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Life
| 1945- [William John Banville]; b. 8 Dec., Wexford, son of office worker in garage-supply business; ed. Christian Brothers, and St. Peter’s College, Summerhill, Wexford, where he was taught by Fr. Larkin; bought copy of Ulysses in Liverpool at 17; intended for architect by parents; working as Aer Lingus clerk, 1968; m. an American, 1968; joined Irish Press, 1980; literary editor of The Irish Times, 1988-98 [var. 1999]; wins Allied Irish Banks and Irish-America Found. Lit. Awards, 1967; Macaulay Fellowship of Irish Arts Council, 1973; short stories, Long Lankin (1970), all involving an outsider and his effect on other characters and based on the Scottish ballad of that name dealing with the death of a child; Nightspawn (1971), a psychological thriller and anti-novel set in Greece on the eve of a military coup and narrated by Irish writer Ben White, who becomes involved; |
| issued Birchwood (1973), set in an Irish ‘big house’ combining features of different historical periods, and centred on the narrator Gabriel Godkin’s discovery that his ‘cousin’ Michael is actually his brother from an incestuous relationship between his father and his aunt - with jealousies, violence and deceits arising from these circumstances; compared in reviews with Jennifer Johnston to the disappointment of the author; issued Doctor Copernicus (1976), based on the life of the astronomer Copernicus [Koppernigk], and winner of James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction; issued Kepler (1981), in the same vein and likewise grounded in Koestler’s study of scientific paradigms in The Sleepwalkers (1959); |
| completed ‘scientific’ trilogy with The Newton Letter (1982), set in Ferns, where the scientist’s biographer takes accommodation with the Lawlesses and becomes involved with the daughter of the house; reputed to be Banville’s favorite and filmed for Channel 4; issued Mefisto (1986), a Faustian tale narrated by Gabriel Swan in two parts, before and after his own part-immolation in a burning ‘big house’ and ultimately concerned with matematical models of reality - a theme and treatment oddly in the manner of Flann O’Briens “De De Selby” character in The Third Policeman; author’s expectations of popular success disappointed by unfortunate timing of British reviews of the novel; |
| issued The Book of Evidence (1989), dealing with Freddie Montgomery’s killing of Josie Bell in circumstances not unlike those in the 1982 Macarthur murder case (‘all just drift, like everything else’), with an obsession with a Dutch painting lost to the character’s Anglo-Irish family as the immediate cause of the criminal events; shortlisted for Booker Prize and winner of 1989 Guinness Peat Aviation [GPA] Award - but only after a fracas involving the adjudicator Graham Greene and the unlisted entrant [Vincent McDonnell]; brought Banville his first popular success; issued Ghosts (1993), a novel about film-crew arriving on an island, with Montgomery under alias; wrote The Broken Jug (Peacock, 1 June, 1994; dir. by Ben Barnes), a stage-farce in verse adapted from Heinrich von Kleist’s Der Zebrochene Krug [1807], and dealing obliquely with the Famine; |
| wrote Seachange (Autumn 1994), his first TV drama, appeared in RTÉ “Two Lives” series, produced by Focus Th. along with Michael Harding’s play Kiss; issued Athena (1995), the third in a trilogy centred on Freddie Montgomery, now alias Morrow; issued The Untouchable (1997), a novel centred in career of Victor Maskell and based on story of the aesthete-spy Anthony Blunt (d.1983); it incls. the character Querell, widely held to be based on Graham Greene; rebuked journalists’ for ‘intrusive and inaccurate’ stories about his private life (Hot Press, 9 July 1997); winner Lannan Literary Award, 1997 ($75,000); mbr. of Irish Arts Council under Colm Ó Briain’s directorship in the 1980s; succeeded by Caroline Walshe in literary-editorship of Irish Times and becomes Chief Critic in succession to Brian Fallon, 1999; |
| issued Eclipse (2000), in which Alexander Cleave, an actor, narrates his retreat into himself after a humiliation on the stage but has to come to terms with his family and especially his troubled dg. Cass - followed by Shroud (2002) and Ancient Light (2012) to for a trilogy; God’s Gift, based on von Kleist’s version of the tale of Amphitryon’s wife (Barabbas, Dec. 2000); contrib. essay to first issue of the new-series Dublin Review; resigned from Aosdána following non-election of his candidate Mary Morrissey, 2001; isued Shroud (2002), a sequel to Eclipse; issued Prague Pictures (2003); strenuously criticises Ian MacEwan’s novel Saturday, in The New York Review of Books (26 May 2005); |
