Set against the backdrop of a harsh Irish winter, a reclusive researcher named Fox embarks on a journey to confront his past after learning that his mentor and former love rival, Stoyte, is critically ill. The call from his ex-girlfriend Clara compels him to face unresolved emotions and memories as he navigates the treacherous weather to hear Stoyte's final words. This poignant tale explores themes of love, rivalry, and the complexities of human relationships.
Lyrical and blackly comic, A Provincial Death is a startlingly original meditation on solitude and perseverance, the consolations of art and philosophy, and the capacity of human beings to endure catastrophe. It is a hot, summer morning and Smyth, a struggling writer and academic, wakes to discover he is stranded alone on a rock in the Irish Sea. As he clings on in hope of salvation, he is assailed by broken memories and the failures of his past. Fragmented images of the previous day come to him: a mysterious research institute, a dead forest, a rickety boat captained by a gruff old fisherman, an eccentric academic named McGovern who believed that the Moon was about to crash into the Earth, destroying everything. Confused, weary and sore, and with the tide rising inexorably and strange sea creatures circling, Smyth tries to make sense of an arbitrary world in a desperate bid for survival.
'Reading The Failing Heart is like taking a trip; part escape into another consciousness, part suffocating delusion. The story – or rather the scaffolding upon which Smith displays elegant philosophical architecture – follows a young scholar whose mother has just died. Estranged from his father after stealing his money, hounded by the ominous figure of his landlord, and oppressed with images of his ex-lover's impending labour, he wanders into an existential purgatory.“All these open mouths, living or dead, they never shut up.” Death is everywhere, through the needs and revulsions of the body, its smells, secretions, drives. The narrative circles in on itself in an ever-decreasing gyre, examining ancient and modern ideas about existence, subjecting philosophical scholarship itself to a sardonic inquiry using its own tools of scrutiny.The writing is self-aware and wry, with rare flashes of humour amid a claustrophobic search for meaning and desire to confess. Time expands and contracts; it is unclear what is real, what is at the end of this brief novel there is the sensation of having witnessed the dark dream of a stranger.'The Irish Times
This study explores the fiction of John Banville within a variety of cultural, political, ethical and philosophical contexts. Providing individual and thematic readings of his novels, it examines the complexity of his view of the artwork and explores his engagement with the concept of authenticity.
