Long Lankin

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The Book of Evidence (1989), which won the Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction, Ghosts (1993) and Athena (1995) form a loose trilogy of novels narrated by Freddie Montgomery, a convicted murderer. The central character of Banville's 1997 novel, The Untouchable, Victor Maskell, is based on the art historian and spy Anthony Blunt. Eclipse (2000), is narrated by Alexander Cleave, an actor who has withdrawn to the house where he spent his childhood. Shroud (2002), continues the tale begun in Eclipse and Prague Pictures: Portrait of a City (2003), is a personal evocation of the magical European city. The Sea (2005) won the 2005 Man Booker Prize. In The Sea an elderly art historian loses his wife to cancer and feels compelled to revisit the seaside villa where he spent childhood holidays. His latest novel is The Infinities (2009). He received the Franz Kafka Award in 2011. This is a story to get lost in: the gloomy, rain-soaked atmosphere recalls Wilkie Collins’ THE WOMAN IN WHITE… Those who appreciate old-fashioned chillers will be rewarded by incident after unsettling incident: witchcraft, exorcisms, fire, plagues, and a blood-drinking murderer who walks on all fours. Banville gained international recognition with his next four books, usually described as his 'scientific tetralogy', and linked by their common interest in the status of mathematical or astronomical structures as alternative 'languages' of perception. In Dr Copernicus (1976) and Kepler (1981), the scientific protagonists serve to illustrate the shortcomings of any 'fictional' versions of the universe, which ultimately fail to capture its elusive substance. The resultant self doubt which burdens both Copernicus and Kepler recurs in The Newton Letter (1982), in which Newton's biographer, living in isolation in County Wexford, Ireland, attempts to write about Newton's crisis of belief while suffering, simultaneously, his own neurotic failure of nerve. The implied parallel between scientist and writer, where each pursues his own inadequate system of interpretation, is foregrounded in what has been read as Banville's most autobiographical work. Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland. His father worked in a garage and died when Banville was in his early thirties; his mother was a housewife. He is the youngest of three siblings; his older brother Vincent is also a novelist and has written under the name Vincent Lawrence as well as his own. His sister Vonnie Banville-Evans has written both a children's novel and a reminiscence of growing up in Wexford. One of the hallmarks of Banville's writing is inter-textual repetition, where motifs or allusions recur from novel to novel. Mefisto (1986), the fourth book of his scientific tetralogy, is a Faustian tale of a mathematical prodigy, Gabriel Swan, whose carnivalesque adventures in a fun fair (together with his Proustian associations), artfully recall the earlier Birchwood. In the enigmatic trilogy of novels which succeeds the tetralogy, this pattern of recurrence is conspicuous, and a central character, Freddie Montgomery, is traced across three dramatically different contexts. Here the figure of the scientist gives way to the painter, as visual art becomes the primary channel for the author's meditation on perception and representation. And where the tetralogy threw the role of human imagination into crisis, the trilogy, to some extent, offers a reinvestment in the necessary creative fictions of human invention. Collectively, therefore, these novels mitigate some of Banville's earlier scepticism, despite their flirtation with the archetypal postmodernist jeux of gapped and inconsistent narration, non-sequential chronology, and the blurring of 'truth' and fantasy.

Very early stuff, a sort of proto-Banville; from the archaic period, before the voice had fully formed. The most interesting story was called "Nightwind" in which a recurring character type evident in many of the subsequent novels appears: the "kept man". Not a gigolo, but rather a man who has "married well" and is at some respects—and perhaps only in his own mind—beholden to his wife's money. Or more accurately, her father's money. That money allows him to pursue a more esoteric career path, one perhaps less remunerative, in the arts. Like art history or writing.

This debut horror story set in Britain during the late 1940s starts slowly but weaves a chilling spell that will immerse readers in this world and hold them through to the breathless conclusion. . . .A spine-tingling selection.

Barraclough evokes setting and atmosphere with earthy richness, detailing smells, sounds, blossoms, family life, and decaying architecture with the same attention she gives her portrait of postwar British village culture. . .the book gives readers shivers enough as Long Lankin, pungent and fetid, emerges to test the heroism of the three protagonists. Regarded as the most stylistically elaborate Irish writer of his generation, John Banville is a philosophical novelist concerned with the nature of perception, the conflict between imagination and reality, and the existential isolation of the individual. Genuinely suspenseful and eerie, "Long Lankin" is a stunning debut by an author with a wonderful feel for things that go bump in the night, and the courage it takes to shine a light on them. This atmospheric, pulse-pounding debut makes the most of its rural, post–World War II setting, a time and place where folklore uneasily informs reality. Barraclough controls her narrative with authority, shifting voices and tenses to provide both perspective and the occasional welcome respite from tension. . .A good, old-fashioned literary horror tale for sophisticated readers.

Until she reaches Bryers Guerdon and meets the man they call Long Lankin – the leper. Ostracized and tormented, he is the only person willing to help her.

The novel maintains a spooky atmosphere and some of the details could creep out the most adult of us.When a violent fire destroys their home, Aphra is left to fend for herself. Years of begging and stealing make her strong, but they also make her bitter, for she is shunned and feared by everyone she meets.