He’ll Be Having A Go At The Lilies Next

He pee’d off the literary crew when, on accepting the Booker Prize for THE SEA, he announced that it was ‘nice to see a work of art win for a change’. Then he got stuck into crime writing – allegedly. Yesterday, in a fine interview with Fiona McCann in the Irish Times, John Banville had a go at the webnauts. To wit:

Banville is full of opinions: on art, on sport, on working life, on the internet. “Most of the stuff that people churn out on the internet is rubbish. People should learn a little bit of reticence and not imagine that they have things to say.”

  Funnily enough, I read the interview on the Irish Times’ website, in which John Banville is, as Fiona McCann points out, ‘full of opinions’ …
  The interview, of course, was marking the publication of the latest Banville novel, THE INFINITIES, which I read a couple of weeks ago and thoroughly enjoyed. Told over the course of one day, as a family gathers about its dying pater familias, Adam Godley, the story is for the most part narrated by Hermes, the messenger of the Greek gods – although, as Hermes points out, the gods being a rather protean lot, the first-person narrative duties do tend to switch about. The tale is a gently meandering one of mortal and immortal failings and foibles, and love stories, and minor infidelities, and quantum physics. The characters are fragmentary, deliberately so, as Hermes wafts in and out of their lives, with the story as a whole offering an incomplete mosaic of a family trapped in the amber of one day. The language, the prose style, is beautifully rendered, even if there are sentences and even whole paragraphs that billow like glass overblown – although it should be said that almost every line is shot through with sly and self-mocking humour. At the risk of displaying an unseemly lack of reticence, I’d say it’s Banville’s most engaging book for some time, an arched eyebrow of a comic novel that seems to appreciate its place in the grand scheme of things, which is, I think, because of its admittedly enjoyable angsty self-awareness, on the lower slopes of the empyrean rather than in the pantheon itself.

The Creature From The Black Lagoon

John Banville (right) recently unburdened himself to The Age’s Tom Adair, ruminating about the phenomenon that is Benny Blanco, aka Benjamin Black. Sample outtakes runneth thusly:

“Now, looking back I think the invention of Benjamin Black was John Banville’s ploy to find his way out of what was suspiciously like a rut. I took the pseudonym to indicate that the venture was not an elaborate, post-modernist, literary joke. It is straightforward. I simply discovered I had this facility for cheap fiction.”

“Yes, in a curious way, it’s something I can’t explain, I feel more estranged from the work of John Banville than from the novels of Benjamin Black. I’ve a certain pride in the Benjamin Black books. Those by Banville I hate and loathe and they embarrass me. They stand there, like a set of awful, unforgiven sins.”

So who sells better? “I couldn't tell you,” he says. “I don’t ask. It’s like asking your bank manager about your bank balance. It’s always a shock — or a disappointment.” Then he relents: “Black, in paperback I’d reckon, outsells Banville. But then, THE SEA — because of the Booker win — sold superbly. My great ambition,” he adds, “is for Black to win the Booker and later on to pick up the Nobel.”

Said with tongue, no doubt, very firmly wedged in cheek. The vid below is taken from the end of the excellent documentary screened on RTE recently, Being John Banville, which was directed by Charlie McCarthy for Ice Box Films, in which Benny may or may not have inadvertently hit the why-writers-write nail squarely on the head …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE SILVER SWAN by Benjamin Black

Incurably curious pathologist Quirke is back, in John Banville’s second novel written as Benjamin Black. It’s two years since the events of CHRISTINE FALLS, and Quirke has given up the drink. He and his daughter aren’t on good terms, his step-father’s suffered a severe stroke, and his step-brother’s lonely and mourning the death of his wife. A bleak picture in ’50s Dublin, then. Things threaten to become even more interesting when Billy Hunt, an old school-friend Quirke barely remembers, calls him and asks a favour: his wife has been found drowned, a suspected suicide, and could Quirke please see that an autopsy is not performed – Billy can’t bear the thought of his wife’s body under the pathologist’s scalpel. Quirke, being Quirke, agrees but does one anyway after he notices a suspicious mark on the dead woman’s skin. It seems he is right to be suspicious, but all that he finds only begs more questions, questions Quirke begins to worry away at, slowly picking his way through a puzzle of drugs, messy finances, and adultery, to reveal the answer. It’s possible that Banville is the best writer at work in the genre at the moment, in terms of artfulness at least. His prose is simply brilliant, gorgeous and evocative and poetic. The sentences he writes stun, the descriptions of the people and the city seem lovingly penned. However, there are moments when you get the sense he’s working on autopilot with these books. Every now and then, a clunker, which would never happen in a book written under the real name. I read somewhere that he writes them very quickly, and if you were to compare the writing here to the writing in, for example, THE SEA, I can certainly believe that. If his writing is this good when he’s not even really trying, if he were to spend the time on a crime novel that he spends on a normal piece of fiction, imagine the result! Quirke is a stunning character, too. Troubled, determined, dogged, melancholy, tee-total here, Banville furnishes him with dimension and makes him fascinating with absolute ease. The characterisation of Quirke alone is reason enough to read the series. As would be the atmosphere of the novel: vaguely sordid, repressed, a little desperate, dark, with everything seeming sinister. The only area where Banville is less than brilliant is the plotting. CHRISTINE FALLS was a little too predictable in this department, though with a brilliant end. The plot of THE SILVER SWAN is actually quite simple, but Banville moves it along at a perfect pace and this time ensures that there’s enough the reader doesn’t know to keep them interested in that department. There are no great shocks (there are, after all, only about three scenarios which could prove to be the truth), but it’s all developed excellently. There’s no punch at the end as there was with the last novel, but the whole thing is more satisfying over all. I can’t wait for the next, apparently called THE LEMUR, and to be serialised in The New York Times.- Fiona Walker

This review is republished by the kind permission of Euro Crime

Alas, Poor Novel. We Knew It, Horatio ...

