Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Birchwood

3.77 of 5 stars 3.77 · rating details · 182 ratings · 19 reviews

An early classic from the Man Booker-prize winning author of The Sea.

I am therefore I think. So starts John Banville’s 1973 novel Birchwood, a novel that centers around Gabriel Godkin and his return to his dilapidated family estate. After years away, Gabriel returns to a house filled with memories and despair. Delving deep into family secrets—a cold father, a tortured moth...more

Paperback, 176 pages

Published May 8th 2007 by Vintage (first published 1973)

more details... edit details

Get a copy:

More…

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Lists with This Book

This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Add this book to your favorite list »

Community Reviews

(showing 1-30 of 422)

filter | sort: default (?) | rating details

Jan 08, 2009 Caroline rated it 5 of 5 stars

Birchwood, John Banville. Extraoridnary writer. His language and talent is wonderful. The journey of Gabriel Godkin from his boyhood home, in flight, through the circus of the area, during the potato famine, back to his childhood home and the revelations of his parentage, father, mother sister of his father, inheritance struggles with his cousin, read brother Michael, and all the deaths both of the tenants of the area and the dreams of everyone is a sad and awesome tale. I can’t say I loved it b...more

like 1 like · see review

Jun 25, 2008 James rated it 5 of 5 stars

Blending the gothic with the romantic and a vicious and sometimes callous dark comedy, this book chronicles the last days of both the Birchwood estate and the descent of Ireland into madness during the Great Famine, known better in the states as the Potato Famine. The story deals with themes of dynasty and how people tend to grow to echo each other; because of this, the book doesn't make for a readily thrilling read. However, Banville's sardonic humor is matched by an elegant prose that at times...more

like 1 like · see review

Oct 02, 2011 Eva rated it 4 of 5 stars

Birchwood by John Banville is a lovely book that gets off to a ponderous, pretentious start. First line? “I am, therefore I think.” The second paragraph starts with “The name is Godkin, Gabriel.” The book came out in 1973 when Banville was under twenty so I’ll forgive him such pretensions, but the first few chapters are overwrought reminiscences that foreshadow all the events of the story set in Ireland. The people he describes as mad are not very mad by literary standards, but the story builds...more

like · see review

Dec 08, 2012 James Wharton rated it 5 of 5 stars

Birchwood is Banville at his best. It is a book about a man who comes home after being away for many years. The estate is run down and the place is filled with eccentric souls in strange situations. His grandmother is insane, his mother unhappy, and his father always treated him badly. The story is interesting, humorous, and once again, told in Banville's inimitable eloquent style. The description of the house and characters is incredible. The plot is well thought out and credible. In a way, Bir...more

like · see review

Feb 14, 2013 J. rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: irish

Banville called Birchwood his ‘Irish novel’. Set in the time of the famine Gabriel Godkin is the young heir to the Godkin family estate. The house is falling to pieces around him reflecting the unraveling lives of his family. Gabriel runs away to join a traveling circus and look for his lost twin sister. Like most of Banville’s characters the protagonist is on a quest for meaning. This novella is very dark and gothic. I enjoyed the character of Granny Godkin. Banville is Ireland's greatest livin...more

like · see review

Dec 02, 2012 A. Mary Murphy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: irish-novels

This novel has an unusual voice telling a dream-like story anchored in the historical realities of the 1840's. The prose is very dense, the narrative especially visual, matching the surrealism of its details. Gabriel Godkin, the young protagonist, is surrounded by his family, living in their estate house, which sounds very ordinary and predictable, but this bunch of characters has a jumbled collection of secrets and weaknesses and traits that makes them as much a circus as those who circle Irela...more

like · see review

Feb 08, 2012 Christin rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. "Violets and cowshit, my life has ever been thus."

