As the novel begins, protagonist Alexander Cleave, a 50-year-old, disillusioned actor, retreats to his empty childhood home for an indefinite period of introspection, leaving his wife Lydia behind.

Cleave's solitude is interrupted by what he provisionally believes to be ghosts, "sightings, brief, diaphanous, gleamingly translucent, like a series of photographs blown up to life-size and for a moment made wanly animate.

Of this, Alex Clark writes in The Guardian, ″Ghosts, it appears, can exist in the future as well as the past; whether or not we choose to respond to their beckoning is another matter.″[4] Upon release, Eclipse was generally well-received among British press.

[7] A review of the book in The New York Times stated: "Like Nabokov, Banville captures the vivid aesthetic pleasures of quotidian reality in the most satisfying ways....At such moments, his dream of dislocation and transport becomes ours.

"[2] Robert MacFarlane is equally enthusiastic, writing: "The book is ornately written, heartless in an honest fashion, profoundly interrogative of ideas of identity and, above all, spectacularly beautiful.