Shroud

John Banville's most recent novel "Shroud" was longlisted for the Booker Prize but it got no further, which is a shame because it is one of the most literate and immaculately crafted novels to have been published this year. Fans of Banville will recognise their favourite author's trademark writing style. Packed from cover to cover with long flowing sentences and beautifully eloquent prose that recalls the flair of the great classical novelists, "Shroud" is also a psychological thriller that speaks of lies, deceit and the charisma of identity to those desperate to escape their own past and reality. Alex Vander, a celebrated expatriate professor of literature in America, is forced to flee to Europe to confront an enemy figure who threatens to reveal his true identity, expose his long buried past to the world and blow his distinguished career apart. His nemesis is Cassie Cleave, a tormented and slightly crazed lady with demons of her own. From their first meeting in a hotel, there isn't a modicum of doubt that their liaison - surprising in some ways - would lead to tragedy and tears.I'm not giving anything away but just don't imagine Alex to be a replica of that now famous Ripley character from Patricia Highsmith's novel. Alex may be a cantankerous old semi-invalid. He may be selfish, deceitful and lacking in redeeming qualities - his callous treatment of Magda, his long suffering deceased wife is vividly alluded to in flashbacks - but he is no murderer. So, there are far less high points of drama in the revelation than the blurbs at the back of the book would suggest. What Alex, Magda, Cassie and the other characters share in common is an old world heritage of pain, loss and deprivation. That's the real enemy that haunts their past. The story is narrated from Alex's perspective, though Cassie's tale alternates with Alex's for centrestage. Banville is obviously less concerned with plot than with unrevelling the mysteries of the human heart. The love story that develops between Alex and Cassie is surprising and by no means a cliche. It is both touching and heartbreaking, so when the tragedy unfolds, the understated emotional impact is almost unbearable. Banville for me can do no wrong. His "The Untouchables" is a modern masterpiece. "Shroud" comes close and should have made it to the Booker shortlist. Read it. You won't be disappointed.

Axel Vander, the narrator of John Banville's "Shroud," is the latest and, according to Banville, will be the last of his "self-hating, murderous" central characters, the kind that careen drunkenly through polite society. Vander is an anti-hero with nothing going for him. He is a liar, a thief, a charlatan, an academic in-fighter, an exploiter of women. He is even a critic. "Professor Vander," mocks his Italian host, "holds that every text conceals a shameful secret, the hidden understains left behind by the author in his necessarily bad faith, and which it is the critic's task to nose out. Is that not so, Axel?" (222-23) The reviewer who seeks to parse "Shroud," to expose the secret of its architecture, thus risks sounding painfully, ironically silly. Here goes anyway. Set in Turin, where Nietzsche became mad, and the Ligurian coast, where Shelley drowned, "Shroud" is a character study of Vander, a Jewish refugee who assumes the identity of a dead partisan in pre-War Belgium, rises to fame on the faculty of an American university, and at the end of his life confronts, and is confronted by, a dreamy young woman who threatens to unmask him. Told mostly in first-person from Vander's point of view and in third-person from his accuser's, "Shroud" is a meditation on death, truth, identity and self, good and evil, social covenants, and spirit, in which Nietsche's Zoroaster, Christ's resurrection, commedia dell'arte, and a rejection of rationalism are all somehow conflated. (Am I sounding silly yet?)As a character, Vander lacks the comedic, self-deprecating charm of, say, Freddie Montgomery, the anti-hero of Banville's "The Book of Evidence," so there is little lightness in his voyage of discovery ending in death. (On the other hand, I suppose, neither is there much lightness in "Moby Dick" or "Crime and Punishment," to which "Shroud" self-consciously refers.) Vander is not the sort of character Graham Greene would invite to dinner. However, his voice is always full and multi-layered, in a nineteenth-century prose style, and the novel's minor characters - an Italian academic and his family, a former lover dying of cancer, hotel employees, and caffè patrons - are quirky and memorable.Words, even words that no one else has ever heard of or used, seem to spill out of Banville's brain effortlessly, and like Faulkner or Proust he has a master's ability to connect the dots in long rolling rhythms. I recommend this book. Robert E. Olsen

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. A respected scholar and professor at a California college, Vander is recognized 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, questioning his own identity and asking to meet with him. As the novel unfolds, we come to know more about the "real" Axel Vander and more about his mysterious correspondent, the emotionally disturbed Cass Cleave.Like Banville's narrators in other novels, the elderly Axel Vander of Shroud is unreliable and often dishonest, self-concerned but not self-aware. Consummately venal (though beautifully realized), he is a character who blithely takes advantage of whatever circumstances arise, with no concern for the consequences, except to himself. Cass Cleave, the daughter of Alexander Cleave, the narrator of Banville's previous novel, Eclipse, has visions and seizures, and Vander regards her as mad, but she and Vander develop a relationship of almost religious significance. He is a depraved and amoral old man living a life of personal un-truth, while she is a sick, avenging angel, striving to connect the disjunctions in her life so that she can become an integrated, whole person. In Turin, where she joins Axel, Cass sees religious symbolism in common events, finding an ordinary breakfast a form of communion. Artworks, especially crucifixion scenes by artists from the various settings in which the novel takes place (Cranach, Bosch, Memling, and Van Eyck in the Low Countries; and Tintoretto, Mantegna, and Bellini in Italy) further develop the symbolism. Always present in the background, of course, is the Shroud of Turin, which may be the real burial cloth of Jesus--or may not be. Parallels and contrasts between Vander and Jesus abound.Banville's novel is intense, highly compressed in its development of overlapping themes, and filled with suspense, both real and intellectual. Every plot detail expands his themes of identity and selfhood, the relationships we create with the outside world, and our desire to be remembered after our deaths. Banville's prose is exquisite, creating mystery by introducing details at a snail's pace, conveying attitude, and acutely observing sensuous details and physical reactions. He juxtaposes unlikely events from different times to convey information, providing voluptuous descriptions which contain both an idea and its antithesis simultaneously. Major surprises occur in the final five pages, not inserted as literary tricks, but generated naturally out of the action and interactions. This is a challenging and fascinating novel, beautifully crafted and rewarding on every level. Mary Whipple

In Eclipse, Banville's previous novel, we met the actor Alex Cleave, coming to terms with might conventionally be termed a mid-life crisis. Informing his woes was his fraught relationship with his deranged daughter Cass, who remained offscreen but permeated the story. Now Banville moves Cass to the center stage, where she has crossed paths with the mendacious Axel Vander, patterned loosely after Paul de Man and Louis Althusser (note the anagram of Alex -- these are different sides of the same essential personality), and the story moves into a darker key. Banville is difficult in the best possible way, demanding attention and involvement from his readers. But the rewards are great and his prose glitters and his characters resonate long after the book is set down. Axel is his darkest monster yet, beside whom Freddie Montgomery (The Book of Evidence) is a boy scout. But he's afforded something resembling redemption -- albeit Banville-style, and this work will echo in your mind for a long time. The only downside is it's another 3 or 4 long years until his next -- he promises something light but don't count on it!