John Banville

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	Photo: © Douglas Banville

Biography

Irish novelist John Banville was born in Wexford in Ireland in 1945. He was educated at a Christian Brothers' school and St Peter's College in Wexford. He worked for Aer Lingus in Dublin, an opportunity that enabled him to travel widely. He was literary editor of the Irish Times between 1988 and 1999. Long Lankin, a collection of short stories, was published in 1970. It was followed by Nightspawn (1971) and Birchwood (1973), both novels.

Banville's fictional portrait of the 15th-century Polish astronomer Dr Copernicus (1976) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) and was the first in a series of books exploring the lives of eminent scientists and scientific ideas. The second novel in the series was about the 16th-century German astronomer Kepler (1981) and won the Guardian Fiction Prize. The Newton Letter: An Interlude (1982), is the story of an academic writing a book about the mathematician Sir Isaac Newton. It was adapted as a film by Channel 4 Television. Mefisto (1986), explores the world of numbers in a reworking of Dr Faustus.

The Book of Evidence (1989), which won the Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction, Ghosts (1993) and Athena (1995) form a loose trilogy of novels narrated by Freddie Montgomery, a convicted murderer. The central character of Banville's 1997 novel, The Untouchable, Victor Maskell, is based on the art historian and spy Anthony Blunt. Eclipse (2000), is narrated by Alexander Cleave, an actor who has withdrawn to the house where he spent his childhood. Shroud (2002), continues the tale begun in Eclipse and Prague Pictures: Portrait of a City (2003), is a personal evocation of the magical European city.

John Banville lives in Dublin. The Sea (2005) won the 2005 Man Booker Prize. In The Sea an elderly art historian loses his wife to cancer and feels compelled to revisit the seaside villa where he spent childhood holidays. His latest novel is The Infinities (2009).

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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Fiction, Non-fiction

Bibliography

Long Lankin   Secker & Warburg, 1970

Nightspawn   Secker & Warburg, 1971

Birchwood   Secker & Warburg, 1973

Dr Copernicus   Secker & Warburg, 1976

Kepler   Secker & Warburg, 1981

The Newton Letter: An Interlude   Secker & Warburg, 1982

Mefisto   Secker & Warburg, 1986

The Book of Evidence   Secker & Warburg, 1989

Ghosts   Secker & Warburg, 1993

Athena   Secker & Warburg, 1995

The Ark   Gallery Press, 1996

The Untouchable   Picador, 1997

Eclipse   Picador, 2000

Shroud   Picador, 2002

Prague Pictures: Portrait of a City   Bloomsbury, 2003

The Sea   Picador, 2005

The Infinities   Picador, 2009

Read about books by John Banville at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by John Banville at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards

1973   Allied Irish Banks' Prize   Birchwood

1973   Arts Council Macaulay Fellowship   Birchwood

1975   American Ireland Fund Literary Award   Dr Copernicus

1976   James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction)   (fiction award)   Dr Copernicus

1981   Guardian Fiction Prize   Kepler

1989   Booker Prize for Fiction   (shortlist)   The Book of Evidence

1989   Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award   The Book of Evidence

1997   Lannan Literary Award (Fiction)

2005   Man Booker Prize for Fiction   The Sea

2006   British Book Awards Author of the Year   (shortlist)   The Sea

2007   Man Booker International Prize   (shortlist)

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Critical Perspective

Regarded as the most stylistically elaborate Irish writer of his generation, John Banville is a philosophical novelist concerned with the nature of perception, the conflict between imagination and reality, and the existential isolation of the individual. While his writing flirts with both postmodernism and magic realism, it is best understood as metafiction in the tradition of Samuel Beckett, Banville's acknowledged mentor. Like Beckett, he moves fluidly from Irish landscapes and characters to European contexts and histories, and from conventional narratives into fabulism and distortion. Relentlessly and some might argue, pretentiously allusive, his works play with both overt and hidden references to his literary idols, particularly Proust, Dostoevsky, and Nabokov.

In his earliest fiction, Long Lankin (1970) and Nightspawn (1971), Banville marked out his non-realist territory and his interest in metaphysical ideas, but was criticised for technical self-indulgence and verbosity. With Birchwood (1973), he retained his tendency to baroque prose, but harnessed it more successfully to a Gothic fantasy of a dysfunctional Irish family and their decaying mansion. Drawing on the romance quest, the circular plot involves the narrator, Gabriel Godkin, setting out to find his lost twin sister, and encountering en route the bizarre community of a travelling circus. Echoes of Dickens' Bleak House, (one character even spontaneously combusts), join more typical Banvillian allusions to Nabokov and Proust in this characteristically poetic meditation on the relationship between memory and imagination:

'We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past. The first death we witness will always be a murmur of voices down a corridor and a clock falling silent in the darkened room, the end of love is forever two cigarettes in a saucer and a white door closing.'

