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Last November, John Banville’s Christine Falls – originally published under the pen name “Benjamin Black” in 2006 – was announced as One Dublin, One Book’s chosen novel for 2026. Jointly administered by the Dublin UNESCO City of Literature Office and Dublin City Public Libraries, the One Dublin, One Book initiative is a month-long programme of events, usually held in April, curated around a literary work with Dublin connections.
UNESCO has granted the City of Literature designation since 2004, as one component of a larger UNESCO programme known as the Creative Cities Network. Dublin was awarded its designation in 2010. The scholar Sarah Brouillette has identified the City of Literature and Creative Cities Network schemes as characteristic projects of UNESCO’s response to the late-20th-century ascendency of neoliberal ideology. With the City of Literature designation, UNESCO is not committing to funding or creating anything new. Instead it bestows upon the city a ‘brand’ with which to work. In this view, culture is conceptualised as a resource to be strategically husbanded with the objective of promoting job creation and economic development. As Brouillette notes, UNESCO “must constantly narrate the potential of culture to measurably, demonstrably play a generative economic role.”
One Dublin, One Book is premised on an idea of literature as democratic and purposeful. The objective is widening participation in literary culture, while deploying literature to cultivate civic engagement and historical understanding. However, this admirable aim “to encourage a love of reading for pleasure among the citizens of Dublin”, co-exists with the more problematic objective of fitting literature to the demands of the creative economy.
Looking at the 2026 programme of events curated around Christine Falls, the stated objective of encouraging “reading for pleasure” featured surprisingly little. Over the month, just two events could be categorised as related to reading, while there were several workshops offering guidance to prospective writers of crime fiction, along with a roundtable of novelists discussing their approaches to writing historical fiction.
This emphasis on writing over reading is an effect of the creative economy model of literary culture as it has developed since the 1990s. That term encapsulates the application of the logic of profit and loss – the framework of cost-benefit analysis – through which the literary is called to account for itself as ‘useful’. However, this logic is not economic in any straightforward way.
For instance, writing workshops are very unlikely to be profitable in monetary terms. So their primary role in the creative economy is not so much generating actual economic activity as generating a simulacrum of ‘usefulness’ to legitimise the practices of literature. Writers giving workshops creates an appearance of ‘productivity’ which writers simply writing fiction does not.
In the creative economy paradigm, culture is notionally expected to contribute to economic productivity. But, much more importantly, culture is expected to humanise economic productivity. Whatever monetary value the publication and sale of books might contribute to the material economy is of far less significance than the ideological contribution of the idea that literature is inimical to the logic of the marketplace. If the creative economy is directed at the exploitation of culture as a valuable resource, then the most important resource being exploited is not cultural activity as such but, more tragically, the desire – sublimated in art and literature – to inhabit a humane alternative to the marketplace.
Historical fiction and ideology
This year, the majority of events on the One Dublin, One Book programme were not connected to either reading or writing, but to public engagement with history. Christine Falls is set in Dublin and Boston in the 1950s, the plot revolving around a conspiracy orchestrated by a secret Catholic organisation illegally sending babies to the United States for adoption. Banville’s atmospheric rendering of 1950s Dublin infuses the novel, making the city as much character as setting. And as the programme demonstrated, the book’s attention to historical detail was fertile ground for public historians exploring various topics, from forensic science to Marian devotion, and from emigration to maternal healthcare.
The aim of increasing historical knowledge among a citizenry is wholly admirable. But requiring fiction to prove its usefulness by facilitating transmission of such knowledge is another manifestation of the creative economy’s instrumentalisation of literature. Moreover, historical fiction is less important for transmitting information about the past than encouraging historical consciousness, framing and shaping how we conceptualise the relationship between past, present and future. In other words, the style of a historical novel is crucial, since it is where the novel’s ideological perspective lies. The key question to ask of a work of historical fiction is not what information does it give us about the past, but whether that novel encodes an open and revolutionary or a closed and conservative view of historical development.
Banville’s novel reads like a checklist of those revelations, about Industrial Schools, Magdalene Laundries and other abusive carceral institutions used to control and punish women and children in mid-20th-century Ireland, which had been circulating in public discourse in the decade before the novel was published. However the novel offers limited insight into how those carceral institutions functioned within the social structure of a modern capitalist society, since the motivation of the novel’s conspirators is so luridly Gothic. Rather than identifying the villains of history, perhaps our more urgent imaginative task is confronting the worldview of that majority of ‘ordinary decent’ people who may have been uneasy about that carceral system while still accepting it as part of the ‘common sense’ governing their society.
The writer as artist
In 2005, a year before publishing Christine Falls, Banville’s The Sea won the Booker Prize. At the prize-giving event, Banville caused some consternation in London literary circles by telling a journalist that “it’s nice to see a work of art win”. Given that One Dublin, One Book is so shaped by the creative economy model of literary value, choosing a John Banville novel for the programme seemed like an odd choice.
Throughout his career Banville has reiterated his commitment to an idea of literature as autonomous. In this view, creating, as well as engaging with, literature or any serious art is a distinctive category of human experience, impelled by a powerful and ultimately tragic, because impossible to fulfil, quest for freedom and transcendence amidst the alienation of modern life. This vision of literature as a repository of human desires and experiences beyond the reach of commodification offers a rigorous challenge to the creative economy’s instrumentalised view of writers and literature.
As his quip at the Booker event suggests, for Banville the ideal of art to which literature, especially the novel, should aspire was manifest historically in the tradition of oil painting which dominated European visual culture from the 16th century to the beginning of the 20th. Several of his novels are first-person narratives centred on art historians and connoisseurs, such as Max Morden in The Sea and Victor Maskell in The Untouchable (1997). The latter is a fictional character partly based on a historic figure, Anthony Blunt, who along with being a scholar and civil servant was a Soviet spy. Banville’s signature style of narration strives to capture in prose the affective and psychic condition of looking at paintings; that immersive experience of being unmoored and discombobulated by a work of art.
Probably the best known of Banville’s art-obsessed men is Freddie Montgomery in The Book of Evidence (1989), whose desire to possess a painting of a woman leads him to murder a woman. As Freddie demonstrates, for Banville serious intellectual engagement with art should never be mistaken for any easily commodified “love of art” which, it is assumed, will make you a better person. On the contrary, with their traitors and psychopaths his books insist that art should not be expected to cultivate empathy or ethical integrity, nor offer spiritual consolation.
It is in this way that Banville’s novels repudiate the creative economy model of literary value most rigorously, since it is precisely such solace and self-actualisation which the literary experience promises. This, we are reassured, is how we can distinguish literary experience from mere entertainment.
Giving the market what it wants
And yet a Banville novel was chosen for One Dublin, One Book, proving his work sufficiently adaptable to its programme. One pessimistic reading is that this further demonstrates the overwhelming force of neoliberal marketisation, in which even countervailing currents, apparently resistant to commodification, can still be cannibalised to strengthen its hegemony. An alternative, even more pessimistic, reading is that Banville’s fiction proves conducive to the neoliberal creative economy not despite but because of his idealised vision of literary value and artistic autonomy.
In the 21st century, the neoliberal literary marketplace is very invested in cultivating the aura of serious literature and commodifying those experiences of class distinction conferred by self-identifying as a reader of literary fiction. So when in interviews Banville regularly distinguishes between his approach to writing his literary novels and his crime novels by describing the former as ‘art’ and the latter as ‘craft’, he is not, as seems to be the case, disdaining the marketplace but giving it exactly what it wants.
By projecting twin personas, ‘John Banville’, author of The Sea, and ‘Benjamin Black’, author of Christine Falls, Banville (along with his agents, publishers, marketing departments and cooperative journalists) seemed to be insisting on drawing a rigid distinction between serious and popular, art and craft, literary and genre fiction. Such was the difference between these, is the implication, that Banville had to conceptually split himself in two to write novels for both categories. But there was never any attempt to hide Banville’s identity as ‘Benjamin Black’, since that was never the point. Being so open about this game from the outset was a way of simultaneously deconstructing that distinction while seeming to insist on it, and helping to position ‘literary fiction’ as a distinctive genre just when the marketplace required it.
In “the age of Amazon”, to borrow Mark McGurl’s phrase, genre has proved an indispensable mechanism for sorting a proliferating volume of fiction into legible categories efficiently directed at target readers. As McGurl documents, technological developments such as Kindle Direct Publishing created new opportunities for writers (but also new methods for their precarious labour to be exploited), as well as a dizzying proliferation of ever more finely specialised generic categories. In the world of traditional publishing, ‘literary fiction’ has shifted from being the unnamed opposite of ‘genre’ or ‘popular’ fiction, as it was in the 20th century, to now being one genre among others.
But ‘literary fiction’ becoming just another genre does not represent an assault on literary value or the idea of serious literature represented by Banville’s idea of the novel as art. It is a recognition of that genre’s distinctive appeal to a specific segment of readers, and a means of attracting those readers’ attention in a culture where such attention is at a premium.
The ‘art novel’ against the masses
Banville’s vision of serious literature as art is not just productively amenable to the literary marketplace. For all that this ideal is premised on a commitment to artistic autonomy – a vision of art as transcending the political and ideological – it is constitutively an expression of an ideological standpoint, one that is anti-democratic, individualist, and fully aligned with the neoliberal conception of people as entrepreneurial subjects striving to maximise value rather than citizens motivated by solidarity.
Banville is very enthusiastic about the novels of Henry James, even writing a sequel to James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881). When discussing his own novels as works of art Banville does so in idealising and ahistorical language. He does not acknowledge that this idea, that certain types of novels are works of art – the art novel – has not always been around but is specific to a certain historical period. Nor does he acknowledge that James played a pivotal role in actively constructing this idea, which developed out of a conservative reaction against the gradual expansion of democracy, especially the organisation of labour, during the late 19th century.
In The Future of the Novel, James fretted over an emergent mass culture in which the “multitude” – the “total swarm” – were now able to “possess itself in one way or another of the book”. This presented for James, as Mark McGurl has argued, an appalling possibility that the aesthetic development of the novel would be determined by a readership for whom “taste is but a confused immediate instinct”. The task confronting James, and those in alignment with his perspective on this rapidly developing literary culture, was to manufacture a distinction between the novel as mass entertainment and the novel as artform. With compulsory primary education increasing literacy levels, it was no longer possible to rely on the ability to read, and a restrictive distribution of that ability across society, to secure the distinctiveness of the novel. Instead it became necessary to construct a difference between styles of reading.
In James’s signature style of writing fiction and, more importantly, in the famous prefaces he later added to his reissued novels, he created the art novel as something requiring a specialised form of intellectual labour to write but also to read. The ‘art novel’ became a bearer of cultural capital, guaranteeing individual distinctiveness in a culture where other forms of class distinction appeared to be crumbling beneath the homogenising force of democracy. From the beginning the ‘art novel’ has had a complicated relationship with mass culture; defined in opposition to mass culture, but therefore always reliant on that mass culture to secure its distinctive identity.
Interviewed by Ruth Padel in 1997, Banville claimed that he lived “in exile” in Ireland, “out of touch with other writers” and “hopelessly ill-informed”. By then, Banville had been a member of Aosdána since 1984 and literary editor of the Irish Times for nine years. In other words, he had been a beneficiary of state funding, as well as having a decision-making role in the distribution of such funding to other writers along with the distribution of recognition and prestige. As literary editor of a national newspaper he mediated between writers and their reading public, exercising significant control over the distribution of attention in Irish literary culture. From that perspective his self-conception as an “exile” seems absurd. But from the viewpoint of neoliberal cultural entrepreneurship it makes sense to obscure the material and institutional situation of your literary practice, to reiterate individual effort, and disavow any notion of literature as a collective practice.
Banville – defender of Israel
Can these paradoxes of Banville’s literary career explain how one so immersed in the humanist tradition of European literary and artistic history could find themselves committed to a distressingly inhuman standpoint when confronted by genocide? What leads an artist dedicated to an ideal of artistic autonomy to repudiate that ideal, committing themselves to solidarity with the perpetrators of genocide out of a perverse sense of moral obligation?
In September 2025 the Irish Times published an interview with Banville to publicise his latest novel, Venetian Vespers. Banville took the opportunity to use the slur of antisemitism to discredit his colleagues in Irish writing who had taken a principled stance in solidarity with Palestinian liberation and in opposition to the genocide in Gaza:
"I said, the point is you cannot censor me. They would try it now with all this wokeist nonsense. Thank God it’s coming to an end… I’m a philo-Semite. I still defend the Israelis. I was shaped by the death camps. My view of the savagery of human beings was shaped by my childhood memories of what was coming out of Germany…
All this stuff about Gaza which is terrible, of course, but nobody gave a damn when Assad was killing 350,000 of his own people. No one cared about Rwanda. It’s nascent anti-Semitism. Someone sent me a statement. I wrote back saying I will not sign this, there is no mention of Hamas. Of course, they gave Netanyahu and his horrible gang the excuse to commit atrocities. But they started it."
Born in 1945, Banville spent his childhood as a Christian in Wexford. Born in 1938, Stephen Kapos was a Jewish child in Budapest during the destruction of Hungarian Jewry by Nazis and local collaborators. Over recent years, Kapos has been a familiar figure on demonstrations in support of Palestinian liberation in London and was questioned by the police, in March 2025, because of his participation in one such protest. In interviews he explicitly locates the impetus for his solidarity with the Palestinian people, and his opposition to Zionism, in that childhood experience of surviving genocide. Meanwhile, Banville claims to be “shaped by the death camps”, instrumentalising other people’s historical experience of genocide to justify apartheid, war crimes and genocide – which is the essential meaning of “I still defend the Israelis.” And a writer of historical fiction replaces historical analysis with the childish logic of a playground dispute about who “started it”.
To be clear – there can be no doubt about the magnitude of the crime carried out by the state which Banville seeks to defend. Major international organisations such as Amnesty International and Médecins Sans Frontières have concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. So have the Israeli organisations B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights–Israel, and Israeli Holocaust scholars such as Omer Bartov, Daniel Blatman and Amos Goldberg. So has the International Association of Genocide Scholars, the world's foremost academic body on the issue. And in June of this year, the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory concluded that Israel continues to commit genocide through the deliberate targeting of Palestinian children, and that much of the harm they suffered "was not incidental but intended to destroy the existence of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group"
As Nancy Fraser observes, Palestine remains the “ground zero” of the Gazan genocide as world event. Foremost it is a tragic catastrophe for the Palestinian people, victims of Israeli violence and primary agents of resistance to that violence. For Europeans, as Fraser argues, “Gaza” does not represent such a material catastrophe, of course, but it does represent an epochal rupture in the political and moral order. For millions of Europeans who have taken to the streets in solidarity with Palestine since October 2023 (“all this stuff about Gaza”, as Banville would have it), the pro-Zionist logic of political leaders like Ursula von der Leyen and liberal intellectuals like John Banville – their view that the history of Judeocide in Europe makes unequivocal support for Israel a moral imperative – is a grotesque and repugnant distortion of history.
In Pankaj Mishra’s words, “in the war of ideas and memory that intensified in Europe and North America after 7 October, the narrative in which the Shoah gives unlimited moral legitimacy to Israel has never appeared weaker.” Moreover, that sharp contrast between the EU’s response to Russian war crimes in Ukraine and Israeli war crimes in Gaza exposed the racism endemic to European ‘liberal values’, with its restrictive equation of the ‘human’ in ‘human rights’ with whiteness.
The crisis Fraser identifies is one in which European citizens confront their complicity in Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. Confronting that this genocide is being perpetrated in their name, with the active support of the EU. And that this genocide is a direct consequence of historical genocides perpetrated by Europeans, on European Jewry in the 1940s as well as those genocidal atrocities, including chattel slavery, inflicted globally in the pursuit of European imperialist expansion from the early modern period onward. Genocides on which Western Europe’s modernity and current prosperity were built.
If, as Banville puts it, modern European liberalism is “shaped by the death camps” what this actually means is that several generations of Europeans are content that Palestine should indefinitely remain a death camp for Palestinians in order to avoid any reckoning for European imperialism.
Art and politics
Theodor Adorno famously asserted that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. The phrase is translated variously from the original German, and so open to interpretation. The obvious meaning is that this is an injunction forbidding poetry, i.e. it would be barbaric to write poetry. Another interpretation is that this is a prescription for the style of poetry that needs to be written: it is not that the act of writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, but that the poetry which is written should be barbarous. Such poetry should pierce the mind and ear with the jagged violence of barbed wire on skin. Art and literature would be created after Auschwitz, but could not be created as before or as if it had never happened.
What of Irish literature ‘after Gaza’? To begin to confront the political and moral consequences of Gaza as ‘world event’, Irish writers will have to strive to free themselves from that decaying Euro-centric liberalism articulated by Banville. The problem is not John Banville personally, of course, but the neoliberal conception of literary value represented by his successful career. A conception of literary work that celebrates writers as exceptional individual ‘artists’ while exploiting their cheap, precarious labour for creative writing programmes and literary festivals, all the while pitting them against each other for recognition and funding. An idea of literary value combining abstract mystification about ‘art’ with the ruthless instrumentalisation and banalisation of the creative economy.
In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin identified an epochal change in our perception of art provoked by the technological advances that began with photography in the 19th century. Now that artworks were reproducible, they could be freed from the quasi-religious mystification – what Benjamin termed the “aura” – enveloping them. Reproducibility could dispel that numinous authority conferred on art by tradition and the guarantee of authenticity. Importantly, Benjamin did not grieve over this dissolution of the aura surrounding art. On the contrary, he welcomed the possibility this created; “the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.”
Art as political does not mean that restrictive conception of politically engaged literature encouraged by the neoliberal creative economy. For instance, dutifully addressing ‘issues’ in workshop-friendly fashion to affirm the self-conception of liberal readers, as we find in Banville’s Christine Falls. Nor is it the reductive caricature of political engagement placed in opposition to an equally caricatured notion of art, as when Banville counsels fellow novelists that “any writer who imagines he has a social voice is in trouble. If you mix politics and art you get bad politics and bad art.”
The work of art is not impelled by a desire to escape the political, but a desire to transform the political. Art does not promise solace for the alienation of modernity, but gives imaginative form to our incoherent longings for an alternative reality in which human consciousness, and therefore social relations, have been transformed by revolution. Works of art are made political by giving symbolic expression to outlawed visions of freedom from the domination and atomised individualism of capitalism. This is the vision of a political literature to which Irish writers must aspire “after Gaza”.
Michael G Cronin lectures in the Department of English at Maynooth University. He writes on the relationship between aesthetics and politics in 20th century and contemporary Irish literature and culture, most recently in Revolutionary Bodies (2024) and Sexual/Liberation (2022), the latter is part of the "Síreacht: longings for another Ireland" series.