Banville, John
Banville, John ( 1945 – ),novelist and journalist, born in Wexford, literary editor of the Irish Times since 1989 . His fiction is characterized by a densely referential and ironic style and by a preoccupation with the act of writing itself. Long Lankin ( 1970 ), his first book, was a collection of episodic short stories and a concluding novella, ‘The Possessed’, which was drawn on for his first novel, Nightspawn ( 1971 ), in which the narrator becomes a character in his own plot. Birchwood ( 1973 ), a novel with an Irish country-house setting, was followed by a trilogy of fictional biographies of figures from the history of science—Doctor Copernicus ( 1976 ), Kepler ( 1981 ), and The Newton Letter: An Interlude ( 1982 )—in which the scientific search for certainty mirrors an exploration of the relationship between fiction and reality. The central figure of...
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