I just finished John Banville’s Birchwood , which tells the family saga of the title’s Big House and the inter-marriages/feuding between the Lawlesses and the Godkins. Our protagonist, Gabriel Godkin, has returned to the crumbling family manse and seems fixated on the past which he claims to remember with crystalline clarity and which has more resonance for him than the nebulous, unmentioned present. His memories of his grandmother depict her as...more "Violets and cowshit, my life has ever been thus."

I just finished John Banville’s Birchwood , which tells the family saga of the title’s Big House and the inter-marriages/feuding between the Lawlesses and the Godkins. Our protagonist, Gabriel Godkin, has returned to the crumbling family manse and seems fixated on the past which he claims to remember with crystalline clarity and which has more resonance for him than the nebulous, unmentioned present. His memories of his grandmother depict her as a(n albeit fertile) version of Miss Havisham or Mrs. Bates, endeavoring to emotionally manipulate her children and control the household. His father is the distant young heir, and his mother, who goes mad, appears in fleeting images, as if she were no more substantial than “vapour.”

He witnesses his parents having sex in the wood, and the dark and mysterious landscape metonymically represents their act. His frail mother is subsequently embodied by damaged blue butterflies and bruised primroses. Young Gabriel even fantasizes about destroying the butterflies, even though he does not. These images foreshadow his problematic relationships with women and his fantasy of a sweet twin sister (instead of a wicked twin brother). Femininity is an appealing mystery but also fundamentally a deformity, a weakness, as he describes the first vagina he ever saw of young love, Rosie, as a “wound”—the same way he later describes the genitals of a local farm girl he encounters, Mag. He only remembers Rosie bodily and insists, showing his misogyny and egocentrism: “Try as I will, I cannot see her face. Her other parts, or some of them, I vividly recall, naturally….Our affair then was founded on mutual astonishment at the intricacy of things, my brain, her cunt, things like that."

When Gabriel flees his family and joins the circus, women are the repositories of the trauma and grief the nation experiences as a result of the Potato Blight, specifically the aptly named Sibyl, one of the circus performers. Another female performer, Ida, one of the novel’s many sets of twins, is raped and beaten to death by British soldiers. The baby daughter of a circus couple disappears after the caravan is besieged by peelers who want to drive the circus out of town. Gabriel narrowly escapes after the clown saves him and is fatally wounded, only to wander starving and astray through the countryside like Lear or Sweeney. When he reunites with the circus, the fat lady Angel, who has cooked for all the performers, dies too in the skirmishes with the Lawlesses, Cotter the squatter, who has previously maimed and eventually killed the family patriarch, Granda Godkin, by beating him in the head with a pheasant; and the Molly Maguires over the Birchwood estate.
His mother, too, most of all, is presented as the walking wounded, always fragile, at the mercy of the whims and entirely subject to the approval or rages of her tempestuous spouse and irate mother-in-law, undone by the deterioration of the house, the selling of the estate, the family’s penury in the face of the Fenian rebellions, and as we discover at the novel’s end her shameful secret that she claimed Gabriel as her own child, despite the fact that he was the product of her husband’s incestuous relationship with his sister, a secret that drives her to send that sister-in-law Martha to her death in a burning building in search of her Gabriel’s cousin/evil twin, Michael, and that causes Granny Godkin to spontaneously combust.

The revelation that Michael is Gabriel’s twin and not his cousin is anticipated by Gabriel’s unreliability as a narrator. As he narrates, he frequently claims paradoxically to remember the past perfectly but not to have understood various fraught family encounters at the time they occurred, to have been in denial regarding his relation to Michael, to have invented the quest for a missing female twin to avoid the horror of the truth. The past is both pristine yet “incommunicable.” Even at the novel’s conclusion, when Gabriel is alone in the shell of Birchwood House, he disavows the entire story, “It may not be like that, any of it. I invent, necessarily….Intimations abound, but they are felt only, and words fail to transfix them.” Gabriel argues for the failure of language in the face of a history of both personal and national horror. There are no words for the utter abjection of the Hunger, or for his own individual hunger for love and acceptance that is never sufficiently sated.

