A review by deegee24
Birchwood by John Banville

4.0

I have wanted to read this book for a long time and finally got around to it. It is an early, short novel by Banville and the first of his that I've read. It is a historical novel but it is more in the style of a modern folk tale. There are allusions to real Irish history, such as the Molly Maguires and the Great Famine. But events are experienced on a ground level, through the limited perspective of the first-person narrator, who is an adolescent. Raised on a dilapidated country estate, where his family is torn apart by insanity and sudden acts of violence, Gabriel Godkin runs away from home and joins the circus, on a quest to find someone who he imagines to be his long-lost twin sister (whether or not she truly exists is the mystery at the heart of the book). The book's treatment of history owes a lot to J.G. Farrell's Troubles, which was published a few years earlier. Both books are set in old, ruined manor houses, with historical events swirling around them and eventually spilling over. Based on what I've read about Banville, I think this is probably not a fully mature work. It has its flaws. There's not enough character development and the narrator is a bit of a blank. The book should have been 50 to 100 pages longer, to give the characters more time to interact and reveal themselves. But he has a beautiful prose style and there are many startling moments of black humor.