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

John Banville’s latest novel imagines the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret secretly travelling to Ireland during the Second World War. Picture: Bryan Meade

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, ...