Introduction

Abstract

Despite the vivid elegance of his prose and the surface of sophisticated allusion with which he textures it, there is a sense in which John Banville’s writing remains fundamentally insular. With the exception of Doctor Copernicus (1976) and Kepler (1981), all of his novels have been written in the first-person confessional form, a narrative mode that attempts — or seems to attempt — the communication of an essence which is, at its core, incommunicable. In the typical Banville novel we are presented with a troubled male narrator’s effort to give a written account of himself, to explain himself to himself. The reader of these documents, these books of evidence, is always external or incidental to this process, as though he or she had simply stumbled across the diary of a perfect stranger and begun to turn the pages.