Ancient Light

This book gives nothing but pleasure. The story - a boy's affair with the mother of his best friend - sounds a bit trite at first, but once you're past the blurb and in the hands of Banville's witty, achingly sardonic narrator, you'll be entranced.

Ageing actor Alexander Cleave's retirement is interrupted when a researcher for a film project rocks up at his front door offering him the part of an ageing critic opposite one of the most glamorous young actors of her generation. Cleave, who has been lost in a reverie for some time concerning a teenage affair he had with an older woman, is dragged back into the world of high-maintanence Hollywood stars and becomes emotionally involved with the leading woman, whose own inner turmoil reminds him of his daughter who killed herself in her early twenties. The book follows the progress of the shoot, which is constantly interspersed with Cleave's memories of his early affair and the emotional scars left by the death of his daughter.

This is one of the best ruminations on memory you could read. Cleave is an intelligent, witty prism through which Banville's ideas are interrogated, and although he is fully aware of the tricks memory plays on us as we get older, he cannot escape its capricious inaccuracies or its constant romanticisation of the past.

In what is something like Banville's twentieth novel, his talent for achingly exquisite prose remains undiminished. This book offers the rare treat of something to marvel at on every page. Even the shortest encounter with his narrator is marvelous, making it thoroughly worth a read.