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Reviewed by Maureen Gibbon

Irish writer John Banville, a Booker Prize nominee in 1989, creates a dark portrait of a man haunted by his past in "Eclipse," his 12th novel. While the theme is not new, Banville's treatment of it is unique.

"In practically all my books, what is significant is what is not there," he has said. This is certainly true of "Eclipse." By reading for the omissions and the secrets kept, the reader is drawn close to the disturbing core of this uneasy and brilliant novel.

At age 50, Alexander Cleave is a successful stage actor who has suddenly "corpsed" -- gone wooden and silent -- in the middle of a performance. The crisis is not wholly unexpected; for some time, Cleave has sought out matinees where he could weep in the darkness and has sensed a ghostlike presence "inside" him.

After his ruinous night onstage, however, Cleave can no longer ignore his emotional state; he cancels his acting contract and retreats from the world and his life. He goes to his boyhood home, a place rife with its own ghosts, but the choice is deliberate: He believes the key to understanding his current state lies in his past.

Cleave has "lived amid surfaces," so the search for his essential self is a difficult one. He also encounters "ectoplasmic" presences that waver at the periphery of his vision. Are they real, or a manifestation of his interior life? Seeking an answer, he realizes that "haunted, I was ever on the watch for phantoms."

Illness in the family

Seventy pages into the book, Banville offers the first hint that Cleave's midlife crisis springs from something deeper than the self-absorbed longings of a man undone by his own superficiality. Cleave, actor and pretender, has a real source of pain in his life: a mentally ill daughter whose suffering began in childhood and continues.

"There is nothing, not a turn in the weather, or a chance word spoken in the street, that does not covertly pass on to her some profound message of warning or encouragement," Cleave says. "I used to try to reason with her, talking myself into ... frustration and rage, while she stood silently before me ... frowning in sullen refusal and defiance. ... What an actor she is!"

Cleave's daughter was "a trial ... an irritation" to him, and his words reveal a colder sentiment than that of a parent pushed to the edge of endurance by a child's exhausting illness. We see for the first time that he is not only a harmless egoist who, in his final moment onstage, gained "hideous awareness" of his "insupportable excess of self," but also someone capable of causing damage.

Although hardly mentioned in the first third of the book, the tempestuous relationship between Cleave and his daughter becomes central -- the key to understanding Cleave's personal crisis. Banville handles this loaded material with great subtlety. Details that seem of little import at first, begin to loom for the attentive reader, and by the book's end, one understands that what has been eclipsed in this novel is not the sun but a life.

-- Maureen Gibbon wrote the novel ''Swimming Sweet Arrow.'' She lives in Plymouth.