John Banville’s Fictions of Art

This chapter discusses the fiction of John Banville, presenting the case that his complex meditations on the significance of art are central to a proper understanding of his aesthetic formation and development. In order to show how Banville’s work has consistently sought to explore the relationship between the mysteries of art and the enigmas of human experience, the chapter examines a wide range of his fiction, from his metafictional novels of the early 1970s, through the science tetralogy of novels published between 1976 and 1986, to his Frames trilogy of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The chapter concludes with a discussion of his post-2000 fiction, including The Sea (2005) and the series of crime novels Banville has published under the pseudonym Benjamin Black.