Ancient Light

Irish author John Banville's novel Ancient Light (2012) is the third installment in a trilogy about actor Alexander (“Alex”) Cleave and his daughter, Cass. Ancient Light is set ten years after Cass’s suicide (which closed the second novel, Eclipse). Grieving for his daughter, Alex finds himself dwelling on his teenage romance with an older woman, Mrs. Gray, the mother of his school friend Billy. Meanwhile, in the present, Alex is invited to star in an adaptation of a book about Alex Vlander, Cass’s companion at the time of her death. During filming, Alex begins an affair with a younger actor, which becomes a way for him to deal with his grief.

Alex recalls how he met Mrs. Gray, through his school friend Billy Gray. Alex was fifteen at the time and living at home with his mother. Their relationship was not close, and the house was shrouded in grief: Alex’s father had died when he was young. The weather and the changing of the seasons form the vivid center of Alex’s memories, as he remembers meeting Mrs. Gray in spring: “Remember what April was like when we were young, that sense of liquid rushing and the wind taking blue scoops out of the air and the birds beside themselves in the budding trees?”

Thirty-four-year-old Mrs. Gray takes a shine to handsome, lonely Alex, and she seduces him. Alex remembers their lovemaking—Alex’s first—in scrupulous and loving detail: “She granted me full freedom of her body, that opulent pleasure garden where I sipped and sucked, dazed as a bumble-bee in full-blown summer…in her most secret places, along the fringes of her nether lips, and in the aureole of the pursed little star occluded within the crevice of her bum.”



Their relationship continued for five months. Mrs. Gray treated Alex with compassionate kindness, and in retrospect, Alex worries that he repaid her with selfishness and self-preoccupation. He also wonders at the fact that there seemed to be a native cruelty in his sexuality even then. She reminded him of a doll that, as a boy, he had kept hidden in the attic: “I spent many a torrid hour dressing it in scraps of rag and then lovingly undressing it again. I performed mock operations on it, too, pretending to remove its tonsils, or, more excitingly, its appendix. These procedures were hotly pleasurable, I did not know why. There was something about the doll’s lightness, its hollowness—it had a loose bit inside it that rattled around like a dried pea—that made me feel protective and at the same time appealed to a nascent streak of erotic cruelty in me.”

Nevertheless, Alex recognizes that as a teenager, he did not understand the real cruelty of their relationship: that inevitably, it would be discovered, and that both Mrs. Gray and Billy would suffer as a result. Billy catches them in the act (although Alex only comments, “You already know who it was”). Alex remembers Billy with regret and pity. As for Mrs. Gray, Alex never saw her again.

In the present day, Alex is asked to come out of retirement to play the role of notorious literary theorist Alex Vlander (a fictional creation modeled on the real literary theorist Paul de Man) in a biographical film called The Invention of the Past. This invitation is both intriguing and troubling to Alex, as Vlander was Cass’s companion at the time of her suicide. With some trepidation, he accepts the role.



On set, Alex meets the young actor Dawn Devonport, playing the role of Cass in the film. Alex and Dawn fall into an intricate relationship, as much a relationship of their roles in the film as their real personae: father and daughter as well as lovers. Devonport’s mental state is unstable, and capturing Cass’s suicidal frame of mind is not helping her. Eventually, she explicitly offers to personify Cass for Alex to help him overcome his guilt.

Meanwhile, Alex continues to recall the aftermath of his affair with Mrs. Gray. He remembers that as a young child, he had suffered from insomnia, and he speculates that in the wake of his father’s death, he had been afraid to sleep in case he died in the night. For a while, he slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of his mother’s room. She would offer him her hand from the bed, and he would hold on to her finger.

After the loss of Mrs. Gray, he found that again he couldn’t sleep. After many sleepless nights, he dug out his sleeping bag and went to lie down beside his mother’s bed. She offered him her finger. Alex refused, and she went back to sleep: “My eyes ached from weeping and my throat was swollen and raw…I looked to the window again. The light around the curtain was stronger now, a light that seemed somehow to shake within itself even as it strengthened, and it was as if some radiant being were advancing towards the house, over the grey grass, across the mossed yard, great trembling wings spread wide, and waiting for it, waiting, I slipped without noticing into sleep.”



In the present moment, Alex’s affair with Dawn brings some calm to his grief, and casts a chill over his marriage: "Dawn Devonport by a negative magic has wrought permanent twilight to our home…I find it a calmative"