Banville gained international recognition with his next four books, usually described as his 'scientific tetralogy', and linked by their common interest in the status of mathematical or astronomical structures as alternative 'languages' of perception. In Dr Copernicus (1976) and Kepler (1981), the scientific protagonists serve to illustrate the shortcomings of any 'fictional' versions of the universe, which ultimately fail to capture its elusive substance. The resultant self doubt which burdens both Copernicus and Kepler recurs in The Newton Letter (1982), in which Newton's biographer, living in isolation in County Wexford, Ireland, attempts to write about Newton's crisis of belief while suffering, simultaneously, his own neurotic failure of nerve. The implied parallel between scientist and writer - both engaged on their own inadequate systems of interpretation - is foregrounded in what has been seen as Banville's most autobiographical work.

One of the hallmarks of Banville's writing is an inter-textual repetition, the carrying of motifs or allusions from novel to novel. Mefisto (1986), the fourth book of his scientific tetralogy, is a Faustian tale of a mathematical prodigy, Gabriel Swan, whose carnivalesque adventures in a fun fair, (together with his Proustian associations) artfully recall the earlier Birchwood. In the enigmatic trilogy of novels which succeeds the tetralogy, this pattern of recurrence is conspicuous, and a central character, Freddie Montgomery, traced across three dramatically different contexts. Here the figure of the scientist gives way to the painter, as visual art becomes the primary channel for the author's meditation on perception and representation. And where the tetralogy threw the role of human imagination into crisis, the trilogy, to some extent, offers a reinvestment in the necessary creative fictions of human invention. Collectively, therefore, these novels mitigate some of Banville's earlier scepticism, despite their flirtation with the archetypal postmodernist jeux of gapped and inconsistent narration, non-sequential chronology, and the blurring of 'truth' and fantasy.

Opening the trilogy, The Book of Evidence (1989) consists of the prison memoir of Freddie Montgomery, on trial for the brutal murder of a female servant who interrupted his plan to steal a painting. Freddie is at once a disarming and objectionable narrator, blinded by his own ego, capable of the most intense response to the portrait he steals, but unable to empathise in any way with his human victim. At the heart of his predicament is his own existential insecurity, his perceived lack of substance: 'How shall I describe it, this sense of myself as something without weight, without moorings, a floating phantom? Other people seemed to have a density, a 'thereness', which I lacked. Among them, these big, carefree creatures, I was a child among adults.' In this fragility of identity the novel locates an ethical dilemma: if Freddie's concept of self is ultimately a fiction, then can he legitimately be held responsible for his crime? What is the nature of his guilt, defined by Freddie himself as 'a failure of imagination'? And how far can the reader trust his narration, a dubious construct fraught with implausibility, inconsistency and pride.

Freddie's reappears in the second novel of the sequence, Ghosts (1993), which situates a shipwrecked community on the island where he has seemingly gone to ground following his release from prison. In this setting, with its obvious echoes of numerous literary texts including The Tempest and Robinson Crusoe, identity is again in flux. The shipwrecked group includes an art historian and his assistant, connected in some mysterious way to Freddie's own scholarly interests in the painter Jean Vaublin. This near anagram for John Banville exemplifies his sporadic ludic tendency: in the next book, Athena (1995), which sees Freddie caught up in a conspiracy to authenticate a series of fake paintings, the painters' names - Johann Livelb, or L.van Hobelijn - are again anagrammatic of the author, an in-joke which also endorses the governing theme of reinvention in the work. Freddie's attempt to reinvent Josie Bell, the murdered serving woman, through his imagined versions of Flora in Ghosts or 'A' in Athena, serves both as a process of individual redemption and as a further linking device between the novels.

The black humour and lucidity which save Banville's work from becoming abstruse are dominant in what some regard as his finest novel. The Untouchable (1997) presents the recollections of Victor Maskell, a figure loosely based on the Royal art curator Anthony Blunt, who was exposed in 1979 as one of the Cambridge spy ring. More accessible perhaps than its predecessors, this work is a biographical study of individuality in freefall, released from the constructions of nationhood and patriotism, and obsessed with the abnegation of self required by the act of betrayal. Quite unlike the existential Gothic melodramas to which he has returned in his most recent fiction, Eclipse (2000) and Shroud (2002), The Untouchable also offers salient reminders of Banville's roots in the fractured condition of Irishness, an identity which continues to provide him with traditional thematic and narrative mainstays beneath the veneer of a cerebral European experimentalism.

Eve Patten, 2002

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Further reading on this site

The Man Booker Prize 2005
John Banville scooped the prestigious award for 2005 in what was claimed to be the closest-fought Man Booker Prize in years. Twice Booker nominated Banville won the award for his... more...   (09/09/2005)

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Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Picador Pan Macmillan Ltd 20 New Wharf Road London  N1 9RR England Tel: +44 (0) 20 7014 6000 Fax: +44 (0)20 7014 6001 http://www.panmacmillan.com

Agent Ed Victor Ltd 6 Bayley Street Bedford Square London  WC1B 3HB England Tel: +44 (0)20 7304 4100 Fax: +44 (0)20 7304 4111

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