The Terror of Freedom

Why, John Banville asks, does nobody in this book walk through the open door? Eveline has a boat ticket and a man willing to marry her; she grips the railing and stays. Little Chandler wants his name on a slim book of poems, and wants never to risk a thing for it. John Banville reads Dubliners and names the fear under every refusal: freedom, the most frightening thing on offer. And then he sets the book down and answers with the shape of his own life, the country he left, the stranger choice he made after, offered quietly as proof. By the end, the question has turned around to face you.