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(''It is an actor's failing,'' he helpfully points out.) He has been, and continues to be, heartlessly detached from his long-suffering wife, Lydia. For some time now, particularly as a husband and father, Cleave has not been what he pretended to be. Because if his condition seems like a kind of Dantean punishment for an actor, that's no accident. This requires some steeliness, it turns out. (''The Untouchable,'' his previous novel, was based on the misadventures of the baroquely self-divided Anthony Blunt, pillar of English society and Soviet spy.) And so Cleave hides out at his now empty childhood home like a survivor from a shipwreck, seeking not only respite but also some perspective, a chance to confront just who he is or might be ''without shock or shrinking.'' He has been involuntarily fixing on a bit of himself - ''a finger, a foot'' - and gaping at it in horror, ''unable to understand how it made its movements.'' And what is his last line before his very public breakdown? ''Who if not I, then, is Amphitryon?''Īs that line suggests, Banville is back to one of the persistent preoccupations of his recent fiction: the elusive and unstable nature of identity. Lately, the simplest things people have said to him seem cryptic and, whatever the hour, it is as if he had just risen and were trying to clear his head and get a grip. He has felt certain he was surrounded by portents, though uncertain of their meaning.
ECLIPSE BOOK REVIEW NEW YORK TIMES MOVIE
The unhappily aptly named Alexander Cleave, the protagonist of ''Eclipse,'' John Banville's 12th novel, celebrated throughout Britain for his sensitive yet brutal Hamlet, ''uncanny'' Iago and ''coiled Richard Crookback,'' has noticed ominous signs even before this disaster: He has found himself weeping in movie theaters with no idea of what he was mourning. Your self has gone away, or has been undermined by other selves that have fallen into step beside you or inside you. HOW'S this for the actor's nightmare: you not only freeze onstage in midperformance - ''cold sweat, mute helpless fish-mouths, the works'' - you also discover, upon staggering into the wings, that you no longer know the lines for your offstage role.