| issues The Sea (2005), in which Max Morden remembers an summer with the Graces, a family of twin children Chloe and Myles with their parents Carlo and Constance; winner of Man Booker Prize (‘it’s the biggest toy in the shop’); issued, as Benjamin Black [pseud.], prepared tv mini-series set in 1950s Ireland in the early 2000s, which however remained unproduced - but was later turned into Christine Falls (2006), first of the Benjamin Black novels featuring the Dublin pathologist and crime-novel anti-hero Quirke - and written at Santa Maddalena, south-east of Florence (Tuscany), hosted by Beatrice von Rezzori, widow of Gregor von Rezzori; |
| issued The Silver Swan (2007), also as Bejamin Black, in which Quirke investigates the supposed suicide of a friend’s wife, bringing on a tale of blackmail, prostition, pornography and drugs; issued Conversations in a Mountains (2008), a play in which Jewish poet Paul Celan visits Martin Heidegger, hoping to hear his apology for complicity in the Holocaust; issued The Lemur (2008), as Benjamin Black, a murder tale set in New York introducing a new protagonist, John Glass; gave the keynote lecture at the Kate O’Brien Weekend in Limerick Courthouse, 2009; |
| issued The Infinities (2010), a novel which imagines the Greek gods living through contemporary beings in the form of a mathematician Adam, now dying of a stroke, and his family gathering about him in a latter-day big-house setting - with a deeply counterfactual historical plot-line as regards events in Ireland and the world - an excerpt appearing in the New York Times on 5 March 2010; issued Elegy for April (2010), another Benjamin Black novel, and A Death in Summer (2011), in which Diamond Dick [Richard Jewell] owner of the Clarion newspaper, is found decapitated by a gunshot; winner of 2011 Kafka Prize; |
| issued Vengeance (2012), as Benjamin Black; as Banville, issued Ancient Lights (2012), in which Alex Cleave falls in love with a friend’s mother in teenage; winner of Bórd Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year; four Benjamin Black novels filmed in BBC with Gabriel Black as Quirk, 2014; issued The Blue Guitar (2015), narrated by Oliver Otway Orme, a self-aggrandising and self-deprecatory painter of some renown and a petty thief who has never before been caught; .issued Mrs Osmond: A Novel (2017) - a continuation of Henry James’s the Portrait of a Lady adn written while visiting professor at the University of Chicago; [...] signatory of international authors' letter calling for an end to ‘cancel culture’ - with Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, JK Rowling et al., July 2202. DIW FDA AOS DIL OCIL |
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| Photo-ports by various photo-journalists; top left by Derek Speirs; bottom right by Gerry Mooney (Irish Independent, 2020). |
Works
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| Banville’s reviews in The New York Review of Books - to April 2007 | ||
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| Note: In a review of Martin Amis, The House of Meetings (NYRB, 1 March 2007), Banville writes of the ‘ridiculous charges of plagiarism leveled against Ian McEwan for his novel Atonement’. | ||
| Source: New York Review of Books [online] - Searching <Banville> - Author - 125 [string] - accessed 10.04.2007. |
| Banville’s reviews in the Literary Review (London) - to Sept. 2021 |
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Sept. 2021 - A Book is Born [diary piece; incls. tribute to Christopher Robbins, The Empress of Ireland, on Brian Desmond Hurst, (film dir.). |
| —Available at Literary Rview - online; accessed 29.01.2024. |
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Criticism| Books | ||||
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See Rüdiger Imhof, ed., Contemporary Irish Novelists (Tübingen: Gunther Narr 1990); Vera Kreilkamp, Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House (Syracuse UP 1998; Eurospan 1999), et al.; also Eve Patten on the British Council’s Contemporary Writers website [link]. |
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| See also num. reviews not listed here but given as extracts under Commentary - infra. |
