Work
Banville's first book, Long Lankin, was published in 1970. He has written three trilogies; The first, The Revolutions Trilogy, focused on great men of science and consisted of Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, and The Newton Letter. The second unnamed trilogy consisted of The Book of Evidence, Ghosts, and Athena, and focused on the power of works of art. The third trilogy is composed of Eclipse, Shroud and Ancient Light, all of which concern the characters Alexander and Cass Cleave. Banville also writes crime fiction under the pen name Benjamin Black, beginning with Christine Falls (2006).
He has been a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1990.
After The Irish Press collapsed in 1995, he became a sub-editor at The Irish Times. He was appointed literary editor in 1998. The Irish Times, too, suffered severe financial problems, and Banville was offered the choice of taking a redundancy package or working as a features department sub-editor. He left.
Banville is highly scathing of all of his work, stating of his books "I hate them all ... I loathe them. They're all a standing embarrassment." Instead of dwelling on the past he is continually looking forward; "You have to crank yourself up every morning and think about all the awful stuff you did yesterday, and how you can compensate for that by doing better today." He writes his Benjamin Black crime fiction much more quickly than he composes his literary novels, and he appreciates his work as Black as a craft, while as Banville he is an artist. He considers crime writing, in his own words, as being "cheap fiction".
| “ | Sometimes, in the middle of the afternoon if I'm feeling a little bit sleepy, Black will sort of lean in over Banville's shoulder and start writing. Or Banville will lean over Black’s shoulder and say "Oh that's an interesting sentence, let's play with that." I can see sometimes, revising the work, the points at which one crept in or the two sides seeped into each other. | ” |
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