Rating: 
Summary: Slow, dense but not uninteresting
Review: A slow-moving study of a reasonably unlikeable character: Alexander Cleave, actor in decline, whose midlife crisis manifests as professional failure and the apparent inability to distinguish imagination from reality. His carefully documented inner life while enduring a compulsive retreat to his childhood home is the substance of this text. Cleave's self-important tone and ostentatious vocabulary may have even seasoned readers scrambling for the dictionary, but those able to hold their irritation at bay and resist the urge to skim will be treated to some interesting moments - Banville is quite good on the repetitive arguments of marriage and the unending self-doubt of parenthood. The plot is imbued with a slow-burning menace which holds your attention but ultimately doesn't deliver - for me, anyway. The climax is not sufficiently connected to the preceding events, and the metaphor of the title seems awkwardly levered into relevance. But perhaps I'm missing something - I'm sure some helpful Amazon friend, disgusted by my ignorance, will let me know. Still, this is streets ahead of much of contemporary literary fiction. Banville continues to impress.
Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful writing within a ramshackle structure
Review: After his nearly perfect previous novel, (The Untouchable) Banville continues to write magnificent prose, but the plotline in Eclipse is nonexistent. His initial idea -- an actor running off the rails -- is terrific but there is no follow-through and the end is out of left field. Despite all that, Banville also writes movingly and knowingly of human frailties in a way that makes the book memorable and his mastery of language can not be compared to anyone else writing today.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful writing within a ramshackle structure
Review: After his nearly perfect previous novel, (The Untouchable) Banville continues to write magnificent prose, but the plotline in Eclipse is nonexistent. His initial idea -- an actor running off the rails -- is terrific but there is no follow-through and the end is out of left field. Despite all that, Banville also writes movingly and knowingly of human frailties in a way that makes the book memorable and his mastery of language can not be compared to anyone else writing today.
Rating: 
Summary: Banville deserves the Nobel Prize
Review: ECLIPSE is one of the most beautiful of contemporary novels, by perhaps our greatest living novelist.
Rating: 
Summary: Might Give It Another Try Some Day
Review: I endured about 75 pages of navel-gazing and finally put the book down. Generally, I like 'heavy' introspective books, but this wasn't going anywhere and the main character wasn't interesting enough to carry it along. I think it was around the part where he found himself oddly fascinated with the various matters his body produced, such as 'stools and snot' that I literally tossed the book aside and picked up something else. I might give it another try, eventually but, then again, maybe not.
Rating:
Summary: ECLIPSE: A Flawed Tour De Force.
Review: I would like to make it clear that my rating of 3 1/2 stars is higher than it might appear. I am judging this novel within the context of the entire history of novel writing, so far as I am familiar with it, and not merely that of current novel writing because I think Banville deserves to be considered in that context. So, it is actually a pretty high rating.
For the most part I have a high regard for Banville's literary ability and integrity, but I would like to focus here on a problem I have with him. I know there are Banville admirers for whom the author can virtually do no wrong, so if you are among these I would ask you to be patient and carefully consider my view here which is given only as a possible area for thought and not an attempt to change anyone's basic view of the author. I readily acknowledge many of the qualities of this novel noted by other reviewers.
