In Ancient Light, the final novel of a trilogy involving Alexander Cleave, Cass Cleave, and Axel Vander, John Banville brings the arc of his continuing story to its conclusion, both in terms of plot and in terms of theme. Here, sixty-five-year-old Cleave and his wife Lydia (whose name is really Leah) are still mourning the death of their pregnant daughter Cass, who died ten years ago. Lydia has full-fledged night-time rampages in which she panics, convinced that Cass is still alive in the house somewhere, while Cleave, sometimes has strange dreams and “manifestations.” Their dreams are always a combination of reality and memory, presented in new forms through the kind of invention which comes through troubled sleep. With its parallel narratives of Cleave as a young man having an affair with Mrs. Gray, his best friend’s mother, and Cleave as a sixty-five-year-old actor trying to save Dawn Devonport, the reader is kept totally engaged with two vibrant stories filled with excitement, yet the scenes and events constantly suggest that there is more underlying the action than meets the eye. The result is thrilling, with the reader willingly assuming the roles of both detective and psychologist, analyzing the details, and finding the answers all related thematically, all part of a trilogy, every detail on every level connected to every other detail.
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Axel Vander tells us from the opening of this sensitive and tension-filled study of identity that he is not who he says he is, that he has assumed another man’s identity. A respected scholar and professor at a California college, Vander is recognized by the literati for his thoughtful philosophical papers and books, especially his ironically entitled The Alias as Salient Fact: The Nominative Case in the Quest for Identity. Just before he leaves for a conference on Nietzsche in Turin, however, he receives a letter from a young woman in Antwerp, raising questions about his real identity and asking to meet with him. He agrees to meet her in Turin, and as the novel unfolds, we come to know more about the “real” Axel Vander and more about his mysterious correspondent, the disturbed Cass Cleave, whose madness does not preclude the truth of her discoveries. Banville’s novel is intense, highly compressed in its development of overlapping themes, and filled with suspense, both real and intellectual. The plot, though entertaining and often exciting, reveals the dark, interior worlds of Vander and Cass so fully that a more detailed plot summary might jeopardize the reader’s own pleasure of discovery. Banville is a master craftsman who has interconnected every plot detail with his themes of identity and selfhood, the relationships we create with the outside world, and our desire to be remembered after our deaths.
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Firmly connected to the cold, often bleak landscapes they inhabit, Per Petterson’s characters are never frivolous, however impulsive and even violent their actions might be. Often shackled by circumstances over which they have little control, they respond in the only ways they can, sometimes self-destructively. Their parents can sometimes offer little guidance, even by way of example, and growing up becomes a question of actions followed either by reward or, more likely, by punishment. In the ironically entitled It’s Fine By Me, an early Petterson novel from 1992, Audun Sletten shares his life from his teen years to age twenty, always honest in his feelings, sometimes to his own detriment, and always sensitive to his personal standards of behavior which the rest of the world does not always understand or share. Beautifully developed and filled with details which ring true, not just in terms of the time and setting, but in terms of psychological honesty, It’s Fine By Me feels almost autobiographical in its ability to convey real feelings by real people. The moving conclusion to this novel shows Ardun’s growth – often with the help of those who care about him – and readers who see themselves (at least in some aspect) within the character of Ardun will celebrate his coming of age – all the while knowing that Ardun is a work in progress and that he’ll never be able to take life or his own responses to threats for granted.
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From the first pages to the last, this refreshing, original, imaginative, thoughtful – and often humorous – debut novel kept me glued to the chair, reading as fast as I could while trying to force myself to read more slowly to savor the fun to the utmost. I confess that I have never been a fan of fantasy, and my knowledge of computer science would fit into a URL line, but I was completely charmed by the style of this novel, an unusual mix of ephemera and cutting edge computer science, and I became totally caught up in it – not just for the excitement of the story itself, but for the ideas it presents and the hints it gives of the future of writing itself. Sure to be at the top of my list of Favorites for the year, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore may be every serious reader’s fantasy, a novel in which an innocent and unsuspecting person takes a night job at a bookstore where he inhabits the world of ancient manuscripts and ancient typefaces – only to discover that his seemingly innocuous, middle-of-the-night customers are all part of a secret cult working to fulfill a six-hundred-year-old mission, the nature of which is unknown to him.
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Focusing on life in the very small community of Pagford, perhaps similar to the small communities Rowling herself grew up in as a child in Gloucestershire, Rowling emphasizes the pettiness, the rivalries, the back-biting, and the cruelties of “ordinary” life as people tryto cope with the messiness of existence as it unfolds. There is no magic here to offer any hope of change, no wizard to sweep down and offer aid, either to the characters or the reader, and as the action progresses, with its focus on the unpleasant and often violent aspects of many lives, the reader is forced to examine the elements of chance which can devastate everything that one might dream of. The style which was so effective for Rowling when she was writing Harry Potter is less effective in this “adult” novel. Here she creates characters who are memorable for some aspects of their characters without being unique, while on the level of plot, the conflicts and crises, based on real life, are already familiar to devoted readers of contemporary fiction and, I regret to say, feel trite. At five hundred pages, this novel gave Rowling many opportunities to introduce broad themes and to develop them with sophistication and attention to universal values. Instead, she gives us a long novel which is sometimes exciting on the limited level of plot, but which remains on that limited level, never soaring into broader realms of wider scope. What starts in Pagford stays in Pagford, unfortunately.
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