Long Lankin

by John Banville

A collection of short stories from the early years of Man Booker Prize-winning author John Banville’s career, Long Lankin explores the passionate emotions—fear, jealousy, desire—that course beneath the surface of everyday life. From a couple at risk of being torn apart by the allure of wealth to an old man’s descent into nature, the tales in this collection showcase the talents that launched Banville onto the literary scene. Offering a unique insight into the mind of “one of the great living masters of English-language prose” ( Los Angeles Times ), these nine haunting sketches stand alone as canny observations on the turbulence of the human condition.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Irish Literature, Ireland, 20th Century

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

William John Banville is an Irish novelist, short story writer, adapter of dramas and screenwriter. Though he has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov", Banville himself maintains that W.B. Yeats and Henry James are the two real influences on his work.
Banville has won the 1976 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the 2003 International Nonino Prize, the 2005 Booker Prize, the 2011 Franz Kafka Prize, the 2013 Austrian State Prize for European Literature and the 2014 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007. Italy made him a Cavaliere of the Ordine della Stella d'Italia (essentially a knighthood) in 2017. He is a former member of Aosdána, having voluntarily relinquished the financial stipend in 2001 to another, more impoverished, writer.
Banville was born and grew up in Wexford town in south-east Ireland. He published his first novel, Nightspawn, in 1971. A second, Birchwood, followed two years later. "The Revolutions Trilogy", published between 1976 and 1982, comprises three works, each named in reference to a renowned scientist: Doctor Copernicus, Kepler and The Newton Letter. His next work, Mefisto, had a mathematical theme. His 1989 novel The Book of Evidence, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of that year's Guinness Peat Aviation award, heralded a second trilogy, three works which deal in common with the work of art. "The Frames Trilogy" is completed by Ghosts and Athena, both published during the 1990s. Banville's thirteenth novel, The Sea, won the Booker Prize in 2005. In addition, he publishes crime novels as Benjamin Black — most of these feature the character of Quirke, an Irish pathologist based in Dublin.
Banville is considered a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He lives in Dublin.

Reviews

[Julie]

7.5/10

[Maxwell]

I'm abandoning this at 53%. These short stories aren't *bad* per se, but they aren't really that great either. From what I know of John Banville, this was his first published work and it shows (1970), so I can only assume & hope he has gotten a lot better since then. These seem a bit underdeveloped and unpolished. The dialogue is quite bad, but the mood/feeling each piece created was strong. Overall, not worth finishing. I got the gist from the first half of the book and didn't see a need to continue.

[Chaitra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very early Banville. It's identifiable as written by the man who would go on to win the Booker, the language being impeccable. The themes are present - alienation, jealousy, loss of love between a couple, senseless rage. The stories themselves however, don't do much to catch one's interest. While they are wonderfully written, I did feel that some of them ended abruptly. There are a few allusions about would be interesting topics, but nothing comes out of it. My favorites of the nine stories were Wild Woods and Lovers, the two most complete (narratively) stories. I also liked De Rerum Natura, a history repeating itself story with an old man who has returned to nature and his son.

Interesting also that a couple of stories were dropped from the earliest edition. I would have liked to read them, if only to satisfy my curiosity. 3 stars for the prose.

I received a copy of this book via NetGalley for review.

[Carla · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting collection of short stories written prior to his Man Booker Prize novel. Was a quick read, with very interesting characters that I felt weren't fully developed, but if they were, would be very interesting! Mr. Banville's prose is intriguing and engaging, but the stories are almost "unfinished". Abrupt endings to each story has the reader putting down the book to reflect on the story, it's meaning, or hidden meaning. To me, this book would be best enjoyed reading a story, writing down one's thoughts, then sitting down with a friend who too had just read the stories and discussing. Without such discussion, some were just plain "odd".

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read John Banville writing as Benjamin Black, but this is my first work of fiction under his own name. It's an elegant and incisive collection of short stories that explore disaffected families, disintegrating relationships, and characters yearning for change but fearful and unable to take the next step. It's safe to say that, although the individual stories are not "linked" in any way, there is an emotional undercurrent of melancholy and loss that runs through them. Previously published in a slightly different version, very early in his career.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

She watched him go away down the road. He did not look back, and soon he was gone around a bend. She turned and walked slowly up the hill. The sun had fallen behind the mountains, and the clouds, like bruised blood, were massing.
— ‘The Visit’.

As a former folkie I’ve long been aware of a widespread folk ballad called ‘Long Lankin’ (or variants such as ‘Cruel Lincoln’) since at least the 1970s. It’s a spooky and bloody tale of a man who breaks into a castle, for reasons which are not always clear: some versions suggest he’s a mason who’s not been paid by the castle’s lord for work he’s done, others that he’s also a leper. He somehow persuades the nurse in charge of the lord’s child to let him bleed the lord’s child to death before murdering the wife; whether it’s for some ritual purpose or for revenge is rarely made clear but eventually the false nurse and the vengeful intruder have to meet justice.