In part, Banville's high reputation rests on his ability to sustain a narrative that continuously glitters and often flashes with a remarkable depth and clarity of unique perception even when he is dealing apparently with the mundane. I, too, admire this ability. But, surprisingly, perhaps, this is exactly where lies the problem referred to. This forcefully manifested ability has such vitality and strength that, for me, it takes on a sort of life of its own. This would be perfectly alright if it formed an objective sort of narrative voice, but in the case of ECLIPSE it is the subjective voice of Alexander Cleave, the central character himself. Though very intelligent in a certain sense, this character exists in an essentially muddled, deceitful condition of tragic depth. He has a surface facility
( grace would be too strong a word) and slickness that are imposing, perhaps impressive, but what he is precisely lacking is a remarkable depth and clarity of unique perception. So my problem is finding a balance point, a point of coincidence, between the distinct voice (and form) of the narrative and the distinctly different content of Cleave's character, or lack thereof. This was a persistent distraction for me and in the end it is not acceptable, artistically or psychologically. I found my thoughts, during and after reading, wandering into all kinds of possible explanations for this disparity and must say that most of them tended to be flattering to Banville in terms of the actual depth of this novel ( was the disparity possibly reflecting the essentially divided -CLEAVE- nature of this character? Just how far does this elucidation of darkness reach?), but in the end I still wondered if it was I doing the imaginative work of expanding the proportions of the novel that Banville had in fact failed to do. So while I would definitely recommend this novel as an example of contemporary fiction that is on a much higher level most, I remain uncertain about how I feel concerning certain important details of Banville's art and this fact keeps me from giving this novel a higher rating. But there is certainly something essentially valuable in a book that stimulates that much thought even if some of it becomes critical of the book itself. For me to have a higher regard for Banville as an artist, he would have to more adequately address this question of the proper function of his remarkable verbal/perceptual gift. In a lesser artist it would be easy to overlook, but in an artist on Banville's level it begs to be resolved.
Rating:
Summary: Cerebral.
Review: In this beautifully realized and complex book, Banville blurs the edges between a man's interior and exterior worlds. He draws the reader in at the same time that he holds him at arm's length and creates a book both realistic and surrealistic. In many ways this resembles a memoir more than a novel, and it's a haunting story of a man's search for himself.Virtually all the "action" in this novel takes place inside the head of Alexander Cleave, and the "story," such as it is, emerges at a snail's pace. An actor who has "dried" onstage, Cleave has escaped to his childhood home to come to terms with his inner self and try to deal with his worry about his disturbed daughter Cass, with whom he has had no communication for months. In the midst of a breakdown, he cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality, acting and action. He sees ghosts, spend a great deal of time sleeping and dreaming, and shadows townspeople at random, living their lives vicariously. His alterego is Quirke, the sloppy caretaker, and his equally untidy daughter Lily. Creatures of the moment, the Quirkes are not at all introspective, indulging their basic desires without thinking about them and living entirely in the commonplace, the ordinary--they buy groceries, do superficial cleaning, go to the pub, read magazines. Only Lily's melancholy, which Cleave also associates with his daughter, suggests that she may have a nascent inner life. If this sounds dull and abstract, it is, in a way. There is very little plot in the traditional sense, and the events that do occur are filtered through the mind of Cleave, who, though very self-conscious, is not self-aware. We do eventually find out what's happened to his daughter, we understand why the Quirkes are important, and we eventually see Cleave achieving an epiphany of sorts. But it is a measure of Cleave's remoteness that the turning point of the book is not an event over which he exerts any control, but a solar eclipse--the convergence of dark and light, shadow and substance, distance and connection. Still, this is a book full of unique insights and transcendent observations, with a main character who, in his earnest attempts to come to terms with the world, bears much in common with us all.
