On John Banville's Split Personality

The work of the Irish novelist John Banville has long combined high aestheticism, fascination with vagaries of subjectivity, and a strong streak of pulp. “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”—such has been the implicit motto of his work since 2020, when he first published an outright detective novel under his own name. At earlier times, however, he seems to have been less certain how, or whether, to reconcile his varied tonal and generic interests—going so far, at times, to publish, simultaneously, under his own name and an alias, one literary and one pulp novel (Vengeance, by “Benjamin Black”). The essay below considers that episode as a window onto broader questions about Banville’s work.