The Sigla Blog

John Banville is a master of language and story-telling. He considers himself “a post-humanist, not post-colonial” writer and is the author of several award-winning novels. His new book, ‘The Sea’, echoes his 1989 masterpiece, ‘The Book of Evidence’. Sinéad Gleeson interviewed him in Dublin recently.

In the run-up to a recent interview with John Banville, I tackled a slew of his books. On mentioning this to some friends (all avid readers, one or two journalists), the reaction was alarmingly similar. It ranged from genuine shudders to sympathetic head-bobs. The general consensus on the Wexford-born writer varied from “heavy-going” to “very intense” but my favourite remark was merely: “Jesus, good luck to you”. Others, who have never even read his work, explain that the weight of his literary reputation has put them off. So I began my Banville bender primed and ready for the intensity of his writing, the torrents of language. What I hadn’t expected was to find so much humour in the books. When Banville’s work is discussed, it’s all about the writing, the philosophy, the Nietzschean overtones, Nabokovian echoes - never how funny he can be.

“I’m so glad you said that”, he tells me in The Merrion Hotel, “most of the time people talk about me being this very serious, literary writer; they miss out on the humour in the books and that makes me sad”. He sounds serious, but there is a hint of playfulness in the remark and he’s bashful in a “what the hell do I know?” sort of way during the interview. He answers many of the questions with a question and feigns ignorance when asked about the predictable comparisons to Beckett and Joyce (”Do I get compared to Joyce and Beckett? I don’t think I do.”) and he admits that he would be delighted to be grouped with them - but Banville is more of a European than an Irish writer. Any attempt to saddle him with the title of post-colonial writer is resisted. “I’m more of a post-human writer. Going right back to the Renaissance, people believed that man was the centre of the universe, and for me, he’s not. It’s about everything else going on around us.”

This “everything else” is the collective methodology of his search for meaning. To look back at the breadth of his work, Banville has written, and attempted to find meaning in, well, just about everything. Born in 1945 in Wexford, Banville attended a Christian Brothers’ School and St. Peter’s College in Wexford. He didn’t go on to university and ended up working for Aer Lingus and later as a journalist. He was a sub-editor on ‘The Irish Press’ and Literary Editor of ‘The Irish Times’ until 1999. When asked if being a journalist is a help or hindrance to being a writer, he is quick to point out that he was a sub-editor. Which goes some way to explaining his obsession with the order and meaning of words and language. In his writing, this is most obvious in his “scientific” books - ‘Dr. Copernicus’, ‘Kepler’, ‘The Newton Letter’ and ‘Mephisto’ where the inadequacy of language to explain the phenomena of the world is explored.

From grappling with meaning from a scientific angle, Banville moved along the trajectory of the imagination to the aesthetic world for his ‘art’ trilogy of ‘The Book of Evidence’, ‘Ghosts’ and ‘Athena’. These books, like the quartet before them, sees Banville revisit themes and even reintroduce the same characters. This revisitation marks his work, picking up issues and ideas and tilting them to inspect them from another perspective. This intertextuality makes for compelling reading.

Banville is the kind of writer whose spaces and silences are as crucial as what is clearly delineated. Even when I was away from his writing, I thought about it and at a recent production of Conor McPherson’s play ‘The Lime Tree Bower’, I was reminded of Banville’s stance on language. In the play, an arrogant, bibulous lecturer attempts to undermine a language theory by Professor Konigsburg, a visiting (but fictitious) philosophy lecturer. The theory that he has built his career on, is that language is dying. On reading John Banville, this theory is tested to its limits. Even the most vocabulary savvy reader can be thrown by words Banville uses. In a world of immediacy and blanket dumbing down of the written word from chick lit to text message idioms, language is at the core of his writing. When asked if he’s trying to do something as polemical as educate the reader, he is humbly diffident.

“I suppose in a way I like to make the reader think about language and the words we use.” In his new book, ‘The Sea’, his protagonist Max voices his concerns about it: “how imprecise language is, how inadequate to its occasions” Banville’s protagonists are always male, of a certain age, dogged by self-loathing, unfulfilled and to varying degrees, caddish. (In fact, they have much in common with John Self, the pathetic figure in ‘Money’ by Martin Amis, a writer comparable to Banville in many ways). In the case of the ‘The Sea’, it’s possibly his most emotional book. It tells the story of a tragic childhood memory, which has haunted Max, but a whole other narrative evolves alongside it.

“This book didn’t start out as a novel about a man whose wife has died of cancer a year ago. It was just a tale about the sea, a tale about a childhood, but Max wouldn’t let me just tell that story, it was as if he kept interrupting with the story of his wife”. Death in Banville’s other books is violent and many of his characters are murderers. In his masterpiece, ‘The Book of Evidence’ Freddie Montgomery’s savage killing of a maid with a hammer is chillingly told. In ‘The Sea’ however, death is sedate, dignified - even at one of the book’s most startling moments.

Morality and mortality overlap in Banville’s writing and perhaps turning 60 this year has resurrected a Yeatsian epiphany on age. Max is a pitiful figure, a “paltry shivering thing”, aging, bitter and condemned by his daughter for “living in the past”, but this is just as applicable to Freddie and to Victor Maskille in ‘The Untouchable’. So is that where most of his characters reside? “Memory is a very potent force and there’s no future and present, only past.”

‘The Untouchable’ is also the book where Graham Greene is immortalised - and not in very flattering terms. Greene was on the judging panel for the Guinness Peat Aviation Award in 1989. ‘The Book of Evidence’ won the award, but Greene was unwilling to award the prize to Banville, despite its support from the other judges. In ‘The Untouchable’, the vile character of Querell is a “second-rate novelist” and a thinly disguised Greene.

In his novel ‘Shroud’, Axel Vander becomes a prisoner of the past and all its layered intricacies. One reviewer said of the book: “The story is like an onion, with Banville stripping away layer after rotten layer of Vander’s history until we are at the heart of darkness indeed.” This is a perfect synopsis of Banville’s narrative approach. The way the story is relayed is anchored to how the characters reveal themselves to us. They are very real and very recognisable, even at their most malignant. It is akin to being presented with a Russian doll, each containing many inner selves, some of which we identify with: “Well we all wear masks in our public lives which change from situation to situation”, he says, “that’s what people do”. Banville constantly inverts fact and fiction, the real and the unreal, particularly in his early historical fiction novels. He has said in the past that melting fact and fiction is a process that “achieves a kind of illumination of character.”

The weight of his reputation may well jostle with the calibre of his writing for posterity, but there’s no doubting the impact of his work. Banville, like him or not, is a stunning, complex author and incomparable to any other living Irish writer. “I don’t know how my work will be judged, it will be years before we’ll ever know if it makes an impact. Its impact will be further extended thanks to his inclusion in The Liffey Project, an organisation devoted to translating and making available contemporary writing. Also involved in the project is Ian McEwan, whose novel ‘Saturday’, recently came in for some terse criticism from Banville (’It’s a very bad book” he tells me). He has described himself as a “machine that writes” but Banville is far from mechanical and may well be the best humanist writer working today.

Review: The Sea
Review: The Book of Evidence