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| Try these .... |
Kate O’Brien Weekend (2009) - notice on Banville [adapted]: Literary Editor of the Irish Times, 1988-99, he first issued Long Lankin (1970), short stories, followed by Nightspawn (1971) and Birchwood (1973), both novels, and next published a series of fictional portraits of eminent scientists beginning with the 15th-century Polish astronomer Dr Copernicus (1976), winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, followed by a novel about the 16th-century German astronomer Kepler (1981), which took the Guardian Fiction Prize, and -finally - The Newton Letter: An Interlude (1982), the story of an academic writing a book on Sir Isaac Newton which was was adapted as a C4 TV film. His next novel, Mefisto (1986), is a reworking of Dr Faustus and an exploration of the world of numbers. His next novel, The Book of Evidence (1989), which is narrated by Freddie Montgomery, a character based on the contemporary case of Malcolm Macarthur, won the Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Ghosts (1993) and Athena (1995) are sequels dealing with the same character after release. Victor Maskell, the central character of his next novel, The Untouchable (1997), is based on the upper-crust Engliah art-historian and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt - the eponymous ‘third man’. Eclipse (2000) is narrated by Alexander Cleave, an actor who has withdrawn to the house where he passed his childhood; Shroud (2002), continues his story. The Sea (2005), beingthe narrative of an elderly art historian who loses his wife to cancer and feels compelled to revisit the seaside villa where he spent family holidays in childhood, took the 2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Prague Pictures: Portrait of a City (2003), is a personal evocation of that city.
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Anthologies
Peter Fallon & Seán Golden, eds., Soft Day: A Miscellany of Contemporary Irish Writing (Dublin: Wolfhound Press; US: Notre Dame 1980), contains ‘Fragment from a Novel in Progress [Kepler ]’, pp.170-76.
Andrew Carpenter & Peter Fallon, eds., The Writers: A Sense of Place (Dublin: O’Brien Press 1980), contains extract from Kepler ; incls. photo-portrait.
Peter Ellis (Cat. 20) lists Long Lankin (London: Martin Secker & Warburg 1970), 189pp., first novel; £450 [in 2004]; Eclipse (2000) [£20].
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Notes
Birchwood (1873); the novel centres around Gabriel Godkin and his return to the dilapidated family estate after years of absence. Delving deep into a family legacy of memories and despair embodied by the house itself, he reveals to the reader the tortuous experience of Irish history - strangely delivered in an anachronistic tale of conquest and plantation, famine and Land War, all embodied in the interlocking characters of a cold father, a tortured mother and an insane grandmother. Gabriel personal progress from innocence to experience, involving a hallucinatory journey with a troupe of circus players, matches sexual intimacies with political violence in a plot the ends cataclysmically with the burning of the house itself. The whole is conveyed in an intensely stylised prose whcih suggests the manner of magic realism, reaching beyond the naturalistic into the domain of symbol and correspondence without lapsing into mere fantasy or pastiche. (See www.goodreads.com online - accessed 24.07.2011.)
Copernicus (1976): The novel, which is filled with a sense of the historical reality of the period, follows the astronomer’s life from childhood to death in four distinct parts. The first part, “Orbitas lumenque” is a narrative of childhood and education in Prussia and Italy. The second part deals with Copernicus’s traumatic relationship with his brother; the third part, using Banville’s technique of mixing time and characters, gives us version of events by his disciple Rheticus who finally secured publication of Copernicus’s work but became completely cynical and morally exhausted in the process; the final part, “Magnum miraculum”, hands the novel back to the narrator andf gives us Banville’s interpretation of Faustian myth in relating the mental and physical decline of the astronomer. (See Nataliya Stokes, ‘The Concept of Harmony in Selected Works of John Banville’, BA Hons. Dissertation, UUC 2005.)
