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From his experiences in those first years living on the southeast coast came his book Field Work, an elegiac rumination on loss, friendship, reunion, and country life. In the large, glass-walled library, I found books stuck with beer coasters and unsent letters. More often, when I needed a book, I strolled down to Reader's Paradise or Red Books, where the shelves heaved and the air was tinged with the old-paper scent of vanilla and hay past its due date.

The article starts from the observation that Irish fiction has recently shown a diversification, which can be summarised as follows: on the one hand there are works addressing the history of Ireland, on the other hand we see novels focusing on post-national topics (cf. Haekel). John Banville, who under the pseudonym of Benjamin Black also wrote crime novels, is a renowned representative of narrative fiction informed by contemporary philosophy and aesthetics, exploring questions such as memory, cognition, and personal identity. My article reveals how in his latest (and allegedly last) literary novel The Singularities (2022) his highly sophisticated character narration reaches a terminal point, as self-reflexivity, textual referentiality, and abstraction become unsettling. However, the complexity of placing his work in literary history has intensified by the appearance of three more novels published between 2020 and 2023 under Banville’s own name despite the supposed finality of The Singularities. Surprisingly, Snow (2020), April in Spain (2021) and The Lock-Up (2023) revisit dismal topics from Irish national history. These thematically (trans)national fictions also enhance the propositions of realism in Banville’s work. They present another hybrid form of narrative genres, blending crime fiction and historical novel, infused with philosophical reflection. The writer evades a categorisation. With The Singularities, Banville wishes to take his departure from the philosophical novel, as it seems with the intention to continue writing his new kind of murder mystery. The Lock-Up will be followed by another crime novel in October 2024. The Singularities, I wish to show in my analysis, points at the exhaustion due to a self-reflexive probing of the subject, the unreliability of knowledge, and the impossibility of truthful representation. Reality appears gloomy, yet in the end art surfaces as a source of freedom and imaginativeness for the individual and prospering kinds of fellowship.

A controversy within John Banville scholarship focuses on his seemingly ambivalent relation to his Irishness. The dominance of Banville’s philosophical topics has seemingly rendered the specifically Irish issues redundant. However, there are Irish traits that have significance for more subtle themes or motifs in certain novels. These passages often appear as side-paths in the eccentric protagonists’ meandering narration. In The Blue Guitar, Oliver Orme mentions that his “namesake Oliver Cromwell” attempted an attack upon the town in which his childhood home is situated, but eventually “the victorious Catholic garrison hanged half a dozen russetcoated captains” on the hill where the house stands and where “the Lord Protector’s tent” had been erected. Such casual remarks on violent historical incidents harbor a key to a particular Banvillean ethics. The frequently recurring prose structure of thematized mise en abîme and the mazes of signifiers indicate that no historical ontology in terms of a meta-narrative seems to exist. However, many of Banville’s novels revolve around the disclosure of a truth. This alethic element questions an all too convenient reliance on a completely constructivist understanding of history and thereby of Irish historical events appearing in the Banvillean oeuvre.

References to Vladimir Nabokov's texts are frequent in the works of contemporary British writers, but it is John Banville who seems to be engaged in an unceasing conversation with Nabokov. As this essay will argue, in Banville's comments on Nabokov's sophisticated structures the readers can glimpse a hint of Banville's own practice. The essay discusses Banville's celebrated ethical thriller, The Book of Evidence, which not only resembles Nabokov's Despair and Lolita in its theme and structure, or borrows phrases and images from these books, but also creates intimations of a hidden story, which remains decipherable though not conclusive, thus reproducing Nabokov's textual model. Using a heuristic comparative approach, this essay treats Despair as a case study of Nabokov's method of concealment of a storyline beneath flamboyant narration, and then studies Banville's novel with particular attention to the signals of unreliability, which, keeping in mind the deceptions of Despair, can be seen as evidence of untold story. The essay proposes a reinterpretation of the plot in The Book of Evidence by analogy with Despair, as well as a rereading of Despair under the influence of Banville's novel.

No Irish man of letters is able to escape crisis in Irish history. As a country beset by colonisation, famines, social and political unrest, and bloody sectarian conflict, Ireland remains a gothic place, haunted by dark memories and traumatic experiences. Contemporary Irish Revisionist historians and men of letters believe that the Irish nationalists were responsible for prolonging the violence in their country during the twentieth century, in part by using history to serve their political agenda of an independent nation. As a result, new attempts to approach Irish history from a different perspective have been made by the so-called “Revisionists,” who try to deconstruct traditional representations of this history in literature and historical records, especially in post-independence times. Instead of mythologising Irish history, Revisionists present it in the form of an unavoidable nightmarish cycle to help readers see this reality and recover from the trauma of the past. John Banville’s “Birchwood” will be analysed from this viewpoint since it was written during turbulent times when Ireland witnessed sectarian conflict in the north.

