John Banville

by

Elke D'hoker

• LAST MODIFIED: 24 July 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846719-0205

Introduction

Born in Wexford on 8 December 1945, John Banville was educated at the Christian Brothers and St Peter’s College in Wexford. He did not attend university, but worked as a clerk and started writing. In 1969 he became copy-editor at the Irish Press and in 1983 he joined The Irish Times, first as sub-editor and from 1988 to 1999 as literary editor. Stories published in magazines in the late 1960s became his first (and only) short story collection, Long Lankin (1970), quickly followed by two novels: Nightspawn (1971) and Birchwood (1973). In 1976, Banville published Doctor Copernicus, the first novel of his ambitious science tetralogy: a series devoted to the life and ideas of major scientists. Kepler (1981), The Newton Letter (1982), and Mefisto (1986) completed the series. Banville’s exploration of morally compromised self-centered narrators in these last two novels was continued in The Book of Evidence (1989). Based on the life of a notorious Dublin murderer, it attracted considerable media attention and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Ghosts (1993) and Athena (1995) completed this so-called art trilogy around Freddie Montgomery. The Untouchable, a fictionalized life of Soviet spy Anthony Blunt followed in 1997. Eclipse (2000), Shroud (2002), and Ancient Light (2012) form a second trilogy in Banville’s oeuvre, partly based on the life of deconstructionist critic Paul de Man. The year 2005 saw Banville win the Man Booker Prize for The Sea, the fictional memoir of a man who returns to a scene of childhood trauma while mourning the death of his wife. In the 1990s and 2000s Banville also branched out into other forms of writing. He adapted three plays of Heinrich von Kleist, The Broken Jug (1994), God’s Gift (2000), and Love in the Wars (2005); wrote two radio plays, A World Too Wide (2005) and Totdnauberg (2006); and adapted his own work and that of others for the screen. He also turned to crime fiction in 2006 with Christine Falls, published under the pseudonym of Benjamin Black. The book was well received and Banville has since written thirteen more crime fiction novels, under different pen names and, since 2020, his own name. While creating an entirely different fictional universe, mostly set in 1950s Ireland, the crime fiction does contain many Banville tropes and themes. Another “literary” novel, The Infinities was published in 2009, followed by The Blue Guitar (2015) and Mrs Osmond (2017), a sequel to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. In 2022 Banville wrote what he calls his final novel, The Singularities. It assembles a cast of characters from his previous novels in a fitting farewell. The Lock-Up (2023) is his last crime novel to date. Banville has won many literary awards, including the Kafka Prize and the Prince of Asturias Award. He was a member of Aosdána from 1984 to 2001.

Critical Monographs

John Banville is alone among contemporary Irish writers to have attracted so much critical interest. Since the first critical introduction, Imhof 1997 (first published in 1989) Banville has been the object of fourteen critical monographs as well as several more doctoral dissertations. The monographs listed below typically analyze the novels in chronological order, but McMinn 1999, Friberg-Harnesk 2018, and Murphy 2018 also discuss his plays. Only Murphy 2018 devotes a chapter to Banville’s crime fiction. Every critical study has its own emphasis and argument. Imhof 1997 and D’hoker 2004 trace intertextual references in Banville’s work, highlighting its embeddedness in a very rich European literary and philosophical tradition. McMinn 1999 also constructs a literary lineage for Banville, but emphasizes his inheritance of a modernist aesthetics. Hand 2002 and Kenny 2009 illuminate the Irish contexts and intertexts of Banville’s novels. McNamee 2006 traces the mystical, religious impulse in Banville’s oeuvre and O’Connell 2013 offers an interesting psychoanalytic reading of Banville’s narrators and narrative style. Banville’s concern with authenticity, and the impossibility of ever achieving it, is traced in its different modulations in Smith 2014, while Friberg-Harnesk 2018 interprets this same concern through the lens of Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra.

• D’hoker, Elke. Visions of Alterity: Representation in the Works of John Banville. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004.

