Ancient LIght by John Banville: review The biographer A J A Symons, searching for an adequate term to describe the prose style of his subject, the wandering pederast Fr Rolfe, alias Baron Corvo, lit upon "tyrianthine" - a purple word for purple. In Ancient Light, John Banville casts a fictional version of himself in a bit part, as "JB," a biographer whose work, The Invention of the Past - the life of a disgraced academic, a book not unlike Banville's own Shroud (2003), only non-fictional, or purportedly non-fictional - is being made into a film. The narrator, Alex Cleave - that is, the narrator of Ancient Light, who is also the narrator of Eclipse (2002) and a character in Shroud - encounters the fictionalised "JB" when he is engaged to play the said disgraced academic in the film. Reading the biography to bone up on the part, he notes that JB writes like "a minor court official at Byzantium" and "Walter Pater in a delirium." But perhaps it's not just some extravagant sensibility that demands such elaboration by the author, but rather this very piling-up of timeslips and half-rememberings, overlapping selves and fictionalised truths. Banville has said as much of his own work, in the not especially self-referential setting of a newspaper interview: "It's reality as I see it." Nevertheless, there is both sensibility and extravagance aplenty in Ancient Light. As Cleave prepares to film The Invention of the Past, he finds his mind drifting back, as Banville's protagonists do. He recalls an intense affair he had when he was 15 with Mrs Gray, the mother of one of his school friends; and its inevitable, shameful termination. He is haunted, as Banville's protagonists are. His daughter Cass, dead by her own hand a decade back (and, the reader may know, instrumental in the events of Shroud) is still much with him - not least because she appears to be somehow implicated in The Invention of the Past, too. Cleave is also the subject of nocturnal visits from his co-star, the unravelling Dawn Devonport, who offers to personify Cass for the purposes of some obscure (or maybe none too obscure) expiatory ritual. As in previous books, there's a remarkable balancing act whereby sharply seen details of the specificities of things ("the broad groove between her breasts had a silvery sheen") are undermined by a prevailing atmosphere of troublesome vagueness. Cleave questions his own memories, though he seems to know that by conjuring them up as they may be, right or wrong, willy-nilly, he speaks to the inward need - he is not an unreliable narrator in the Nabokovian sense. He is also not a monster in the Nabokovian sense, though he shares with almost every other middle-aged man in the Banville corpus a sense of being a sort of voluptuary of disgrace, cruising the dark alleys of his past like a slumming aesthete, a ghost in his own life. Vis-à-vis Mrs Gray, of course, he is in a position that most would regard as innocent, the seduced schoolboy; but he comes to realise how costly the affair was to her, and he mourns his friend, her son, with tenderness. The text of Ancient Light is notably, though for the most part seamlessly, light-fingered - strings of Yeses from Ulysses, bits of Eliot, a hazel wood from Yeats, a lovely quote from Leopardi. The device of giving a walk-on role to a fictionalised version of himself, especially in the context of a film being made, explicitly reprises Martin Amis's Money (though JB is a more furtive and abject figure than MA). This is perhaps to be expected in so bookish a book: the quotes stalk the text like shades in the underworld. Alongside the richness of Banville's own writing though, it does raise the temperature of the novel somewhat, and creates expectations of a silver-age perfection that would be hard for anyone to maintain. A phrase such as "the hammered gold of fallen leaves" could be Yeats (and it carries a clever sting, as Cleave realises that the scene he recalls must have taken place in spring, not autumn). But "How he wept, and I the prime cause of his bitter tears" is, perhaps, a bit more Sylvie Krin. by John Banville 256PP, Viking t £14.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (rrp £16.99, ebook £9.99)