Athena (1995): third in a trilogy which follows the protagonist, Mr. Morrow, a man of contradictory sensibility yearning equally for gothic monsters and pristine world of artistic perfection as he wanders through the realm of art and the criminal underworld. The novel opens with a homage to his love, A. and an account of the ominous house where he meets a sinister pair one of whom (Morden) proposes that he catalogue eight Flemish paintings in his possession. For the rest of the novel, the narrative chapters are interspliced with others analysing the eight paintings. On his second trip through the neighborhood, Morrow is invited by striking woman into her room at the same house and begins a steamy romance with her. Later, Morden takes him to meet a man called “the Da”, a master-criminal and the major force behind the theft and the cataloging of the paintings. In a minor plot, Morrow’s elderly cousin Aunt Corky leaves her her estate to him after long illness. When Detective Hackett, a police inspector, arrives in quest of the stolen paintings Morrow confesses that they are hidden in the house, and later it is discovered that all but one are forgeries. When the Da, Morden, and A. all disappear, Detective Hackett informs Morrow that Morden and A. are the Da’s children, leading Morrow to understand that his involvement with A was contrived to draw him into the crime. Morrow embarks on a search for A and an examination of his experiences related in the novel. The whole revisits and develops the themes of identity and authenticity, order, intelligibility and mythology in the modern life. (BS: see www.endnotes.com online; accessed 24.07.2011.)
God’s Gift (2000) is a bawdy tale based on Heinreich Von Kleist’s 1807 version of the myth of Prince Amphitryon whose wife is seduced by Jupiter, now set in Ireland following the 1798 Rebellion with General Ashburningham’s Minna, with a subplot concern Jupiter’s interference with the General’s servant Souse and his wife Kitty; produced by Barabbas (dir. Veronica Coburn). See Irish Emigrant Arts Review (Dec. 2000).
Seachange (Autumn 1994), his first TV drama, appeared in RTÉ “Two Lives” series; produced by Focus Th. along with Michael Harding, Kiss [see Irish Times, 19 Nov. 1994].
The Sea (2005): a man who has recently lost his wife returns to the seaside village of his childhood, mixing memories of marriage with those of a childhood infatuation; a novel of love and time, and the influence of the past. It begins: ‘They depart, the gods, on the day of the strange tide.’
Christine Black (2006): In the Pathology Department it was always night. This was one of the things Quirke liked about his job ... it was restful, cosy, one might almost say, down in these depths nearly two floors beneath the city’s busy pavements. There was too a sense here of being part of the continuance of ancient practices, secret skills, of work too dark to be carried on up in the light. But one night, late after a party, Quirke stumbles across a body that shouldn’t have been there...and his brother-in-law, eminent paediatrician Malachy Griffin - a rare sight in Quirke’s gloomy domain - altering a file to cover up the corpse’s cause of death. It is the first time Quirke encounters Christine Falls, but the investigation he decides to lead into the way she lived - and the reason she died - disturbs a dark secret that has been festering at the core of Dublin’s high Catholic society, a secret ready to destabilize the very heart and soul of Quirke’s own family ... [see COPAC online; accessed 31.07.08]
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The Silver Swan (2007): Time has moved on for Quirke, the world-weary Dublin pathologist first encountered in Christine Falls. It is the middle of the 1950s, that low, dishonourable decade; a woman he loved has died, a man whom he once admired is dying, while the daughter he for so long denied is still finding it hard to accept him as her father. When Billy Hunt, an acquaintance from college days, approaches him about his wife’s apparent suicide, Quirke recognises trouble but, as always, trouble is something he cannot resist. Slowly he is drawn into a twilight world of drug addiction, sexual obsession, blackmail and murder, a world in which even the redoubtable Inspector Hackett can offer him few directions. [See COPAC online; accessed 31.07.08]
Elegy for April (2010): set in 1950s Ireland; newly returned from a drying-out hospital, is set to investigate the disappearance of the young woman in the title whose friend Phoebe Griffin, haunted by the horrors of her past, calls on Quirke’s daughter’s help. Assisted by Inspector Hackett, Quirke discovers that the missing girl’s family is anxious to suppress the scandal associated with her disappearance. More seems to lie behind the missing girl’s habitual secrecy than meets the eye. Quirke is led astray - and back to drinking - by a beautiful young actress while Phoebe watches on helplessly as April’s family hush up her disappearance. Only the unthinkable seems to explain her disappearance; and when Quirke makes a disturbing discovery he begins to unravel the complex web of love, lies, jealousy and dark secrets out of which April’s life was spun. (See COPAC online; accessed 30.07.2011.)
