Sometimes I think the hardest concept to explain to people who don't write about the act of writing itself is the idea of presentation, that just because a story essentially boils down to "this happened, then this happened, then this happened, and then it turned out it was the dog all along" doesn't mean you have to write it that way. Many a person has an amazing idea for a plot but doesn't quite grasp that you can tell me what happened, but that doesn't mean I'm going to find it all that interesting if you don't dress it up a little bit. Good ideas don't automatically translate into gripping reading. Just like my parents told me when I drew my awesome schematics for my volcano science project in elementary school: if you want it to come out right, you're going to have to put some effort into it.

Banville seems to understand effort. In fact, sometimes he comes across as having made it his life's goal to make us aware of just how many words exist in the English language, and how they can be used in a sentence. I'd be surprised if he ever used the same description twice, at least not intentionally. It makes for oddly rich reading, as if every other author you've been reading prior to this has only be using half the colors available in the palette, like Dorothy wandering out into Oz.

However, there is a fairly thin line between "marvelously descriptive" and "tediously overwritten". That line is probably going to be different for everyone depending on your taste and there's probably a subset of people trying to read any of his novels that is tempted to throw it across the room in frustration screaming, "Just say he's in a hotel room already!" Still, it is difficult to call a novel that is a hair under two hundred and fifty pages "bloated" by any yardstick and points to one of Banville's greatest strengths: it's not how many words you know, it's knowing the right place to use them.

Thus: the plot. A semi-crooked man with a shady past who narrates our story is recruited by even shadier people to authenticate some paintings they have stashed away and are probably not planning on selling to the local gallery. Meanwhile, he runs into a woman and becomes obsessed with her, despite knowing absolutely nothing about her, not even her name. Sometimes it seems like the cops are onto him, sometimes it seems like he's in a dangerous world that has put him in over his head. Meanwhile, he's tangled up in prose. Oh, and his aunt is sick.

See, that doesn't sound terribly exciting. Mix some of the basic elements up and add about seven hundred pages and it could be William Gaddis' "The Recognitions", but with a slightly higher chance for car chases (don't get your hopes up, though). Yet Banville manages to make it all compelling through the use of his prose, which seems determined to plunge the reader into a languid, dream-like affair, held together by a narrator who seems to drift in and out of his own story, sometimes settling into a scene with a startlingly concrete presence, and other times anchored to absolutely nothing at all. There's hints that he could be the same narrator that graced some of Banville's other novels but that's not really a requirement here (good, because I read those several years back and don't remember the details), instead you're just asked to go along with events, like being blindfolded with a ratty cloth and forced to fill in the details from the splashes of blurry light that you catch as you're jostled down dingy hallways, all the while listening to someone describe to you exactly what he sees. Thing is, he could be lying. Or maybe you just can't see very well.

Plunging us in a world where it seems to be constantly on the verge of dusk no matter what time of day it is, there isn't much to grasp and so the book has to succeed on both mood and pacing. Which it does. The hazy nature of the narrative allows Banville to shift the scene pretty much at will, and when we're tired of the elusive sexual shenanigans of our narrator and his single-lettered sort of lover, we can have some criminals show up. And when the vague hints of something bad about to happen linger for too long and start to lose their edge, maybe some police inspectors can come by, or we have some fun with his dying aunt. In a sense it becomes not unlike a playland created by children under a blanket, where every fold can bring about another scene no matter which way you turn, held together by a playful dream-logic where everything makes sense because absolutely nothing makes sense. It doesn't go to David Lynch levels of absurdist surrealism, but it seems to hover right on the edge of it, with one foot existing enough in the real world that we can start to think, "oh, maybe this is really happening."

It's not even the kind of story where you mind that the ending isn't so much an ending as everyone deciding the story is over, like parents calling all their kids back into the house because it's getting late. There's a risk with this of letting the story go on for too long that all the ambiguity becomes more annoying than anything else. At this length, all the muscles and tendons lay nicely over the skeleton, with the increasingly unhinged reviews of paintings I've never seen a particular highlight, as the narrator feels things boiling to a fever pitch, even if the fever winds up becoming dissipated in a chill night. But it hardly matters. The images linger, like being surprised that a hand pressed that lightly into skin can leave such a mark. It's a testament to how just any old set of words won't do, and even if the narrator never seems to be totally in control, you never doubt that the author is. Skill and craft do count for something. If I tried to write a story based on this plot, it would come across as an inept documentary put together by well-meaning preschoolers. In his hands, it winds up being the dream that doesn't quite startle you enough to wake you up, but lingers long enough to make you wonder if you ever did wake up completely.

The narrator has a guilty conscience and is not just a little unreliable in what he tells us. The story is about art theft, forgery, a mysterious woman, and a passionate love affair. The way this story is told, is what makes this book so brilliant... because the reader is left guessing as to what is real, what is fiction, what is true, and what is a lie or a false recollection. Strange but fascinating book.

Help! Help! I've fallen and I can't get up! I'm terribly afraid yet oddly expectant. What? Where am I? you ask.

My surroundings -- those that my awed gaze is at least capable of distinguishing -- are louche, dark, feverish yet preternaturally calm; the sky, a hare - coat gray. Images of you, of my doomy rescuer (whom I shall call Athena or simply A), of art, of misconstrued childhood embarrassments, not of mine perhaps but rather of my nearly forgotten or spontaneously invented son, thick with the sibilance of rain and a humorless detective-inspector named Hackett, dance before me like a bad Shakespearean metaphor.

Puns and anagrams aside, suspended as I am between desire and tedium, there is only one place on earth I possibly can be. Of course: John Banville's dissembling mind.

I used to come here often. I delighted in the author's words, his grandiloquent and sociopathic characters, his local color of that other Eden -- Ireland. But now his wordplay amuses less; his characters' psychological fixes appear contrived; his modernism, mannered.

Help! Help! I've fallen and I can't get up!

Stylistically breathtaking. Nothing has matched my love for >Ancient Light<, the first Banville book I read, however.

"And that night I had the strangest dream, I remember it. You were in it." Banville's book covers are hot to touch. You get the warning on the back. Do Not Touch because something "harrowing" takes place within, the characters are at "loose ends." But you put on the gloves and open to the first page. Enough of this metaphor. "In this painter's dark and sickly world nothing is certain but suffering. " - there Banville says it.

The final book of this Trilogy. I have found all 3 depressing. Freddie is a victim of his own ill deeds, a narsissitic, dark and isolated person. The only redemption for him in this last book is the hint of concern regarding his Aunt, although he makes decisions that he immediately regrets as the self centred side of his personality kicks in. Told mostly in the first person which can be very boring at times.

This is the last novel in a trilogy that includes Book of Evidence and Ghosts. I'm now, I guess, an official Banville fan; I'm captivated by his style. But Athena was disappointing. Though full of the felicities one can expect from Banville's writing, the protagonist, Freddie (now calling himself Morrow), has largely abandoned his journey of self-exploration after the murder he committed in Book of Evidence, and is obsessed with a woman with whom he's having a clandestine affair. But I asked while reading: "So? Why should this interest me?" And it didn't. But, as a fan, I'm not sorry I read it, and will continue going through his novels hoping for the best.