John Banville Is An Artful Tour Guide In His Dublin Memoir, 'Time Pieces'

Ed Siegel

March 2, 2018

The curiosity that we have about the lives of artists knows few bounds. That curiosity seems an integral, if not particularly admirable, part of the cultural and political times. John Banville’s “Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir” is a sly wink to our need to know more about the artist than the art, or at least to apply the real-world events of the writer’s life to the worlds that the writer creates.

John Banville On Marlowe, Quirke — And George Clooney

John Banville
by David Levine

John Banville On Marlowe, Quirke — And George Clooney

Ed Siegel

April 3, 2014

The contrasts in John Banville’s writing are ever intriguing. His novels often have an air of the supernatural in them but are thoroughly grounded in reality. The Quirke crime novels written under the name Benjamin Black resolve who done it, but there’s a lingering question of how much others, beyond the reach of Irish law in the 1950s, have gotten away with.

He wasn’t the most likely crime writer, then, to be selected to write the latest Philip Marlowe novel. The late Robert Parker, who finished a previous Marlowe book, “Poodle Springs,” was closer to Raymond Chandler’s sensibilities than Black, though the book by many accounts was not a success. (I gave up on it.) Black’s contribution, “The Black-Eyed Blonde,” by most accounts, is.