Elegy for April (2010) features Dublin pathologist Dr Quirke, Banville’s uncompromising sleuth; opens in 1950s Dublin with the city shrouded in a “muffled silence” of fog where it “seemed bewildered, like a man whose sight has suddenly failed”, and sustains the imagery of inclement weather throughout the novel in the form of an acutely apposite metaphor for a society held tightly in the grip of reactionary individuals and cabals hiding behind self-serving facades of respectability. We first meet Quirke drying out in St John of God’s; struggling with “the daily unblurred confrontation with a self he heartily wished to avoid”; when he lapses the whiskey gives him “the feeling of it spreading through his chest made him think of a small, many-branched tree bursting slowly into hot, bright flames”; obliged by the programme to expose his failures to a “designated fellow-sufferer”, one Harkness, a Christian Brother who represents the institutionalised world in which Quirke spent his maimed childhood, but Harkness is only able to “release reluctant resistant nuggets of information, as if he were spitting out the seeds of a sour fruit”. Quirke is visited by his daughter Phoebe who whom he previously gave away after the death of her mother; she confides her concerns about a missing friend April Latimer, the estranged daughter of the powerful Latimer family who do their best to frustrate his search by means of “the velvet word, the silken threat”. Other characters incl. the thin lipped (warm-hearted) Inspector Hackett, and Isabel Galloway, an actress and Quirke’s love interest whose “vivid lips, sharply curved and glistening, [...] looked as if a rare and exotic butterfly had settled on her mouth and clung there, twitching and throbbing”. David Park, reviewing, remarks on the numerous Dickensian echoes and allusions, and concludes: “Ultimately, Elegy for April is a novel that transcends any limitation of genre or categorisation, stands supremely confident in its achievement and, to this reader at least, reveals itself as good enough to take its place with anything John Banville has ever written.”’ (The Irish Times, 16 Oct. 2010, Weekend, p.10.)
The Lemur (2008) John Glass, an Irishman in New York who is married to the daughter of Big Bill Muholland, a successful businessman in the cable business and former CIA agent, is required to undertake the biography of his father-in-law. He recruits a young researcher called Dylan Reilly [var. Riley], whom he nicknames “The Lemur”, and who is subsequently murdered - but not before he rings Glass with news of a secret which he claims entitles him to half the fee that Mulholland is paying Glass. Glass fears that Riley has turned up the secret of his own affair with the painter Alison O’Keeffe. In reality he’s discovered the secret of the Mulholland family which puts Glass’s pecadillo in the shade. Meanwhile, Captain Ambrose of the NYPD has identified Glass as the last man Riley rang before he was shot. (See COPAC > Kirkus Review - online; accessed 30.07.2011.)
Juggery-pokery: There is another version of von Kleist’s De Zerbrochen Krug trans. by Blake Morrison as The Cracked Pot played at Skipton Auction Mart using copious amounts of recorded Yorkshire dialect of 1911 (see Times Literary Supplement, 22 March 1996, p.20.)
What the Dickens!: In Birchwood (1973) Banville introduces a travelling circus, much as Dickens does in Hard Times while the term “whelp” is shared by both texts. If intentional, the borrowed trope and term are among very many intertextual elements in the novel including an echo of Joyce’s Dubliners in the naming of the protagonists Gabriel and Michael. (Note on Dickens and Joyce provided by Ryan Horner, UG Essay, UUC 2003.)
