SOURCE: "This is Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On," in The Spectator, Vol. 274, No. 8693, pp. 30-1.

In the following review, Craig discusses the dream-like quality of Banville's Athena.

I've always likened writing a novel to a very powerful dream that you know is going to haunt you for days. If you sit down at the breakfast table and start to try to explain the dream to someone, they yawn and look at you and they can't understand what you're on about.

If—John Banville goes on in an Irish Times interview with Fintan O'Toole in 1989—if you try to imagine an author sitting down with such a dream for three years or so, refining and refining it into an elaborate work of fiction, 'then you're close to the impulse of my novels'. It's an illuminating analogy. The supercharged realism and lucidity of Banville's prose do not preclude...