LONG LANKIN

Name: LONG LANKIN
Author: John Banville
ISBN: 978-0-345-80706-9

by John Banville ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 2, 2013

Formative work by an author who would later revisit what’s best in these stories through longer and more ambitious fiction.

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First American publication of a collection of very early, very short stories by the Irish master of the literary novel.

Since a slightly different version of this volume was issued in Britain in 1970, Banville has earned much greater renown as a prize-winning novelist (The Sea, 2005, etc.) and has subsequently won a popular readership through a series of detective novels as Benjamin Black (Christine Falls, 2007, etc.). The seeds of both branches of his fiction can be found in these elliptical, elemental stories. Though there are only hints of the more lyrical prose that would subsequently dazzle admirers (while seeming overwritten to detractors), the sea and the solitude it affords were plainly a preoccupation early on. And there’s some mystery at the heart of practically every one of these stories—an unexplained relationship or situation, an inscrutable murder (in more than one story), a dilemma not completely understood yet requiring escape. The Banville of his early 20s could write dialogue like this from “Lovers”: “We’ll be free. We’re young and the world is wide. We’ll be free.” Yet he already knows that such freedom is an illusion, an empty promise. And more often, his characters find themselves lamenting the passing of old ways, such as the stranger who seems oddly familiar to a son mourning his father in “A Death”: “There is a new brand of despair in the world. The old ways are dying, and the old religion too. When people turn their backs on God what can they expect?” Other stories have similarly elemental titles—“Sanctuary,” “Summer Voices,” “Island”—and similar obsessions with transition and loss. “Look it at,” says the drunken host at a party of friends he doesn’t like. “The new Ireland. Sitting around at the end of a party wondering why we’re not happy. Trying to find what it is we’ve lost.”

Formative work by an author who would later revisit what’s best in these stories through longer and more ambitious fiction.

Pub Date: July 2, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-345-80706-9

Page Count: 112

Publisher: Vintage

Review Posted Online: April 28, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

- BOOK REVIEW
THE DROWNED
by John Banville

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LOCK-UP
by John Banville

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SINGULARITIES
by John Banville

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CONCLAVE

by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

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Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.

Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.

Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

- BOOK REVIEW
PRECIPICE
by Robert Harris

- BOOK REVIEW
ACT OF OBLIVION
by Robert Harris

- BOOK REVIEW
V2
by Robert Harris

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.