A man—"a shearsman"—bends over a blue guitar and considers an accusation by a group identified only as "they": "You do not play things as they are." The exchange becomes convoluted as the guitarist notes that his instrument does change things. They insist he play a tune "beyond" them, yet themselves. The guitarist acknowledges in the second of the poem's 33 sections that he can't create a whole world, but he can "patch" its troubles. "Jangling" his strings, he can strike the terrible notes of living.
"They" continue issuing requests for the proper tune. It must replace hymns with sacred truth. At center is the notion that in times of war, "things as they are have been destroyed." The pressure of reality is too great in wartime, unless "the imagined and the real, thought / And the truth" can be uncovered. Nearing the end in section 25, the cycles of nature come into view with the reintroduction of "things as they are." The imagination is revivified. After a fruitless repose in a cathedral, the guitarist returns to "evolve a man," not in an idealized state but struggling. What remains are basic acts of the imagination based in essentials and deprivations.
To start over is to begin in darkness in order to appreciate shapes, to discover "actual stone" and bread. The recovery of the imagination is slow. After the trauma of war and the suppression of the imagination, people recover in elemental ways. They sleep at night and "forget by day" until they "choose to play," imagining simple elements of nature: the pine and the jay.
There is an impatience, or perhaps an anxiety, running through this novel which too often does not convince as something belonging only to the narrator – which seems, that is, to be authorial.
In this beautiful, heartbreaking novel, Banville has fashioned much more than a mere keepsake for his readers.