John Banville

Abstract

Exulting with a Joycean glee, the writerly protagonist of John Banville's Nightspawn declares: ‘Sweaty pencils poised, panting hunters of the symbol? There is wealth in store’. Although the ‘Banville industry’ has not been quite as industrious as the Joyce scholars, to date there have been seven scholarly monographs analysing and investigating his fictional output as well as the Irish University Review's Special Issue dedicated to his work, edited by Derek Hand and published in 2006. John Kenny's John Banville, which appeared in the Irish Academic Press' series ‘Irish Writers in their Time’, is a worthy contribution to this ‘wealth’. John Banville is a well-written and fascinating addition to Banville scholarship. More than close readings of the books, Kenny relies here on two sources: Banville's own reviews, essays, and articles and, as he points out in the Preface, ‘to a lesser extent’, the manuscripts held at Trinity College Library in Dublin (p. x). Both sources have been explored before, but no one has paid such meticulous attention to Banville's own work as a reviewer, literary critic, and essayist; Kenny has brought to light numerous less well-known pieces from Banville's early days as a reviewer. Furthermore, he has also included Banville's uncollected early short stories, his first book, Long Lankin (1970), and his first full-length novel, Nightspawn (1971), among the texts he considers in this study. The latter, part of the ‘formational period’ according to Kenny's periodization, have all too frequently been neglected as less noteworthy than his early fiction (p. xxi). John Banville offers an illuminating analysis of themes and motifs that first occur in the formational period and come to maturation in Banville's later works. For instance, Kenny calls attention to the ‘interiorized moments of panic’ in ‘A Death’, a short story from Long Lankin, in order to point out a connection with Doctor Copernicus which was published in 1976 (p. 92). He is also the first person to note a link between one of Banville's earliest short stories, ‘The Party’ (1966), that has remained uncollected, and The Book of Evidence, published in 1989 (p. 155). Links like these are of utmost value for an author such as Banville, who is infamous for building intra-textual connections across his oeuvre.