Linda Hutcheon claims in The Poetics of Postmodernism , in true Derridean fashion, that there is never a single capital-T Truth, but multiple truths, based on the individual perceptions and needs of a narrator—verisimilitude and multifocal perspectives, rather than so-called “authenticity.” Gabriel, named after God’s own storyteller, the Archangel of the Annunciation, narrates, but the truth, like his memories of his mother, is the stuff of “vapour.” Unlike his seraphimic namesake, his words are not a performative utterance—they are not the Word—they do not become flesh; even though they do so for the reader, for Gabriel, they are fundamentally unable reconstitute the numerous material bodies of friends and family who have fallen in the wake of his lifetime. They cannot bear the weight of his monumental losses nor manage to contain the atrocities he has witnessed and endured.

I think the novel provides an interesting counterpoint to other pomo novels that rely on unreliable narrators: The Blind Assassin, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Moor's Last Sigh, Atonement, and even my most recent read, The Gathering .(less)

like · see review

Oct 10, 2009 Andrew rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book has very clear echoes of Proust, both in the writing style and in the sense of nostalgia that pervades the story of aristocratic decline. The references are clear and deliberate - in the very first chapter, Banville's narrator refers to his fragments of memory as "madeleines" and talks of his "search for time misplaced."

None of this boded very well for the novel - I had Proust on my night-table for ages, but every time I read it I fell asleep so quickly that I seemed to go backwards as...more

like · see review

Oct 22, 2010 Tortla rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: schooly, historical-fiction, wishlist, must-own, religiony, writing-on-writing

It took me a long time to get past the first few pages, and I skimmed bits near the end. So I feel like I haven't completely read it, really. But I really enjoyed what I got. There's a focus on the dreamy unreality of memory and time which appeals to me. And the remembering-a-ruined-estate which to me evokes Rebecca. And it was kind of feminist-y, what with the narrator's preoccupation with vaginas and sympathy for women and love toward female figures when the males were all kind of violent and...more

like · see review

Jul 14, 2010 Issy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: resentreads

I think Banville is a frustrated poet. The writing is often beautiful but sometimes I was like "how did that guy get down in the yard when last sentence he was in the attic being threatened with a knife."

like · see review

Jan 13, 2010 Lauren Albert rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

This made me think of Southern Gothic fiction. The characters were Faulknerian. But I found the narrator unlikeable both as an adult and as a child and that made it hard to like the book.

like · see review

May 16, 2010 Joe La rated it 4 of 5 stars

Excellent book very well written. About house in Ireland during
Potato famine. Echoes of William Faulkner.

like · see review

May 15, 2013 Sarah McAllister rated it 4 of 5 stars

Anything Joyce-inspired or Irish always appeals to me.

like · see review

Jul 06, 2012 Tracey rated it 5 of 5 stars

Before reading anything by Edna O'Brien or John Banville, I kept hearing about them as huge contributors to Irish writing. Last year, I read O'Brien's 'House of Splendid Isolation' and loved it - for its, well, hard-to-explain Irishness. Banville's 'Birchwood' also has elements of that same writing, but includes Gothic characters and Irish history - it is so gorgeously written, I spent time re-reading sentences and paragraphs to glean as much as I possibly could out of them. I can't wait to read...more

like · see review

Aug 19, 2011 Frank rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: irish-authors

Tomorrow I'm going to write a joint review of Birchwood and Eclipse, which I'll post to both.

like · see review

Jul 23, 2007 Eric rated it 4 of 5 stars

at the risk of being reductive, the irish not only possess the gift of gab and hospitality, but also the ability to place poetic language against big ideas, great pain and unbridled passion. banville's a beaut. his powerful short novel not only thinks deeply about time, loss, family and various associated unmentionables, but even incorporates the potato famine without melodrama.

like · see review

Nov 16, 2011 Serjeant Wildgoose rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Written in his succulent prose, this is one of Banville's earliest works (1973) and my favourite of 3 read to date. It is a harsh, bleak tale of land and inheritance set against the horrors of Ireland before and during the Great Hunger.

