The Secret Guests: Banville’s royal ramblings are a rich delight
Fiction: Writing as BW Black, the Irish novelist throws another literary curveball with a counterfactual historical romance
The Secret Guests
By BW Black
Penguin Books, €12
Reviewed by Kevin Power
John Banville’s late career has been distinguished largely by its capacity to wrongfoot everyone, including seasoned Banville observers.
The first surprise came in 2006, when Banville (the stringent modernist, the painstaking prose stylist) produced his debut Benjamin Black thriller, Christine Falls. Nine more Black novels have since appeared, each a superbly wrought exercise in popular storytelling.
It's as if Henry James had turned, around about 1910 or so, ...