Past and Present

in
• There are really two books there – one set in the past, that is quite
direct and has a pulse that's like the sea: wave sentences, pulsating,
while in the present-day narrative, when Max Morden is talking about
himself in the present, the style goes back to that of Shroud. (Friberg
203-4; emphasis added)
Two-part Book: Correspondence
• “Damned thing ... seems to be…” (7,247)
• “Everything seems to be something else.” (65, 138)
• robin, cat and long grass (42, 157)

• Avril’s freckles, a broken bird egg, … and Anna (57, 159, 106)

•…
Indivisible Time: In-betweenness
• “I walked down Station Road in the sunlit emptiness of afternoon.”
(10; emphasis added)
• “I am walking down Station Road.” (12; emphasis added)

• “I am in the Strand Café, with Chloe, after the pictures and that
memorable kiss.” (160)
Two-part Book: Growing Narrative Self-Consciousness
• Before I knew what I was doing I was clambering up the middlemost
one. This was not like me, I was not daring or adventurous, and had,
and have, no head for heights. Up I went, however, up and up, hand
and instep, instep and hand, from bough to bough. The climb was
exhilaratingly easy, despite the foliage hissing in scandalised protest
around me and twigs slapping at my face, and soon I was as near the
top as it was possible to go. […] I could see the roofs of the town on
the horizon, and farther off and higher up, like a mirage, a tiny silver
ship propped motionless on a smear of pale sea. (Banville 228;
emphasis added)
Cedars Representation: Change in Perception
of Time
• The name of the house is the Cedars, as of old. A bristling clump of those
trees, monkey-brown with a tarry reek, their trunks nightmarishly tangled,
still grows at the left side, facing across an untidy lawn to the big curved
window of what used to be the living room but which Miss Vavasour
prefers to call, in landladyese, the lounge. The front door is at the opposite
side, opening on to a square of oil-stained gravel behind the iron gate that
is still painted green, though rust has reduced its struts to a tremulous
filigree. I am amazed at how little has changed in the more than fifty years
that have gone by since I was last here. Amazed, and disappointed, I would
go so far as to say appalled, for reasons that are obscure to me, since why
should I desire change, I who have come back to live amidst the rubble of
the past? (Banville 4)
• It was an evening just like that, the Sunday evening when I came here
to stay, after Anna had gone at last. (Banville 146)

• I experienced a sense almost of panic as the real, the crassly

complacent real, took hold of the things I thought I remembered and
shook them into its own shape. Something precious was dissolving
and pouring away between my fingers. Yet how easily, in the end, I let
it go. The past, I mean the real past, matters less than we pretend.
(Banville 156-7)