The Two Mr. Banvilles

So he went back to his day job -- eventually, he became literary editor of the Irish Times -- and kept writing.

John Banville novels, of which there have been more than a dozen so far, weren't exactly mass-market fare, as you might guess from this fairly typical reviewer's judgment: "Banville has constructed a style that combines the sensuous beauty of language as a physical object with a painful, hesitant self-awareness that derives from Beckett's prose." They tended to sell around 5,000 copies each, Banville says, though 1989's "The Book of Evidence" did modestly better after it was shortlisted for the Booker.

The fans he did acquire, however, tended to be passionate.

Novelist and screenwriter Mark Sarvas, proprietor of a literary blog called the Elegant Variation, first encountered Banville in 2000, when he read a review asserting that "Eclipse" might be the novel that finally got Banville noticed. Sarvas "walked across the street to a bookstore, read the first page" and was hooked.

"Nobody writes a sentence like this man does," Sarvas says. He goes on to describe Banville both as a novelist of ideas and as a wonderful observer of the landscape of "the damaged male."

"Eclipse," it turned out, was one more breakthrough that didn't happen. It wasn't until his Booker win that Banville actually started to sell. (According to Nielsen BookScan, "The Sea" is pushing 200,000 -- in combined hardback and paperback sales -- in this country alone.)

Meanwhile, Benjamin Black's career was starting to take shape.

"The Sea" was finished in September 2004. In March 2005, Banville began writing the first Quirke novel. Six months later, on the same day the Booker shortlist was announced, his agent presented his British publisher with the manuscript of "Christine Falls."

Banville asked that it be published under a pseudonym. The idea was simply to signal that "this was something different."

* * *