Rating:
Summary: Portrait of a Liar
Review: John Banville has an almost scary insight into the psychology of the lie. Word by painstaking word, he creates a subtle and nuanced portrait of characters who, despite all evidence to the contrary, cannot or will not see the immense flaws in their souls which wreak havoc to all those close to them. In this novel, Eclipse, Banville undertakes on of these subtle portraits to create a story of haunting insight, literally and figuratively. Alex Cleave is a moderately successful stage actor. In his mind he is terribly successful, but there are many hints throughout the book that all is not the way he paints it, either in his life or his career. Midperformance, Cleave suffers a nervous breakdown and retreats to his haunted boyhood home to recover, much to the dismay of his estranged wife. There, Cleave struggles with ghosts, real and imagined, which bring him to terms with the realities of his ruined life, the shambles of his marriage, and his tense relationship with his emotionally disturbed daughter Cass. Banville uses this rather thin plot, with it's reminiscences of the Victorian ghost story to shape a narrative that is poetic and ultimately tragic. This novel is short on action or even plot. Rather it is a subtly drawn character study, rendered in some of the most exquisite prose since Henry James. Banville has an uncanny sense of the inner workings of his character. Cleave is an actor, and as such has the touch of the liar about him. As his mind drifts from present events to the remembered past you watch as Cleave's mind skirts around the real problems of his life. He engages in self-aggrandizement, rationalizations and most especially avoidance when faced with anything unpleasant. He admits to lesser failings readily to avoid confrontation with his greater failings. His observations of the other characters in the novel are well drawn, but slanted. Banville's brilliance is shown particularly in the life of these peripheral characters. Lydia, Cleave's wife, seems on the surface to be a shrew...and yet, you leave the novel with the sense that her complaints against her husband are more than justified. Lilly, the daughter of Cleave's rather odious caretaker, is a mysterious cypher, by turns superficial and yet possessing glimpses of a very complicated inner life that Cleave only barely understands. The central haunting figure in the novel, Cleave's daughter Cass, is not even physically present throughout, and yet she haunts the book more fully than the ghosts in Cleave's house. Cass is brilliant but mentally troubled. She hears voices and has a tendency to self-destruction. Her specter comes between Cleave and his wife and even haunts Cleave's strange and unsettling relationship with Lilly. She troubles Cleave's conscience and yet we never know quite why. Much is left unstated in the novel about the relationship. At heart you feel there is a secret underlying it all, a secret that Banville will never fully reveal. At every moment when you think something is going to finally break in this tenuous story, the characters look away....and don't say what they are actually feeling. Even the final climax of the book is ultimately an enigma...like the eclipse of the title, most of the important events in Cleave's life are obscured by clouds, and even when they aren't he looks away. This is not a book for "light reading" or for those who's interest is most heavily in plot or dialogue. In fact, the passages of dialogue in the work could probably be fit on ten pages. It is rather a long, internal monologue rendered in breathtaking turns of phrase. If you love haunting, slow and powerfully tragic novels though, Banville is for you. His is a world that I will be entering again soon.
Rating:
Summary: Sheer Brilliance
Review: John Banville is my favorite living novelist and certainly one of the great practitioners of the form of this century. He writes dense, inquiring profound books which are difficult but rewarding. To dismiss them as "navel-gazing" or other such stupidity is to miss the point entirely. These are layered works that reveal themselves gradually. Nothing is arbitrary in his world, everything is there for a reason no matter how random it may seem. His latest book, "Shroud," has been long-listed for this year's Booker Prize and picks up characters introduced in "Eclipse." Simply put, Banville is one of the great masters of the language, sadly overlooked but unforgettable. Once you've read his work, so much of everything else seems second-rate. If you have to have rip-snorting page turning narratives, he's not your man, go buy a Grisham; but if burrowing deep into character, if understanding essentials, core questions -- the thing itself -- is your bag, he is without equal.
Rating:
Summary: Sheer Brilliance
Review: John Banville is my favorite living novelist and certainly one of the great practitioners of the form of this century. He writes dense, inquiring profound books which are difficult but rewarding. To dismiss them as "navel-gazing" or other such stupidity is to miss the point entirely. These are layered works that reveal themselves gradually. Nothing is arbitrary in his world, everything is there for a reason no matter how random it may seem. His latest book, "Shroud," has been long-listed for this year's Booker Prize and picks up characters introduced in "Eclipse." Simply put, Banville is one of the great masters of the language, sadly overlooked but unforgettable. Once you've read his work, so much of everything else seems second-rate. If you have to have rip-snorting page turning narratives, he's not your man, go buy a Grisham; but if burrowing deep into character, if understanding essentials, core questions -- the thing itself -- is your bag, he is without equal.
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