The title of Banville's first novel, Nightspawn (1971), involves a pun: "night spawn," "night's pawn," and "knight's pawn," heralding the ludic nature of the whole book. Nightspawn plays with literary conventions in order to show their exhaustive nature. It is an inside-out novel, one of the very few metanovels to have come out of Ireland. Ben White tells of a coup d'etat in Greece and his embroilment therein. White is a writer and he succeeds in working his account into a gripping thriller. But Nightspawn is anything but a straitlaced thriller; it is a parody of the narrative genre. Most scenes end in farce. Behind all the parodying, the playful turning upside-down of conventions and self-reflexive commenting, there lies a most serious intention: the age-old desire of the artist to express the things in their essence, to transfix beauty and truth. Like Beckett's narrators, White permanently urges himself on 'to express it all.' But he fails, is bound to fail, because every artist must necessarily fail in this respect, beauty and truth defying efforts.
'They took everything from me. Everything.' So says the central character of Nightspawn, John Banville's elusive, first novel, in which the author rehearses now familiar attributes: his humour, ironies, and brilliant knowing. In the arid setting of the Aegean, Ben White indulges in an obsessive quest: to assemble his 'story' and to untangle his relationships with a cast of improbable figures. Banville's subversive, Beckettian fiction embraces themes of freedom and betrayal, and toys with an implausible plot, the stuff of an ordinary 'thriller' shadowed by political intrigue. In this elaborate artifact, Banville's characters 'sometimes lose the meaning of things, and everything is just . . . funny.' There begins their search for 'the magic to combat any force'.
John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of thirteen previous novels including The Book of Evidence, which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize. He has received a literary award from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Dublin.
