Birchwood – Prosaic Black Comedy by John Banville

Sometimes it feels as if John Banville doesn’t write, but rather works as a craftsman, setting and modifying the words, one by one, tweaking and altering ,word by word, until the sentence perfect. And then, sentence by sentence, tweaking and altering until the paragraph is in place, reading just right. And in the process, always paring, ridding the page of unnecessary words, as much as possible taking out words that are unnecessary, as if there is a price to be paid in pounds of gold for extra words. And always preferring words that are dense and cast long shadows, contributing to the substance of the text.

Written in 1973, John Banville’s novel Birchwood is a short (less than 200 pages), dense and exceedingly beautiful. Artfully and compactly written, it is a novel that centers on Gabriel Godkin and his return to the dilapidated family estate, recounting the story of the fall and rise of Birchwood. If Gabriel is a special, somewhat strange and intriguing character – and believe me, he is – then his family is “special” in a sense that reaches the extreme and almost utmost meaning of that word.

After many years away, Gabriel – the heir to Birchwood – returns to a house filled with unsettling memories and despair. The family secrets are deep and dark —a cold father, a tortured mother, an insane grandmother. A family whose members – including Gabriel – are all wobbling on the edges of an insanity. In this black and oh so Irish comedy we reach deep into an existence of a family and its desperation and isolation, and we witness love and loss as well as the end of innocence. A complex story told in a brilliant prose seemingly crafted just for a story like this, providing just the right amount illumination and shadow to make us not really see, but at least glimpse the real somewhere there, deep in the dreamy beauty of the narrative.

It is a book best read slowly. Birchwood is a book written almost as a stream of consciousness, but whose reading should not be rushed, but rather savored. It is a book with sentences that sometimes require some pondering. John Banville’s writing is so beautiful and so compact that his books simply can’t always be read as other books, and this is certainly true of Birchwood as well.

“This is one of the most startling of the century’s varied achievements in Irish writing.”
—Seamus Deane

“John Banville is one of the greatest masters of the English language.”
—The Scotsman

“Birchwood represents a watershed in contemporary Irish writing..”
—Colm Toibin

Links to books by John Banville at Amazon US and Amazon UK.

Tagged as: Black Comedy, Book review, Early novel, John Banville