Ancient Light by John Banville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Mysteries of the Kitchen

A young man's sexual fantasy about an affair with a married woman becomes, if he lives long enough, an old man's nostalgic reminiscence of first love. Or is it an unacknowledged trauma which crippled him emotionally and created an entirely mis-recalled scandal? Ancient Light isn't telling with complete certainty. In any case, as Banville's male protagonist has it, "...what is life but a gradual shipwreck?"

There are several connected stories hung on the memories of adolescent adultery, all continuations of themes used in Banville's previous novels, The Shroud and Eclipse: betrayal, suicide, and family trauma among them. The common thread in all three volumes is identity - how it is constructed, maintained, and eroded. In Ancient Light identity is explored as it is created through the traces of the past that, like light from distant stars, reaches us blurred and distorted in memory.

What Banville reveals is not what one might expect, at least not entirely, about male identity. He makes it quite clear that men, or at least his man Alex Cleave, remember primarily the sex and the threatened deprivation of sex in their youthful past. That and the incessant emotional demands - singular attentiveness, immediate empathy, motherly tenderness - they make on the object of their affections. It appears that it is the acquiescence to these demands that constitute the primary reason for Alex's 'loving' memories. In a word, Alex is selfish.

And he is not noticeably less selfish at age 65 than he was at age 15. Alex's mature reveries about his teenage exploits with the 35-year-old Mrs Gray, for example, never provoke the slightest serious thought about why such a woman, the mother of his best friend, might take the enormous risk of an affair with a pimply-faced, whinging youth. The best he can come up with is a projection, "Perhaps that's what she accomplished for herself through me, a return to childhood..." Not anywhere near the truth of course. He merely presumes, even in his maturity, that she had the same motivations as his own. To this extent, then, Alex's identity seems constant; or is a 'fixed' a better term?

Another symptom of male selfishness is Alex's contemplation of an 'alternative universe'. "How would it have been," he muses, " if Mrs Gray and not Lydia had been my daughter's mother?" This is the Lydia to whom he has been married for almost 40 years, with whom he has had a handicapped daughter who committed suicide a decade previously in mysterious circumstances, and who sleep-walks the house at night in search of her lost daughter. Yet he calmly fantasises about the life he might have had, implicitly comparing it to the one he has. Just thinking about it causes him to exclaim, "Lord, I feel 15 again." Bastard.

Banville also suggests that - probably because of their intrinsic selfishness - men are entirely incapable of understanding, much less entering into the kind of relationships women routinely have with one another. His symbol for this male alienation is the kitchen, a room in which male presence is not encouraged and within which women speak with each other of mysterious matters incomprehensible to men. The relationships among women, including those who are virtual strangers to one another, are entirely opaque and inexplicable to Alex. Even the relationships between living and dead women, such as between his wife and daughter, do not compute in his experience. Learning, it seems, is not part of Alex's identity.

Problematic maleness pervades the narrative otherwise with frequent references to the man, Vander, a character appearing in the first two Cleave novels, who is the likely cause of Alex's daughter's suicide. Ancient Light has a little twist of the post-modern, probably ironic, in that Alex, an actor, plays a biographical film-role of Vander, thus implicating him, at least in a literary way, with his daughter's death.

In sum then, male identity doesn't come off well here. It is certainly an inept and bumbling misogyny that Alex demonstrates on every opportunity he has. But it is misogyny nonetheless. This begs the question of course: Who taught him, or failed to teach him, about appropriate relationships with women other than the women with whom he has had relationships? Could his shipwreck of a life have been avoided through a little feminine instruction in sex, life and the universe? Or is the X-Y genetic profile merely a curse?

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