Untwining the Threads in John Banville’s Birchwood: False Shadows, Bogus Plots and What Lies Beyond Unreliability

This paper proposes a radical re-interpretation of John Banville’s Birchwood, a novel that may be seen to contain interpretative keys to the writer’s universe. Almost all critics note that Gabriel Godkin’s tale is a deliberately constructed fiction, but no one has as yet made an effort to decode the hidden essence of the narrative – and this is precisely what this essay aims to do. Rejecting the fundamental “revelation” of the narrative that Michael is his Gabriel’s twin, I assert that Michael does not exist as a separate entity – he is Gabriel’s imagined double, made up to fulfil his dark desires. Another grand fiction is the circus episode, which functions as a distorting mirror of the drama happening at home. By following clues in “Air and Angels” we may discover, for instance, that Gabriel is the one who killed his father. Finally, the essay discusses a metaphor of the two artistic modes found in the text: the puzzle-making vs. the juggling act. The latter consists of skillful replacement of one figure – scene – event – image with another, until all the reader sees is a brilliant hoop of light, a beautiful vision which seems to be uninterpretable.