Shroud

Rating:
Summary: A bleak yet beautiful novel
Review: The masterful ending of John Banville's "Shroud" reminded me of that of Gogol's superb "The Overcoat." In the wild chaos he creates in the final pages, Gogol manages to literally hide the ironic ending of his story from all but the very careful reader. By contrast, Banville's final pages seemingly very peacefully and sedately tapering off, hide a bombshell, a totally unexpected surprise ending.

The style of this novel is truly mesmerizing, as objects, streets, buildings, rooms and people flow by the reader in a slow and dark river of words. A sizable fraction of the novel deals with porters, cooks, maids and other incidental characters. Weather, or the lack of it, is constantly on the author's mind. Yet, even in this thick --- too thick? --- medium, a gripping human story unfolds in its own vague manner. Were it to be told precisely, factually by Axel Vander, the main character, this story would lose all its interest, because Vander is known to us as an inveterate liar, thief, dissimulator and worse. Flooded with detail by Vander, we are forced to read between the lines and there, even a man as intelligent and as deceitful as Vander, loses control and inadvertently reveals some of the truth.

One of the main themes of the book is whether a human being has a "self" at all, and if so, whether this self is unique. Banville also tries to make sense of Vander, an extremely talented literary scholar, so thoroughly immoral and amoral as to qualify without exaggeration as a criminal, yet sufficiently intelligent to fully appreciate the extent of his own infamy.

Banville has Vander describe his own dishonesty, "There is not a sincere bone in the entire body of my text. I have manufactured a voice .... from material filched from others." Very funny did I find the theft of one of most famous words coined by James Joyce, in Vander's, "the green of the glass took on a snotlike hue." There are many other such instances. On the whole, there is something outright Nabokovian about Banville's style. Here and there this gets out of hand, as in the reference to "undulant waves," but this is no more than a minor quibble. Even the character Vander has more than a passing resemblance to Nabokov himself and to that disgraced literary scholar, the late Paul de Man (could Cassy Cleave owe something to Cynthia Chase???)

The novel offers some intriguing insights (e.g. "If it could think, the heart would stop beating") and also some that float gracefully near the surface (e.g. "How could there be so many people in the world, she wondered, so many lives? Not to mention the countless dead.").

Banville visits horrible fates on his three female characters, one is mercy-killed by her husband, another jumps to her death not far from where the poet Shelley met his tragic end, and the third is not spared any of the agonies as she slowly dies of cancer under our very eyes. Misogyny? Perish the thought! Keep in mind that the surviving males are far from getting the proverbial last laugh in this bleak yet beautiful novel.