[...]the novels suggest that relationality and interdependence should involve untangling that net of power and control so as to negotiate social responsibility and create a climate of greater justice and solidarity. [...]he calls to mind how \"the noir narrator begins investigating a supposedly external situation, from a supposedly neutral point of view, only to discover that she or he is implicated in it\" (17). In a similar vein, in their introduction to a special issue of the journal Green Letters devoted to crime fiction and ecology, Walton and Walton underscore the interrelation between noir texts and ecocriticism by noting not only the growing number of ecocritical connotations in crime narratives, but also how more and more reflections on ecocritical theory and environmental philosophy are informed by detective fiction. [...]as far as Ireland is concerned this localist view has been endorsed by many critical commentators of the large number of crime novels that have appeared in recent decades on the island.

The following discussion highlights parallels between the narrators, Lemuel Gulliver of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Freddie Montgomery of John Banville’s The Book of Evidence (1989). The argument calls on post-colonialism, Foucaultian theory of “will to truth” and the narrative theory of Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan to emphasize similarities in the rendering of mental degeneration in Gulliver and Montgomery. The colonial-induced mental breakdown of both narrators can be said to unravel, not so much in the tale these narrators think they are relating, but instead between the lines of their stories in narratives which continually focus attention back onto themselves. Despite the 260 years separating these works, the madness of both Gulliver and Montgomery can be interpreted as a reluctance on their respective parts to shed established colonial identities once the colonial stage has receded. 

This MA thesis draws on four novels to examine techniques for representing consciousness in Irish fiction from 1922 to the present: James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls Trilogy (1960-64), and John Banville's The Infinites (2013), and The Singularities (2022). These novels creates a historical continuum, beginning with the neorealism of Ulysses, continuing with the modernism of The Country Girls Trilogy, and ending with the tricky postmodernism of The Infinities and The Singularities. To understand how these novels represent consciousness, I apply a feminist narrative methodology. In a sense, feminist narrative theory shares features with the rhetorical and anti-mimetic approaches put forward in cognitive narratology. I use Alan Palmer's \"attribution theory\" to show how narrators, characters, and readers attribute states of mind to themselves and to others, with implications for how fictional minds perform within the storyworlds of these four texts. Processes of attribution supply a productive way to classify numerous stages in the representation of the mind in narrative fiction because they permit us to fix a specific parameter or heuristic for investigation to contrast texts from distinct periods and in distinct styles. This thesis takes into account the mind treated as a theme in narrative, the nature of the fictional minds that are constructed by texts, and the content of those minds. My inquiry focuses on first-person unreliable narrators. The preoccupations of the characters in these four texts are underscored by unreliable homodiegetic or first-person narratives, which can represent mental states in and through language, although never infallibly

Ciaran Carson’s The Irish for No, published in 1986, was heralded as a verse map of his home city, Belfast, during the Troubles. Its urban setting and modern context, long lines, and patchwork form incorporating diverse sources is typically considered a drastic departure from his previous work. Some critics refer to it as his ”first\" book after a false start of typical and competent Northern Irish verse and an ensuing decade of silence. But his earlier writings reveal continuities with the breakout volume and his evolving ideas about the poet’s role, particularly during a time of conflict.The (Northern) Irish writer has often been characterized by a divided mind. This dissertation will provide a close, chronological analysis of Carson’s early works to examine his developing understanding and acceptance of an “in-between” position. The Insular Celts centers on the hermit-scribe, isolated from human contact. Subsequent works turn to domestic scenes, craftwork, and exploration through travel and memory as his speakers consider how to represent the world around them and preserve what is in danger of being lost. Early anxieties about division give way to gradual acceptance of a hybrid position. His essays and reviews reveal the writers and works that led him more directly to employ Belfast, with its landmarks and a past fundamentally tied to Carson’s identity, as a source and setting. They also show the influence of his work with traditional music. The mix of present-day experiences, personal associations, and layers of the past that a performance creates parallels the mapping of a person’s or place’s identity.While his Belfast volumes stand out for their depiction of the modern city and for a new form, considering his earlier works enables a reading that moves beyond seeing them simply as “Troubles poems.” The books are set in Belfast but are not just about it; the city serves as a context for Carson’s ongoing investigation of how identity incorporates the specific and particular, joining elements from the past and present into something new and characteristic of a moment in time and place while subject to continual change.

According to Brooks, the phallic body - the image of the woman \"fixed\" by the phallic signifier - \"can never be wholly grasped as an understandable, representable object\" because \"the epistemophilic project is always inherently frustrated\".7 As a result, \"the investigatory gaze becomes fixated on an imaginary body\" (Brooks 99), the phallic woman. According to de Man, the Romantic poets tried to counter the nostalgia for the natural object by creating poetic images that differ from the natural world in an attempt to produce a representational (poetic) reality that is independent from the (inaccessible) world of natural objects. [...]insofar as sexual difference is based on the asymmetric way in which masculinity and femininity are phallicized through the Symbolic, Banville's narratives can be regarded as an examination of how masculine-feminine intersubjectivity functions, how it is constructed, rather than a promotion of the phallic structure of male and female identities. According to Grosz, the problem lies in the fact that the biological difference between male and female genital organs \"becomes expressed in terms of the presence or absence of a single (male) term\" (Jacques Lacan 117).