SOURCE: "Irish Baroque," in New York Times Book Review, May 21, 1995, p. 15.

In the following review, Gorra describes the mood of Banville's Athena and states that, "Plot counts for nothing here, or seems not to, and mood becomes all—a mood sustained by a prose of idiosyncratic and appalling charm."

Murder as sex, sex as murder, murder instead of sex—why do so many recent Irish novels worry away at the relation between the big death and the little one? John Banville writes with his eyes on a European past, and not a narrowly national one; writes without the customary parade of politics and priests. But murder and sex, those he does share with his contemporaries, with writers like Bernard MacLaverty, Patrick McCabe and William Trevor. Mr. Banville's peculiar genius is to bleed this promising material dry, draining it of suspense; reading him, you never taste the stomach-turning urge...