There are countries like Portugal or Ireland, which seem to carry the label of melancholy in any of their artistic forms. From music to literature, everything is drenched in that scent of decadence and longing.
At book Return to Birchwood, John Banville is busy presenting us with an Ireland invaded by that homeland typical of this great island. Gabriel Godkin is its protagonist, a kind of alter ego of the author who returns to that Birchwood iventado that represents the cosmos of Irish stereotypes.
Gabriel discovers that the old house in which he grew up is hardly sustained, sheltering characters that inhabit it who seem to be dotted with the same deterioration of a merciless passage of time. In a way, you can detect that kind of metaphor between the reality found and the memory of a happy past when you return to spaces of other times. The emotional shock can be likened to that material disorder that the author draws.
However, the tragic touch of the story also moves with a point of humor, acid without a doubt, but humor at the end of the day, which one uses to overcome the tragedy of losses and nostalgia.
Given the disastrous state of that space of his childhood, Gabriel ends up embarking on a circus, hoping to find his twin sister, whom he inexplicably lost track of. And it is then when the author takes the opportunity to portray the deep Ireland, punished by misery in its rural part. And it is also then when we discover the greatness of the characters who occupy those punished places. Grotesque figures of strange behaviors that, endowed with John Banville's magical descriptive ability, leave their mark, between the most brutal eccentricity and an undeniable vitalism that pushes them to survive in the face of a world that denies everything.
In this novel, Ireland is a sum of memories of happiness that slide like currents between all the scenarios proposed, leaving in their wake a patina that homogenizes faces and houses, belongings and souls in sepia.
You can buy the book Return to Birchwood, the new novel by the great writer John Banville, here: