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publication: fifty-four.
     
     

John Banville 1945–
     
1989 The Book of Evidence
     
    John Banville is one of the best prose stylists writing in English now. His tone is aloof and mandarin, subversive and slyly comic; the voice in his work is close to that of the Beckett of the Molloy trilogy and the Nabokov of Lolita and Ada . His second novel, Birchwood (1973), represents a watershed in contemporary Irish writing: it is a novel in which history becomes a rich black comedy full of land agitation and Gothic characters, and a sense of bewilderment at the nature of the universe fills the pages.
    The Book of Evidence, however, is the book where his skills as a stylist and his macabre vision come best together. It is written as a speech from the dock by one Freddie Montgomery – Banville loves playing with posh Anglo-Irish identities – who tells the story of how he came to murder a servant girl in a big house. Banville clearly relishes the voice he has created – versions of the same Freddie appear in Ghosts (1991) and Athena (1993) – which deals in perfectly crafted sentences and images, and has a narrative thrust which is dark and utterly free of guilt. Banville also loves the idea of invention, and enjoys playing with notions of evil. In this novel, all this comes together with a murder story which is moving, gripping and totally absorbing.
    John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, and now lives in Dublin. He has published eleven works of fiction. The Book of Evidence won the Guiness Peat Aviation Award in 1989. The Untouchable (1997) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The Sea (2005) won the Man Booker Prize. He has also written a series of crime novels under a pseudonym Benjamin Black.
    Age in year of publication: forty-four.
     
     

Pat Barker 1943–
     
1991–1995 The Regeneration Trilogy
     
Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), The Ghost Road (1995)
     
    This is a rich and complex retelling of the story of British combatants in the First World War. It uses as a focus and centre the work of a real (as opposed to fictional) character, Dr William Rivers, whose job it is to deal with men who have been traumatized by their time in the trenches at a period when little was known about trauma. Other real characters appear in the books, notably Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves.
    The trilogy also dramatizes the life and times of one Billy Prior, a triumphantly buoyant and brilliant creation, working class but an officer, and bisexual. The opening of the second volume has one of the best descriptions ever of sex between men. The third, which is plainly written, using short scenes and a large number of subplots, deals with divisions within the characters themselves, including the doctors, and within the governing ideologies. Ideas of bravery, fear, recovery, madness, the unconscious, masculinity, friendship, leadership, pacifism and the class system, to name but a few, are examined in terms that are deceptively simple.
    Barker is in full control of her material: she understands her characters and their dilemmas, she has an enormous sympathy with people, and an astonishing range. These three books establish her as one of the most talented English novelists of her time.
    Pat Barker was born in Thornaby-on-Tees and lives in Durham. Regeneration was made into a film by Gillies Mackinnon; The Eye in the Door won the Guardian Fiction Prize; The Ghost Road won the Booker Prize.
    Age in years these books were published: forty-eight – fifty-two.
     
     

Julian Barnes 1946–
     
1984 Flaubert’s Parrot
     
    In this book Julian Barnes turns his attention to the great French writer Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), author of Madame Bovary . The result is a novel like no other, in which Barnes himself jostles with Flaubert and with the narrator of the novel, a fussy sadsack called Dr Braithwaite, for centre stage. Braithwaite is a widower; his wife has committed suicide – she was unfaithful to him. Flaubert