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.

I read this after reading The Sea, which I thought was one of the most beautifully written books I've come across. Banville is an extraordinarily poetic author; he employs unexpected, uncommon, but perfectly chosen words as one would apply just the right amount of paint to a canvas. This is true of Athena as well, apt given the plot. However, I had been expecting a thriller, having seen the novel described that way somehwere, and as a result was disappointed generically. To clarify, I had been expecting an intelligent thriller, not just the run of the mill supermarket/summer read. But even so, I found the pace of this novel slower than I'd like. I did appreciate the narrator's circumlocution (for the most part) and Banville's cleverness with art history and anagrams of his name.

In two of Banville's novels, the narrators admit to disliking dogs, and bad things happen to them (the dogs). I can't think of a quicker way to establish for readers (me at least) that something is wrong with these narrators' personalities. I'll need to remember that if I ever write a novel with a villain or deeply flawed hero.

CRITIQUE:

The Collapse of a Questionable Narration

"Athena" marks the conclusion of n  "the Freddie Montgomery Trilogy",n although it's arguable that the narrative of the Trilogy had collapsed well before the end of the third novel, rather than being reinforced by the extended focus.

As with n  "Ghosts",n the first third to one-half of the novel meanders around before it confirms its purpose and sets its course. However, in contrast, the second half shines a light on the plight of the Freddie character (who goes by the pseudonym, Morrow).

A Counterpoint to Proust

Each of the three novels directly or indirectly raises questions about unreliable narrators. However, here, the unreliability doesn't derive specifically from Morrow's psyche. Instead, it's a product of how Banville suspects the mind, in general, and memory, in particular, works.

Banville develops his perspective in opposition to Marcel Proust:

n  
n  "What paradisal moments are these that assail me at unconsidered moments? They are not, I think, involuntary memories such as those the celebrated madeleine is supposed to have invoked, for no specific events attach to them, no childhood landscapes, no beloved figures in rustling gowns or top-hats; rather they seem absences, suddenly stumbled upon, redolent of a content that never was but was only longed for achingly."n  
n  
n  "Where do they come from, these mysterious, exalted flashes that are not memories yet seem far more than mere imaginings?"n  
n

Arguably, desire creates [false] memories of absences, or events that never occurred. They are not just works of invention, or the conscious imagination.

One wonders whether their purpose is to screen, block or conceal other memories (e.g., memories of traumatic events)(i.e., as does a screen memory).(1)

The Continuum of the Mind

While evaluating Morrow and his observations throughout the novel, I tried to locate different aspects of the mind on a continuum that consists of the following functions or actions:

...perception, analysis, understanding, memory, imagination, invention, dreaming, misapprehension, misunderstanding, illusion, delusion, self-deception, deception, misrepresentation, concealment, deceit, fraud...(2)

Free Fall (From the Collapse Board)

Morrow reflects on his wife (who played a bit part in the first novel, and subsequently divorced him while he was in prison) as someone "with whom long ago I wandered the world until one day we found we had used up world and selves, and I left her, or she left me, and I went into free fall."

He implies that there is a sense in which the self (and all that it consists of) is finite and therefore, inevitably, exhaustible. So, too, is a relationship, and Morrow is destined to go into a second free fall at the end of another relationship (whether imagined or invented).

Morrow lives in the present, as do we all. However, in his capacity as narrator, he resorts to the past, as far as he can recall, to make sense of his story and his present. However, what he finds in the past isn't totally reliable:

n  
n  "I did not know myself (do I ever know myself?)"n  
n

Thus, at his own peril, he delves back into the past to make sense of where (and who) he is in the present,... and the novel documents his free fall.

"These Swoony Ruminations"

There appears to be (or there has recently been) a woman in Morrow's life (A.)(3). He wishes she had 'taken pity on me and led me to the couch and sat me down and said, "All right now, listen, this is what is really going on..." But no, that is not how you would have done it. You would have blurted it out and laughed, wide-eyed, with a hand over your mouth, and only later, if at all, would I have realised the full significance of what it was you had told me. I never understood you.' (4)

Once again, A. might be a creature/invention of Morrow's imagination or gaze. Alternatively, she might be the subject of a painting come alive (e.g., the Greek goddess, Athena, of the title, who is the equivalent of the Roman goddess, Minerva):

n  
n  "I was like a lover who gazes in tongue-tied joy upon his darling and sees not her face but a dream of it. You were the pictures and they were you and I never noticed."n  
n  
n  "I should say that A. herself was almost incidental to these swoony ruminations, which at their most concentrated became entirely self-sustaining."...n  
n

"The Flickering Simulacrum of a Duplicitous Reality"

Banville/Morrow foreshadows opposition to this idea:

n
"...I know, I know the objections, I have read the treatises: there is no real she, only a set of signs, a series of appearances, a grid of relations between swarming particles; yet I insist on it: she was there at those times, it was she who clutched me to her and cried out, not a flickering simulacrum foisted on me by the stop-frame technique of a duplicitous reality. I had her." (5)
n

At the same time that he is apparently in this relationship with A., Morrow has become ensconced in a criminal conspiracy to forge and distribute some paintings (including a work of Jean Vaublin called "Birth of Athena"). Morrow's role is to be the scholar and expert who can verify the authenticity of the paintings.