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Aosdána (1): Anthony Cronin, “John Banville and Aosdana”, letter to The Irish Times (20 Dec. 2001), argues that Banville is mistaken about ‘the nature and purposes of Aosdána’ in supposing that it is for the support of ‘what he calls “hungry” people’. Cronin goes on to express surprise at his [Banville’s] ‘crusading zeal’, arguing that the most members of Aosdána [do not] ‘enjoy, like him, a degree of financial success [and enjoins him to] understand that membership is also an expression of identity of interest with others who have made the same difficult and often dangerous vocational choice as they have themselves but may not have the same good fortune.’
Aosdána (2): John Banville, letter to The Irish Times (10 Jan. 2002), answers Cronin’s letter on his ‘crusading zeal’. Banville explains: ‘The reason for my resignation was simple. I had for some years taken no active part in the proceedings of Aosdána, not because I disapproved of those proceedings, but because I was busy elsewhere, frequently out of the country, &c. It seemed, therefore, that the right and mannerly thing to do would be to resign.’ He also speaks of his proposal that emeritus status be created to facilitate new entrants and makes it clear that he has not received the cnuas since the mid-1980s.
Alan Gilsenan, dir., stage-version of Banville’s Book of Evidence as a dramatic monologue for the Royal Shakespeare Company [RSC], 2000.
QUB/English Society hosts reading and discussion by John Banville on 4 Dec. 2003 (Lanyon North, QUB, Belfast).
The play’s the thing: Fiach Mac Conghail, appt. Director of the Abbey Theatre in Feb. 2005, previously produced films for Paul Mercier, Marina Carr’s Ariel at the Abbey, and The Book of Evidence, a play about Malcolm Macarthur, with Kilkenny Arts Festival, as well as Dorothy & Tom Cross’s Medusa and The Silver Bridge by Jaki Irvine. (Irish Times, 2 Feb. 2005.)
“A Novel Choice” [Irish Times /James Joyce Centre lect. series]: John Banville selects Ulysses by James Joyce [‘First, and obviously, Ulysses, even though it may not be exactly what Tolstoy or George Eliot would have recognised as a proper novel’]; Molloy by Samuel Beckett [‘Molloy is Samuel Beckett’s prose masterpiece - although if the list were longer I would want to include Ill Seen Ill Said, a masterpiece of his old age’]; The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen [‘Elizabeth Bowen wrote The Last September when she was still in her 20s, but it is her finest achievement - and, incidentally, her own favourite among her novels’]. (See The Irish Times, 27 Sept. 2003, announcing a lecture series based on the 10 most voted for novels on a list provided by the commissioned lecturers to be hosted by the James Joyce Centre, 23 Oct. - 27 Nov. 2003.)
Malcolm Macarthur [often err. MacArthur; occas. McArthur] (1): b. 17 April 1945 [var. 1946]; arrested 4 Aug. 1982 and convicted of murdering Bridie Gargan - though not tried for the killing of Co. Offaly farmer Donal [var. Noel] Dunne, widely assumed to be his doing also - was sentenced to a life term of imprisonment and served as the model for the character Freddie Montgomery in The Book of Evidence . He was moved from Mountjoy to an Shelton Abbey, an open prison, on 6 May 2003 [with a view to assessing his suitability for early release]. In January 2005 Macarthur challenged his further detention as one of the the longest held prisoner in the state, and sought a High Court declaration that it is in contravention of the the Constitution and the European Human Rights Convention on the basis that a minister cannot perform a judicial function in over-riding the recommendation of the parole board, as well as damages from the Irish State. (see The Irish Times, 27 Jan 2005.)
Malcolm Macarthur - (2): Note that Macarthur’s son, a PhD student at TCD in 2005, was offered as an example of journalists’ intrusions of privacy in an Irish Times article by Fintan O’Toole (“Private lives, public eyes”, 5 Feb. 2005).
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Malcolm Macarthur - (3): A full account of events leading up to and following on Macarthur's murder of Bridie Gargan, a nurse who was sun-batheing in the Phoenix Park when he crossed her path, is given in an Irish Times article by Conor Lally of 18 June 2011 [online - and conserved at the Irish Free Press website [online - accessed 20.07.2011]. The article relates his killing of Gargan with a lump hammer and Donal Dunne with a shotgun in Co. Offaly days later, before hiding up in Pilot View, Dalkey - the home of Peter Connolly, then chief govt. legal adviser [Attorney General] - giving rise to Conor Cruise O’Brien’s coinage “gubu” to reflect the Taoiseach Charles Haughey’s explanatory phrase, “grotesque, unprecedented, bizarre and unbelievable”. It concludes by reflectig on the unlikelihood of Macarthur’s being released from prison ‘any time soon’.
