SOURCE: "Science, Art, and the Shipwreck of Knowledge: The Novels of John Banville," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 38, No. 3, Fall, 1997, pp. 510-33.

In the following essay, Jackson traces one of Banville's major themes: "the situation of living everyday life in the context of postmodern understandings of knowledge and truth."

The novels of Irish writer John Banville make for uncommonly rich reading. His fictional fabrics are always finely textured, often movingly poetic, threading together various narrative styles and genres. Because he is a very literate writer (he is the literary editor of the Irish Times), his pages abound with allusions to other great literature. At times his writing is straightforwardly realistic, at times surreal, at all times extremely well crafted: repeated visits to his books only increase our awareness of the subtle and complex figures woven into the mesh of his stories. There are many interpretive considerations that could be...