In common with most crime fiction readers, the Crime Always Pays elves tend on the whole to be readers first, crime fiction devotees second. As far as they’re concerned, a good book is a good book is a good book. They’re not even prejudiced against literary fiction – some of the literary novels they’ve enjoyed so far this year include Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD, Mary Renault’s THE MASK OF APOLLO, Brian Moore’s BLACK ROBE, Sebastian Faulks’ BIRDSONG, Flannery O’Connor’s WISE BLOOD, Primo Levi’s THE TRUCE, and John Banville’s THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE. Of course, Banville’s offering could easily be considered a crime fiction novel rather than a literary one, although there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be both. Quoth Marcel Berlins in Saturday’s London Times, reviewing THE SILVER SWAN:

“John Banville won the Man Booker Prize for THE SEA, but may be remembered just as much for the crime novels he writes as Benjamin Black. I do not imply that he’s dumbing down. On the contrary, he has applied his superb literary skills to a new genre, and discovered – as have his readers – that he’s a wonderful crime writer …”

No quibbles here: Banville is a wonderful writer, and could probably turn his hand to churning out quality pornography if the mood took him. But it’s that “I do not imply that he’s dumbing down” that gets under the skin of the elves’ collective inferiority complex. Why should any genre fiction, or non-genre fiction, require ‘dumbing down’ per se? Yes, there are bad crime writers, just as there are bad porn writers, and bad chick-lit writers, and bad literary writers. But what you generally don’t get in genre fiction, and which is increasingly the case in literary fiction, is a writer disappearing up his or her own fundament. A case in point: Adam Thirlwell’s MISS HERBERT, reviewed last week in the Sunday Times by Tom Deveson, the gist of which runneth thusly:

Thirlwell is a fellow of All Souls, Oxford, as well as the author of a previous novel, POLITICS … the scholarly showmanship is impressive and he flourishes his paradoxes with panache. Here is a novel that “is not really a novel”, one with a theme and variations but “no plot, no fiction, and no finale”. In a jetlagged version of literary history, Diderot and Kundera, Joyce and Hrabal are collaborators. Tolstoy “is a miniaturist”, a descendant of the “economical” Sterne.

Yes, well, huzzah. And there’s plenty more in that vein, until Deveson concludes:

It seems that Thirlwell can’t decide whether he is writing “an inside-out novel”, producing a look-at-me-mum firework display or instructing those less fortunate than himself in how to appear well read.

Which is, as far as we can make out, a polite way of saying that Thirlwell is so far up his own hole he’ll need a miner’s helmet, two maps and a compass to find his way out again. But the real issue is this – that it’s Thirlwell and his fellow fellows, with their novels that aren’t really novels, their book-shaped empty vessels devoid of plot, fiction and finale, who regularly pronounce the novel dead. Now, it’s possible that the doomsayers are commenting exclusively on the literary novel, in which case they’re only slightly wrong. But it’s also possible they’re the writing equivalent of the kid who descends from his ivory tower with a shiny new football, then discovers that the ill-bred oiks in the street are running rings around him, and so declares the game stupid, and takes his ball home, there to puncture it in a sulk. Should we indulge that petulant child as he kicks his flat ball around his ivory tower, or should we encourage him to get back out into the street and compete against the oiks, honing his craft to the point where he can beat them at their own game or finally, honourably, admit he just doesn’t have what it takes to play ball? Answers on the back of a used million-yen note to the usual address, people. Oh – and if anyone come across a review similar to that of MISS HERBERT above, mail it on here, placing ‘Putting The Fun Back Into Fundament’ in the subject line. Here is a novel that “is not really a novel”, one with a theme and variations but “no plot, no fiction, and no finale” ? To paraphrase Oscar Wilde on the death of Little Nell, it’d take a heart of stone not to laugh at that.

Ay Caramba! ’Tis John Bartville!

It may be a little behind in its Benny Blanco from the Bronx (aka Benjamin Black) coverage, but given that the elves are huge (as in, tiny-but-keen) fans of The Simpsons, we couldn’t resist the following post from The Writer’s Times :

Interesting piece in today’s Metro about John Banville’s new novel. THE SILVER SWAN is a break from his usual literary output. It’s a thriller, based on something that happened in his local Dublin neighbourhood. Writing as Benjamin Black, Banville has set the novel in the 1950s, exposing the dark side of Ireland, where church and state ruled with a grimness rivalling regimes behind the Iron Curtain … Adopting a different style seems to have helped Banville get back on track with the style which won him the Booker in 2005 for THE SEA.
“... I wrote the Black books, [says Banville] which are all about character and plot, to give myself a bit of a kick.”
It seems to have worked – he’s 6,000 words into a new Banville novel, although he says that, for a writer, all that matters is writing the perfect line: “Each time I sit down to write, I think of Bart Simpson inscribing on the blackboard, ‘I must write a better sentence.’ And I’d sacrifice anything to get a sentence right.”

Insert your own ‘Homeric struggle’ punchline at your leisure, folks …