Drenched in madness, violence and carnality it is a thoroughly rewarding read.

like · see review

Nov 08, 2012 Sophy rated it 4 of 5 stars

A beautifully executed piece of postmodernist writing. Multifaceted, ironic and hilarious at times.

like · see review

Jul 17, 2011 Eamonn Barrett rated it 3 of 5 stars

An early Banville which explores questions like the Big House, the land question, memory, twinship and play in typically poetic and wonderful prose.

like · see review

May 19, 2013 AennA marked it as owned-and-to-read

May 18, 2013 P marked it as to-read

May 12, 2013 Doru Constantin rated it 4 of 5 stars

May 11, 2013 Noel Howley added it

May 10, 2013 Courtney marked it as elibrary

May 07, 2013 Scott marked it as to-read

Shelves: to-borrow, psu-libraries, banville

May 07, 2013 Nuruzzahra marked it as to-read

May 04, 2013 Gary is currently reading it · review of another edition

May 03, 2013 Jemimah added it

Apr 29, 2013 Kim Reinhard added it

Apr 28, 2013 Janet rated it 4 of 5 stars

« previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 … 14 15 next »

new topic
Discuss This Book

There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Be the first to start one »

Recommend it | Stats | Recent status updates

combine
Other Editions (8)

More editions...

Genres

Literary Fiction

5 users

Classics

5 users

Cultural > Ireland

5 users

European Literature > Irish Literature

4 users

Literature

3 users

Contemporary

3 users

Novels

2 users

See top shelves...

Readers also enjoyed similar books

About John Banville

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...more 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.

Educated at a Christian Brothers' school and at St Peter's College in Wexford. Despite having intended to be a painter and an architect he did not attend university. Banville has described this as "A great mistake. I should have gone. I regret not taking that four years of getting drunk and falling in love. But I wanted to get away from my family. I wanted to be free." After school he worked as a clerk at Aer Lingus which allowed him to travel at deeply-discounted rates. He took advantage of this to travel in Greece and Italy. He lived in the United States during 1968 and 1969. On his return to Ireland he became a sub-editor at the Irish Press, rising eventually to the position of chief sub-editor. His first book, Long Lankin, was published in 1970.

After the Irish Press collapsed in 1995, he became a sub-editor at the Irish Times. He was appointed literary editor in 1998. The Irish Times, too, suffered severe financial problems, and Banville was offered the choice of taking a redundancy package or working as a features department sub-editor. He left. Banville has been a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1990. In 1984, he was elected to Aosdána, but resigned in 2001, so that some other artist might be allowed to receive the cnuas.

Banville also writes under the pen name Benjamin Black. His first novel under this pen name was Christine Falls, which was followed by The Silver Swan in 2007. Banville has two adult sons with his wife, the American textile artist Janet Dunham. They met during his visit to San Francisco in 1968 where she was a student at the University of California, Berkeley. Dunham described him during the writing process as being like "a murderer who's just come back from a particularly bloody killing". Banville has two daughters from his relationship with Patricia Quinn, former head of the Arts Council of Ireland.

Banville has a strong interest in vivisection and animal rights, and is often featured in Irish media speaking out against vivisection in Irish university research.(less)

More about John Banville...

Books by John Banville

More…

Share This Book

Facebook Twitter Your website

Trivia About Birchwood

No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »

title link	preview: Birchwood
avg rating	preview: Birchwood Goodreads rating: 3.77 (182 ratings)
small image	preview: click here [close]
med image	preview: click here [close]
BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/556863.Birchwood?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320492510l/556863.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/556863.Birchwood?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Birchwood by John Banville[/url]

Birchwood

Friend Reviews

Community Reviews

Share This Book

Share This Book on Your Website