=books recently read: Long Lankin by John Banville=

Published 44 years ago, this collection of short stories, though quite good, hardly forecasts just how good a writer John Banville would eventually become. These nine  stories, none much longer than ten pages, are terse, lean, and sparely written, but studded with beautifully realized, crystalline images and graced with razor-sharp, pitch-perfect dialogue. Long Lankin is minimalism that satisfies. 

There is a haunting eeriness to these fictions. They  read like ghost stories though not a ghost appears in a single one of them. The supernatural atmosphere is the result of a heightened sense of psychological tension that Banville creates inside and between his characters. Dialogue is preeminent; the stories often read like theater scripts except that they are fleshed out with brief paragraphs with sensual descriptive narrative—think the plays of Harold Pinter. The same sense of claustrophobic foreboding pervades the fictional air. At some point, a mysterious figure in black often appears on some tangential errand or bearing an enigmatic message; this odd character is the physical manifestation of the premonitory mood of disaster that often threatens, looms, but hasn't yet broken over the lives of Banville's characters. There are several dead, dying, or mad fathers. In a couple of stories there's been a murder off-stage and a killer reportedly on the loose. If life is changeable, tenuous, prone to tragedy at any moment, relationships are even more so. In many stories a female character forecasts that her lover will leave her. The male character denies it, assures her he's thinking nothing of the sort, "Do you believe me?" he asks, "Yes," she says, and then five or six pages later he admits that she was right all along.

Banville, the novelist, will later write an even darker fiction, but it will be leavened by a Beckettian gallows humor that is not yet in evidence in these early stories. But to compare the work of a twenty-five-year-old writing at the beginning of his career to a sixty-eight-year-old master of his craft is hardly fair. These stories are well-worth reading for what they are.