Rene-Antoine Houasse - 'The Birth of Minerva" (Minerva (archaic Menerva), a Roman goddess of handicrafts, was widely worshipped and regularly identified with Athena, but most scholars think her indigenous, and connect her name with the root of meminisse [‘to remember’]) Source

He interprets the conspiracy from the perspective of his relationship (which overrides and screens it from memory):

n  
n  "Was I very ridiculous? I say again, I don't care about any of the rest of it, having been cheated and made a fool of and put in danger of going back to jail; all that matters is what you thought of me, think of me. (Think of me!)"n  
n

"The Fragile Theatre of Illusions"

Morrow's memory of A. (as unclear as it appears to be) screens other, potentially more important memories (such as the memory of his involvement in the conspiratorial scheme):

n  
n  "Belief, trust, suspicion, these are chimeras that arise in hindsight, when I look back from the sad eminence of the knowledge of having been deceived."n  
n

A.'s role in Morrow's life is equally unclear:

n  
n  "She desired to be seen, she said, to be a spectacle, to have her most intimate secrets purloined and betrayed. Yet I ask myself now if they really were her secrets that she offered up on the altar of our passion or just variations invented for this or that occasion."n  
n

He wonders whether their intimacy was authentic, or fabricated or fake:

n  
n  "...but no, fake is not the right word. Unformed: that's it. She was not being but becoming. So I thought of her. Everything she did seemed a seeking after definition..."n  
n

"Transports of Doomy Pleasure"

A. reads de Sade's "Justine" (in the first of two scenes that recall de Sade's sado-masochistic fiction) -

n  
n  "...yearning for some sort of final confirmation of...of what? Authenticity, perhaps. And yet it was precisely the inauthentic, the fragile theatre of illusions we had erected to house our increasingly exotic performances, that afforded us the fiercest and most precious transports of doomy pleasure. How keen the dark and tender thrill that shot through me when in the throes of passion she cried out my assumed - my false - name and for a second a phantom other, my jettisoned self, joined us and made a ghostly troilism of our panting labours...how dirty and even dangerous the games we played...

"In these sleepless nights I go over her inch by inch, mapping her contours, surveyor of all I no longer possess. I see her turning slowly in the depths of memory's screen, fixed and staring, too real to be real, like one of those three-dimensional models that computers make. It is then, when she is at her vividest, that I know I have lost her forever."n  
n

"Her Invented Lives"

Before he lost A., Morrow would sit "in some fake old-fashioned pub listening to her stories of herself and her invented lives."

Her invention gives Morrow a sense of licence, not just licentiousness:

n  
n  "And I, what did I think, what [did I] feel? At first bemusement, hesitancy and a sort of frightful exultation at being allowed such a licence...I saw myself towering over her like a maddened monster out of Goya, hirsute and bloody and irresistible, Morrow the Merciless. It was ridiculous, of course, and yet no her own arm and I would not stop, no, I would not stop.t ridiculous at all. I was monster and at the same time man. She would thrash under my blows with her face screwed up and fiercely biting her own arm and I would not stop, no, I would not stop...Who else was there, to make her come alive?"n  
n

"That Intricate Dance of Desire and Deceit"

To the very end, Morrow can't figure out who or what A. was. Was she real or was she invented? If the latter, was she invented by Morrow or Banville? (Does this answer apply to every character in a novel?)

n  
n  "The streets were thronged with the ghost of her. The world of women had dwindled to a single image."

"These memories. Where is she in them? A word, a breath, a turning look. I have lost her. Sometimes I wish that I could lose all recollection of her, too. I suppose I shall, in time. I suppose memory will simply fall away from me, like hair, like teeth. I shall be glad of that diminishment...

"What galled me, I think, was the way the whole thing, that intricate dance of desire and deceit at the centre of which A. and I had whirled and twined, was turned [by the papers] into a clumping caper, bizarre, farcical almost, all leering snouts and horny hands and bare bums, like something by Breughel."n  
n

Banville's novel is no clumping caper or bizarre farce, but it is an intricate dance of desire and deceit. I have dropped it a star rating, because the novel's lyricism doesn't match the quality of the first two volumes of the trilogy, and it took much longer to take off.


FOOTNOTES:

(1). Thanks to Ipsa for pointing me in the direction of Sigmund Freud's concept of "screen memories".

(2). This is a subjective list. It's not meant to be complete.

(3). "It's not even the initial of her name, it's only a letter, but it sounds right, it feels right."

(4). Does the mention of a couch imply that A. might be an analyst?

(5). Banville makes, but doesn't explicitly explore, an allusion to Galatea.


SOUNDTRACK:

Billie Eilish - "No Time to Die"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BboMp...

"I let it burn
You're no longer my concern
Faces from my past return
Another lesson yet to learn
That I'd fallen for a lie
You were never on my side
Fool me once, fool me twice
Are you death or paradise?
Now you'll never see me cry
There's just no time to die..."

Billie Eilish - "No Time to Die" [Live at The New Yorker Festival]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62BAC...

Billie Eilish - "No Time To Die" [Live From Life Is Beautiful 2021]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sjw0e...

Billie Eilish - "No Time To Die" [Live From The BRIT Awards, London]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I1ZU...

Johnny Marr on guitar

Laughing Clowns - "Collapse Board"

https://youtu.be/72e_2iBEMio

Soft Cell - "Tainted Love"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZVpR...

Fleetwood Mac - "Man of the World"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GPR8...

Fleetwood Mac - "Man of the World" [1998 Remaster]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHse8...

Much of Banville's prose is lovely. This is a reflection on authenticity and imagination (and ultimately wisdom, of course), but suffers, in my view, from a lack of sympathetic characters. Banville never really succeeded in making me care about the narrator or his problems, worries, and obsessions. I was more interested in the art, fake or otherwise, that structured the novel.

Banville weaves a dream-like narrative about a disgraced man (presumably Freddie Montgomery from Book of Evidence, now settled in a fairly decrepit city) getting involved with an art forgery ring and a beautiful woman, “A”. The chapters are punctuated by Montgomery’s curatorial analyses of fictitious artworks inspired by real paintings. These chart his unraveling as he loses A. Banville’s prose is really a joy to read as he gets inside the head of a lonely (and despicable) man mourning and obsessing over A.