None of John Banville's (1945–) writing to the point of his publishing Doctor Copernicus in 1976 could have indicated how brilliant this particular novel would be. Not unlike the stammerer's obsession described in the novel: ‘searching … for that last elusive word … that surely would make all come marvellously clear’, Banville's career to this moment was a groping towards a narrative and a way of presenting that narrative which might manifest most powerfully his intellectual disquiet regarding language and form, along with his thematic interest in the modernist/postmodernist story of the plight of the modern individual imagination's engagement with the real world. The achievement of a certain authorial poise, a stylistic control and distance, utterly absent in his previous novel Birchwood (1973) which positively revelled in its own chaos, conceals the anxieties central to Doctor Copernicus. Playing, as it does, with the fundamental contradictions of a modernity which oscillates between desire for the certainties of an older traditional world and the recognition that such certitude is no longer possible. Indeed, Banville's discovery of a means of masking disorder in his aesthetic pursuit of the well-made sentence becomes the keynote gesture of his art from this moment on.

John Banville's art is one of concealment rather than revelation, one of striving towards objective expression rather than self-expression.