La historia del niño que regresa a su casa en el campo, grande, vieja antigua y huye con un circo para buscar a su hermana, perdida muchos años atrás... rara, incómoda, bien escrita. ( )

Una de las primeras novelas de JB en la que ya aparecen todas sus obsesiones y la marca indeleble de su pluma magnética. ( )

Cuando Gabriel Godkin regresa a Birchwood tras varios años, la gran casa familiar no es más que una propiedad ruinosa con habitantes enajenados. Hurgando en los recuerdos, rememora sus primeras experiencias de amor y de pérdida, pero los desastres se suceden y el joven decide huir con un circo ambulante para buscar a su hermana gemela, desaparecida tiempo atrás. Pronto descubrirá que el hambre y el malestar acechan el campo y que Irlanda también está arruinada.

Capturing Ireland's famine with a devastating bleakness, the novel coruscates, overflows with elegiac prose. ( )

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 much as forwards. And aristocratic decline strikes me as generally a good thing, so I often struggle to feel much sympathy for the lords and ladies forced to survive in only two houses instead of five.

Birchwood, though, I thoroughly enjoyed. While the writing style is reminiscent of Proust in its dreamy beauty, it clips along at a much faster pace, as does the sometimes bizarre plot of childhood resentments, exploding grandmothers, running off to join the circus, searching for a long-lost sister, etc. Also there's a detachment from the destruction that comes to Birchwood, a sense that it's inevitable and even deserved, a strong context of the social unrest in Ireland at the time.

The writing was brilliant from the first page to the last, and made me want to read a lot more of Banville's work. ( )