Malcolm Macarthur (4): The Sunday Independent (1 Sept 2002) carried a banner, “Was Macarthur [sic] about to reveal child sex ring? - Garda believe killer had ‘sensational’ information.” See also earlier article by Ralph Riegel in the Irish Independent (26 April 2002), covering allegations made by Phil Hogan (Fine Gael TD for Carlow/Kilkenny) that McArthur [sic] is a paedophile associated with another paedophile in a position of authority in the SE Health Board and that he had sex with an unnamed inmate of an Irish care facility in the bailiwick of the Ministry of Education. The relevant article from the Independent is conserved on the Free Speech website [online] - a website edited by Jim Cairns, author of a work on ‘disappeared’ young persons. The site page referring to Macarthur is titled “SRA Missing Persons and Satanism” and reflects an obsession with the idea of a ‘Jesuit-Vatican’ plot to rule the world. The report concerning Macarthur reports actual exchanges in Dail Eireann involving Michael Woods, Minister of Education (Fianna Fáil) in which the latter undertakes to investigate the allegations.
Malcolm Macarthur (5): As the District judge before whom Malcolm Macarthur was arraigned, Mary Kotsonouris [...] provides a disturbing personal observation on the Macarthur case, writing: ‘There was no way that anyone standing as far away as the road could see him in the gap, but through the barred windows, I heard a sound that was neither human nor animal, a low but thunderous swelling of noise that was as inchoate as it was meaningless. It is a sound I hope never to hear again – the baying of the crowd. Five minutes later, [Macarthur] was charged with two murders.’ In her book she refers to “McArthur”; the rather than Macarthur - an error pointed out by the reviewer. (See John McBratney, review of Kotsonouris, “ ‘tis All Lies, Your Worship”, Tales from the District Court, in Irish Times, 23 July 2011, Weekend, p.11.)
“Beckett’s Last Words”: Banville delivered a public lecture with this title in Theatre P, Newman [Arts] Building, Belfield, on on 20 Feb. 2008, at 7pm.
Valuations of Banville’s first book in the first edition: Long Lankin (Martin Secker & Warburg 1970): Peter Ellis (London) - £450; Simon Finch Rare Books (London, UK) - US$1562.62; Hemingway’s Books (Sumas, WA, USA.) - US$800 [all in 2004].
Which book? Asked by the paper which single book he - among 10 other writers - would give as a gift, Banville answered: A dictionary (‘free to ever citizen of the land at birth’). See Irish Times (5 March 2011), Weekend, p.7.
Crime fiction - see Kirsty Blake Knox, ‘John Banville says those criticising Colm Tóibín's comments on genre fiction should “grow up”’, in INdependent [IE] (23 July 2019): “‘I think they should grow up, and suppress their inferiority complex because they have nothing to feel inferior about. Some of the finest writers of the 20th century wrote crime fiction,” he said.’ (Available online; accessed 15.07.2020.)
Cancel Culture: Banville joined other writers such as Margaret Atwood, Noam Chomsky, Salmon Rushdie, and JK Rowling as signatories of a letter in Harper’s Magazine [magazine] calling for an end to the so-called ‘cancel culture’ in which journalists, academics and others were being ‘called out’ for their supposedly racist and otherwise reactionary offenses. Banville remarked on increasing intolerance which is threatening to destroy free speech and open debate, and he warned ‘we are living through a very dangerous time’ adding that he ‘shivers’ when he hears ‘publishers being coerced into cancelling publication of what are deemed to be unacceptable opinions’ and says it isn’t a long step ‘from suppressing books to burning them’. (See Niamh Horan, ‘“We live in a climate of cravenness and cowardice,”, says Banville”, in Irish Independent, July 2020 - available online.)
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