Athena

Still one of my favorite authors, but not enthralled with this novel. The beautiful writing, clever similes, and closely observed moments are here, and some of the narrator's insights into the human condition are crafted magnificently. But I occasionally had the impression that Banville was showing off rather than applying his brilliance to the task at hand. Either way, the prose rewards close reading. In fact, it requires close reading, and for that reason I often found it difficult to stay focused for more than a few pages at a time.
P.S. I looked up some of the paintings described and found examples of the subjects, but not by the artists named. Perhaps one of the seven was real?

I plodded depressingly through this one. Lovely language but will need to read a plot recap to be sure I got what actually happened.

Breathtakingly good

Boring....

Bizarre Baroque

The old dilemma: award stars according to the author's mastery (close to 5) or to reflect my own enjoyment of the book (2 or 3 at most)? There, right on the front cover, is a quotation from the San Francisco Chronicle: "A thriller… by Ireland's master of the exquisite and uncanny whose brilliant use of prose narration places him in a league with Joyce and Beckett." True—yet it made me reflect what a dubious legacy Joyce bequeathed to Irish intellectuals who followed after.

"My love. If words can reach whatever world you may be suffering in, then listen…." The book begins in words, with this incantation, and it continues in words. Not events, not characters, not time and place, not even any tangible reality, but words pure and by no means simple, creating the atmosphere of a dream that may at any moment turn into nightmare, words spun out, questioned, erased, words rich in apparent meanings that the next moment may well be denied. The narrator must have a past, but we are not told what it is; even his name, Morrow, is assumed, chosen almost at random and since regretted. His love is referred to within the same paragraph sometimes as "she" and sometimes as "you"; he calls her "A… It's not even the initial of her name, it's only a letter, but it sounds right, it feels right." The town house in which they meet seems impossibly vast at first description, though later it shrinks to more more normal proportions. Although some facts and details eventually emerge from the swirling verbal fog, the prevailing atmosphere is one of hallucination. Banville is indeed a master of words, but he uses them less to pin down normal meanings than to create a shifting web in which meaning itself is questioned.

Nonetheless, several narrative strands do begin to come visible; quite separate at first, they gradually intertwine, but never become entirely connected. The narrator appears to be some kind of expert in Flemish baroque art, and he is called in to authenticate some paintings in an old deserted house. On the fringes of this are a number of lowlife characters (many of them quite bizarre), a hovering police presence (called "The Guards" in Ireland), a possible theft, and some unexplained murders. The narrator also looks after his Aunt Corky, a woman of equally mysterious background, who is in a home. But his most significant relationship is with A—an erotic obsession that escalates through physical passion into some of the darker reaches of sexuality; these sections are among the best in the book, because at least they use the realities of flesh to anchor vagaries of feeling.

Another kind of quasi-objective anchor is provided by the catalogue descriptions of various paintings that come in between the chapters. But even these artworks are displaced; although supposedly painted by artists from the Low Countries (all imaginary), their themes from classical mythology are more typical of the Italian Baroque. Yet the progression of subjects, with their undertones of eroticism and violence, parallel the narrator's developing obsession in a way that, to an art historian, may actually be clearer than the main narrative.

The one negative in my review of Banville's Man Booker prizewinning novel, n  The Sean (written ten years after Athena, in 2005), was a certain self-consciousness about the style; however, as it becomes apparent that the narrator is a writer, we come to understand that stylistic fingerprints such as questioning his word-choices or narrative technique reflect on the character, not on Banville. But in Athena, we never learn much about the background of the man who calls himself Morrow, so the same stylistic tricks seem more like the author showing off. If you admire verbal legerdemain and have a liking for Mannerism or the Baroque, certainly give the book a try. But it is not for everyone. [The color cover of the Vintage paperback edition, incidentally, is entirely misleading. Its bland watercolor portrait is the polar opposite of Banville's highly-wrought style, and its subject totally lacks the fascination of the erotic earth-spirit in the book.]

This is a recent novel that is both difficult and enjoyable - which means it is not written by an American author. Athena is a novel with all of Thomas Pynchon's ambition though a fraction his impenetrability.

Banville's unreliable (and self-deprecating) first-person narrator is a treat who, despite most of his confessions coming parenthetically, fills parts of this novel with pleasant surprises. The story doesn't really materialize, certainly in no obvious way for a reader unfamiliar with this book's two predecessors, but it delights nevertheless with its author's precise prose:

She lied with such simplicity and sincere conviction that really it was not lying at all but a sort of continuing reinvention of the self. (p. 22)

There are surprising and insightful observations about art too:

What affects me most strongly and most immediately in a work of art is the quality of its silence. This silence is more than an absence of sound, it is an active force, expressive and coercive. The silence that a painting radiates becomes a kind of aura enfolding both the work itself and the viewer as in a color-field. (p. 79)

And humorous personifications:

The front door as I approached it across the hall had a pent-up, gloating aspect, as if it were just dying to fly open and unleash on me a shouting throng of accusers. (p. 102)

and

After that brief skirmish something that had been standing rigidly between us sat down and folded its arms. (p. 111)

and

I like pubs in the morningtime with that stale, jaded, faintly shamefaced air they have, as if a night-long debauch has just stumbled exhaustedly to an end. (p. 213)

Banville joins Edward St Aubyn on a list of European authors making their American counterparts feel rather small.

Banville, in my opinion, elucidates our provincial nature—our base, a priori, affinities for hedonistic interactions; his glorious explications of our physiological abhorrent nature are quite funny as well; I enjoyed his descriptions of Aunt Corky the most!

Banville is a gorgeous writer, and I want to go back over his prose at times. But Athene is one of those obsessive love/sex novels that just don't do much for me. Actually, Marguerite Duras' The Lover, or Hawkes Travesty, are books I have loved and been fascinated by that follow a sort of erotic obsession to its limit.