Irish Literature

It’s That Man Again

Banville’s heroes are by now familiar to us. Remote, middle-aged elitist types, tortured by the burden of existence and the shadow of death, they may…

Irish Literature

Imagining the Others

An accessible crime thriller it may be, but John Banville’s most celebrated novel also marks out his singular intellectual ambition, an ambition that in the…

Haunted By Ghosts

The Celtic Tiger years have seen a generation of writers emerge that has found in history a way of thinking about the present. It is…

The Melancholy Gods

Hermes records in his narrative the complicated relations of the Godley family, as they wait for the patriarch, Adam, to die. Once a celebrated mathematician,…