SOURCE: "'Be Assured I Am Inventing': The Fiction of John Banville," in Cahiers-Irlandais, Vols. 4-5, 1976, pp. 329-39.

In the following essay, Deane, a well-known poet, discusses Banville's awareness that the world he creates in his books is fictive.

John Banville has so far produced three books: Long Lankin, Nightspawn, and the prizewinning Birchwood. In each one of them he shows himself to be very conscious of the fact that he is writing fiction, and this lends to his work both a literary and an introverted humour which relieves him from the accusations of monotony, plagiarism and preciousness which could otherwise be justifiably levelled against him. He is a litterateur who has a horror of producing 'literature'. This horror is equalled only by his amusement at the notion that literature might (by accident or innate capacity) reproduce life. He rejects mimetic realism by practising it in the avowed consciousness...