Banville's Backlist

John Banville's new novel, The Infinities, is an intriguing read, but as it will barely be on the bookshelves by the night of the reading with Dr. Verghese (March 1), I thought I'd suggest some other Banville titles that you might like to take a look at until then. Banville has been writing and publishing steadily since 1970, so his backlist is an embarrassment of riches. Probably his best known books in this country are The Sea (which won the Man Booker prize in 2006) and 1989's The Book of Evidence (which made the short-list). Either novel is a good place to start if you are new to Banville; both are examples of the stylishly narrated dramatic monologues that have become his literary trademark. 1997's The Untouchable is in the same category, with the added frisson of being a sly fictionalization of the story of the Cambridge Spies.

But other, older Banville books deserve mention here--and a wider readership in the United States. I'm delighted to see that some of them have been reprinted here in the last few years, because they were tricky to get hold of on this side of the Atlantic. Banville's meditations on science and creativity--Dr. Copernicus, Kepler, and The Newton Letter--have been gathered together as the Revolutions Trilogy. In interviews, Banville has mentioned the short Newton Letter as one of the novels he is most satisfied with, especially in terms of tone.

And I see that Vintage International has re-issued 1973's Birchwood, perhaps the most Irish novel by an Irish novelist who identifies more with the European tradition than with a national literature. Birchwood is a wonderfully strange take on the Irish "Big House" tradition, a Gothic nightmare of a "state of the nation" story (1973 being a trying time in Ireland; years later Banville observed, in an interview on Britain's South Bank Show TV program, that the novel had more political resonance than he was fully conscious of when he wrote it).

Posted on Mon, February 15, 2010 by Robert Cremins

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