I say all this because, like many surviving folk ballads of some antiquity in which motivations are not often clear or there exist lacunae in the telling, the nine pieces in John Banville’s collection of short stories (most of which first appeared in 1970) also have the same unnerving feel: we may arrive in the middle of a situation, and key information about the participants and their relationships can be withheld or remain ambiguous, while there also remains a general sense of menace throughout, of mysteries vaguely alluded to, of crises unresolved.

As a debut publication it’s impressive, and even in this revised edition (with a 1984 tale substituted for two of the original ten stories) it remains haunting and suspenseful. And, in keeping with the cryptic nature of the texts, none of the pieces, either directly or indirectly, seems to reference the ballad of the collection’s title.

—Oh yes, I was going to write a book. A love story. The story of Stephen and Alice who thought that love would last forever. And when they found that it wouldn’t or at least that it changed so much that they couldn’t recognize it anymore, the blow was too heavy. They retreated into themselves like rabbits in a burrow.
— ‘A Death’.

For example, in many of the stories there is a visitation, a few intended but the majority unexpected. In ‘Wild Wood’ a young lad and a 16yo axe-wielding gang leader called, enigmatically, Horse feed a bonfire in a wood until another lad called Rice arrives to inform them that a grisly local murder has just been discovered. In ‘Lovers’ Peter and Muriel are planning a future life travelling, but after they visit Peter’s father in hospital these plans don’t seem so cut and dried. In ‘A Death’ a village funeral sees a strangely unmoved Stephen paying his last respects to his father, but the presence on the graveyard’s periphery of an odd stranger who then irritatingly accosts him somehow emphasises his alienation from his pregnant partner Alice and his sister Lilian.

Meanwhile the title of ‘The Visit’ explicitly references this pervasive theme: a young girl is waiting with her aunt for the arrival of a father she’s never met. Will he be the enigmatic conjuror on a push-bike whom she meets who calls himself Rainbow, or somebody else entirely, a grey-haired man whom she’s never set eyes on before? And then in ‘Sanctuary’ who is the young man who arrives at an isolated cottage by the sea where Helen appears to be sheltering a disturbed Julie, who’s evidently suffering from a deeply embedded trauma?

All the remaining tales here – ‘Nightwind’, ‘Summer Voices’, ‘Island’ and ‘De Rerum Natura’ – are similarly eerie and disconcerting. It’s often hard to guess at the context of conversations other than that they allude to unexpressed fears and disagreements; relationships buckle under the strain of incomprehension, non-communication and perceived hurts; locations are often as isolated and inaccessible as the relationships; though most of the settings are Irish they could be anywhere where human souls suffer the pain of dislocation.

Banville masterfully achieves all this by having us arrive without preamble in medias res, and by including choice phrases like ‘bruised blood’ which, though they may defy pure logic, we recognise as having import. Whether we’re in an overgrown garden, on an Aegean island, or by an Irish beach there is an overpowering yet poignantly expressed sense of pregnant tragedy, often conveyed by a very filmic pathetic fallacy:

Darkness was approaching. Black clouds, their edges touched with red, were gathering out over the sea, and shadows were lowering on the ugly waters. A cold damp breath touched his face.
— ‘Summer Voices’.

If this was Banville’s debut, it must have felt like the promise of more engrossing storytelling to come; I shall certainly look out for more from this prose balladeer.

[Banbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is something of the gothic in these stories--a hint of an inexorable unseen evil or corrupt force that threatens the characters into acting in such a way to slowly but surely destroy themselves, all in the light of very ordinary days.

[Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 theme runs at least from 1970 (when these stories were first published) through 2009; Benjamin Black's narrator Glass in The Lemur not only lives off his wife's money, but he's a former "foreign correspondent" who has been hired to write his father-in-law's biography. The taste of ashes is palpable. I'm going to have to sit down some weekend and review all of Banville's narrators and see how often this condition applies.

The edition I read was originally republished in 1984 in Oldcastle, Co Meath. Two of the piece in the first edition were removed by the author—this means I have more research in order to complete my Banville reading.

[Leif · Rating 2 out of 5]

These earliest of stories from Banville, master of oblique, dancing sentences and patient, luminous descriptions are nothing of the sort. Flashes of ambition lighten their generally mundane tone (when compared to his work produced shortly afterward) and save a couple of stories, they are mostly, regrettably, forgettable. Stand outs include "Island", "Summer Voices", and "De Rerum Natura", the last of which is a late addition to this collection which has also excised two stories of the 1970 edition, "Persona" and "The Possessed". All in all you could save your time and read other deft hands at the Irish short story genre: there are, after all, many Irish writers more than worth your time: The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story; The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the primary pleasures of reading John Banville is the prosody. This being the earliest collection of his fiction, that was not in full-force, but by way of compensation: interesting vignettes of domestic life.