  DOI: 10.1163/9789004489615

  An investigation of Banville’s novelistic concern with the paradox of representation, i.e., the necessity and impossibility of expressing world and self in language. Demonstrates the novels’ profound engagement with continental philosophy and Western literature and traces the shifting emphases of this engagement, from a concern with epistemology and aesthetics in the early works to a greater engagement with ethical and existential questions in the art trilogy and after.

• Friberg-Harnesk, Hedda. Reading John Banville through Jean Baudrillard. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2018.

  Discusses the themes of (in)authenticity, masks, duplicity, and unstable identities in Banville’s later work, reading them through Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra. Individual chapters discuss the novels from The Untouchable to The Infinities as well two of the Kleist adaptations, God’s Gift and Love in the Wars.

• Hand, Derek. John Banville: Exploring Fictions. Dublin: Liffey Press, 2002.

  Part of a Contemporary Irish Writers series, this study reads Banville’s work within an Irish context and literary tradition. Hand discusses Banville’s use of the trope of the Irish Big House, his indebtedness to Joyce and Beckett, and his exploration of Irish hybrid identities, split between a Gaelic and Anglo-Irish heritage

• Imhof, Rüdiger. John Banville: A Critical Introduction. Rev. ed. Dublin: Wolfhound, 1997.

  In 1989 Imhof published the first full-length study of Banville’s work, with chapters devoted to the novels up to Mefisto. In 1997 a revised version was published with additional chapters on the art trilogy. Imhof reads Banville as an exponent of an international postmodernist tradition, highlighting the metafictional dimensions of the science tetralogy and tracing their intertextual allusions to European writers.

• Kenny, John. John Banville. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009.

  Takes a contextual approach to Banville’s oeuvre, discussing its reception and its response to Irish history and contemporary Ireland, but has also many interesting things to say about Banville’s aesthetics and his “neo-symbolist” style. Kenny offers a helpful chronology of Banville’s life and work up to 2008.

• McMinn, Joseph. The Supreme Fictions of John Banville. Rev. ed. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999.

  Expanded version of McMinn’s 1991 monograph, John Banville. A Critical Study, which devotes separate chapters to each of Banville’s works up to The Untouchable, also considering his play, The Broken Jug, and screenplay, Seachange. Contrary to Imhof, McMinn finds a strong modernist legacy in Banville’s novels, as their narrators long for the kind of master-narrative—or “supreme fiction”—even as they recognize the impossibility of ever achieving it.

• McNamee, Brendan. The Quest for God in the Novels of John Banville, 1973–2005: A Postmodern Spirituality. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2006.

  Argues for a central spiritual impulse in Banville’s novels as his protagonists experience a sense of the sacred in a secularized world. McNamee likens the religious quest of the mystics to Banville’s postmodern quest for an art that can express the ineffable mystery of life. Devotes individual chapters to each novel, from Birchwood to The Sea.

• Murphy, Neil. John Banville. Lewisburg, NY: Bucknell University Press, 2018.

  A general critical introduction to Banville’s fiction, from the perspective of the aesthetic ambition he defined at the outset of his career: to create art that illuminates rather than reflects life. Murphy brings the critical engagement with Banville’s aesthetics up to date with discussions of his Cleave trilogy, (screen)plays, and crime fiction.

• O’Connell, Mark. John Banville’s Narcissistic Fictions. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

  DOI: 10.1057/9781137365248

  A psychoanalytic reading of different aspects of narcissism in Banville’s major novels. O’Connell lays bare the narcissistic personality traits of Banville’s self-obsessed narrators, he reads Banville’s play with doubles and false identities through the lens of narcissism and analyzes the shame that haunts the protagonists. In the final two chapters, he also interprets Banville’s self-conscious narrative style as a form of narcissism.

• Smith, Eoghan. John Banville: Art and Authenticity. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2014.

  DOI: 10.3726/978-3-0353-0549-4

  Smith argues that the quest for authenticity, always doomed to fail, is at the heart of Banville’s aesthetic project. He traces this quest, in its aesthetic, existential, ethical, and political inflections, from Birchwood to The Infinities, bringing Banville in conversation with Samuel Beckett and Continental philosophers. He also reconsiders Banville’s position as an “Irish writer” in the changing cultural context of contemporary Ireland.