John Banville: Shroud

By PAT BASKETT*

My first encounter with this prolific Irish writer has been challenging - pleasantly so.

Banville has produced novel after novel, along with plays and short stories, since the early 1970s, and you know from the first pages that you are in the hands of a master: the long, lilting sentences; words that, but for writers like Banville, risk extinction (matutinal, striate, umbrous, peccant).

The language is the easy bit. The plot has elements of a detective story - moments of suspense, questions of identity, hints of a crime committed. Axel Vander, eminent academic in retirement in a place called Arcady on the west coast of the United States, is not who he claims to be. His origins lie in wartime Belgium where his family were Jews of modest means, deported at the time of the occupation. His best friend was a middle-class gentile who met a strange early death. But was this friend what he claimed to be?

Questions of identity, authenticity, selfhood, of knowledge and of the wellsprings of writing leak through this multilayered text.

Vander receives a disconcerting letter from a young woman hinting that she has discovered secrets he had thought hidden for 50 years. He agrees to meet her at a conference he has been invited to in Turin - city of the famous shroud which gives the book its title and its wonderful atmosphere. Their meeting and his immediate lust - "I would open up her flesh itself like a coat, unzip her from instep to sternum and climb bodily into her ... clasp her blood-wet bones in my hands" - demand a response. The man is vile. But his portrait has an irresistibility about it that recalls Nabokov. We read on regardless of our growing dislike, fearing or hoping for some dreadful retribution.

It's not spoiling the story to say that it doesn't happen, at least not in a foreseeable way. The denouement nicely deposits the reader back at the beginning and it's worthwhile to re-read that first scene and savour Banville's description of his character: "I am not mad, really, only very, very old."

The young woman, we are told, is mad. She suffers from the rare Mandelbaum's syndrome but her role is puppet-like, and the few times when Banville leaves the first person (of Axel) for the third person (her point of view), are the book's weakest moments.

Banville's list of acknowledgments is instructive. Included is Paul de Man, the Belgian-born theorist of deconstruction who, after his death in 1983, became controversial because he was discovered to have contributed to several Nazi journals in the early 1940s.

De Man has written on semiotics, allegory and symbol and we are reminded that nothing is to be taken at face value.

* Pat Baskett is an Auckland journalist.

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