The collection merited three stars, maybe 2.75. At least, that was where I stood after finishing the first eight stories in the book.

The ninth story, as I understand it, was written later, and was not included in this volume when first published. This last story shows Mr. Banville at his full powers. While the rest of the stories are enjoyable, De Rerum Natura is worth the price of the volume alone--a powerful exposition of how we are shaped by the personal context of the lives in which we live, and how, when seen by another, that same life (without the insight of the context another) can seem a foreign country. All this in no less than finely wrought prose.

Recommended.

[Eli · Rating 3 out of 5]

These early stories of John Banville are connected through the sense of unease which runs through each of them. Banville writes about relationships and situations that feel as if they will splinter apart with the barest breath. Anticipation cannot always meet with reality. And there is the constant reminder of the violence in this world. Ultimately bleak, but gorgeously written, they are like fairy tales without hope of a happy ending. It is clear that this is the work of the author who would come to write the likes of Mefisto and The Infinities.


**I was fortunate to receive this book for free through NetGalley for review purposes.

[Gary · Rating 4 out of 5]

A set of story fragments, almost shards, with underlying themes of murder and madness, with a touch of ogres and other dark creatures, written before 1970 and first published in 1984. Only 76 pp. Captures Banville's uncanny ability to create a mood with only a sentence or two, usually one of foreboding in these stories. These are little flashes of critical moments in a life or relationship or history, with the beginning and the end missing. The reader's imagination is everything. An accomplishment.

[Sally · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you enjoy reading about the painful demise of a relationship while a murderer lurks unseen in the background, you will enjoy this book of depressing short stories. That is the plot of not one but TWO of the stories. Seriously. Is it too much to ask an author of a short story collection to come up with a different plot for each one? Thank goodness it was over with quickly.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of short pieces capturing human experience. What strikes me most is the play of atmosphere on the characters and how one particular character in each tale will influence (often for the worse) the others.

[Johnny Leavesley · Rating 1 out of 5]

Believe it when I write that I am a great admirer of Banville's work and am reading my way through his books in admiration and awe. This, however, is juvenilia. It is good in its own way but does not compare with the great man's mature output.

[Ginny · Rating 3 out of 5]

So much said in so few words. Really short, short stories. I don't usually read short stories but really enjoyed this author.

[Katrina Gonsalves · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful short, short stories. As always extraordinary writing and given that they were actually written early in career they show how great a writer he has always been.

[ems · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful sentences, not sure what actually happened in any of those stories. Dialogue like Antonioni films.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Early Banville, easier to digest because it's in smaller pieces. Dark, though, but you get to come up for air more often. Must keep going......

[Patricia Geller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite of his stories but I loved rum Natura.

[Richard Cubitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Early short stories from Banville. Good but not as great as his later work.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incredible collection of Banville's earliest fiction. Sadly, he decided not to republish "Persona" (which was included in the version published by Secker & Warburg, London, 1970), nor did he include "The Possessed", a longer short story/novella. Still, I cannot critique, or praise, what is not included, so the collection suffers merely from my disappointment upon finding this info on the last page. I knew I would love these stories, and yet I was surprised by their emotional depth and level of character development seeing as how none of the stories exceeded 10 pages. Banville's style suits me perfectly. He edges towards the dreary, melancholy, and simple, without ever overdoing things. A powerful, yet all too slim volume.

[Jeffrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Banville published the first of his many amazing novels in 1973. There was a previous novel published in 1971 that he claims to have “disowned” out of embarrassment. These stories, more like sketches really, were first published even before that, in 1970, when the author was in his early twenties. The author’s raw talent is evident, but the compositions are only half baked.

[Karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

A genius begins his literary career with these dark, confusing snippets of stories. I can see the beginnings of excellent prose, but I was left scratching my head at "what the heck was going on" in quite a few of these offerings.
Sorry, but only two stars from me.

[Robert McTague · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked. Banville writes in a fairly unique style. Every story leaves quite a bit up to the reader. Serious, but not too serious...playful? No, more lyric-mystical. A good read and now makes me want to read at least one of his novels.

[L · Rating 4 out of 5]

DE RERUM NATURA was my favorite

[SJ Fitzpatrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like Banville's style of writing but this one is too dark and creepy. I gave up after the first couple of stories.

[Evelyn J. Katz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful, unusual short stories!

[Friedrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

short stories