Ancient Light and musical words of the past

Cover image from Overdrive

"Time and memory are a firm of interior decorators," says Alex Cleave, the aging actor who narrates Ancient Light, the 2012 novel (Knopf) by Irish author John Banville. The sentiment is poetic, edging on comic.

Listening to this novel on CD, I feel deep comfort at hearing the sounds of words now rarely heard. The late Robin Sachs renders them with the relaxed tempo and introspective mood of a vanished past.

Some of these were from my mother's lexicon -- old country usages brought to Newfoundland by the Irish. I have scarcely heard them since childhood. Who speaks now of the halt and the lame?

Often I have been looked at askance (ah, there is another) for using sonorous old words like streels and skirl, squamous and gloam, preternaturally and pert. This book is verdant with such words, especially those that are languishing at the edges of antiquity.


It is a delight to me to hear again of napery and quiffs, to know that people can still truculently go off in high dudgeon. Further revelations the audio book provides are the pronounced sounds of words like cicatrice and dramaturge, which one reads and recognizes, but almost never hears uttered aloud.

Is it linguistically tendentious of me to be so palpably fond of Banville's elderly nouns: hoydens, and tramps, bickies and fairy cakes? And I do so enjoy hearing of the mordant perfidy of the tumid teenage lover the narrator once was.

I delight in the images of the old man in his aerie/eyrie, almost squiffy in his bafflement as he ponders the twists and turns his life has taken.

As the author means me to be, I am carried away by Alex's tawdry assignation with the young actress Dawn Devonport aka Stella Stebbings. Wondrous names. How uncanny that she knows his secret grief and its associations with the place of brumous winter sky they visit in Italy together, after someone attempts suicide.

I must say, it gave me the greatest pleasure to bathe in the ancient light of Banville's luxurious word showers, even though the story itself, like the deeply unreliable narrator, is rather strange, passing as it does at the end through a postern gate, to bring "a portent out of the past."