May 6, 2006
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When the acclaimed Irish novelist John Banville won the Man Booker Prize last year, he didn’t hold back in his comments. He explains why to Angela Bennie.
WHEN JOHN Banville was announced the winner of the Man Booker Prize last year for his novel, The Sea, “a shocked hush fell on the glittering gathering”, as one report described it, and “ice began to form on their upper slopes”.
The shock was genuine. Julian Barnes’ Arthur & George had been the clear favourite, closely followed by previous Booker winner Katsuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Banville’s The Sea was a long shot, given its dark, dense, meditative mood, its preoccupation with grief and death, its highly self-conscious literariness.
That it had even made the shortlist surprised many – critical disdain had dismissed it as a book with “a lot of lovely language but not much novel”.
Circumnavigating the icy slopes, Banville made his way to the podium to receive his prize. In a low, steady voice of thanks, he said: “It is good to see a work of art being recognised!”
Many cheered, whether for the unapologetic arrogance of the remark or for the truth of it, or perhaps stirred by the whiff of drama in the room. But the sense of outrage among certain of the glitterati only ratcheted up a notch, to spew out the next day in newspaper column-centimetres of invective.
“Yesterday the Man Booker judges made possibly the worst, certainly the most perverse, and perhaps the most indefensible choice in the 36-year history of the contest,” said the literary editor of The Independent, Boyd Tonkin. Another said Banville’s writing was “empty, vapid, cold, humourless, self-indulgent, snooty and pretentious”. A third was just “flabbergasted” at the result.
Banville wasn’t flabbergasted: he meant what he said, he says now from his home in Dublin, and repeats it – his book, The Sea, might be a novel, but it is, first and last, a work of art.
“I said it because I wanted to annoy them, all those literary London critics – they know how to turn the knife. Theirs is such a small world. So I decided to have a go at them. I meant what I said. I do think it good that a work of art has won.
“On the other hand, I do understand the point, why people might think a book like The Sea should not win the Booker. After all, the prize is there in order to keep people reading books, I understand that.
“So they think novels should be about identifiable things, that there should be a story, and all that. They believe that people when they read don’t want to have to think, they just want it to flow over them so they don’t have to think.
“But here is a book winning the Booker that is densely poetic. It is deliberately so. W. H. Auden used to say a poem is the only artform you have to either take or leave, there is no in-between.
“That is the quality I strive for in my writing. And for once they chose a book where the form is more significant than the content, a book that is a work of art, in other words. That is what I am saying.”
It is at this point that Banville now gives a quiet, devilish chuckle – or could it just be a moment of static on the line from Dublin?
“On the other had, all that reaction in the room might be all to do with the fallout from that other matter. You know, the McEwan thing.”
The McEwan thing was the savaging he had given Ian McEwan’s novel, Saturday, some months before in The New York Review of Books, and the literary spat that followed it in the NYRB’s letters page. Saturday (which was long-listed for the Booker) was a “dismayingly bad book”, he had written in his review, “a self-satisfied and . . . ridiculous novel”, its set pieces “hinged together with the subtlety of a child’s erector set”.
The “small world” that is the London literary scene exploded and divided for and against Banville’s critique “right down the middle”, Banville says with satisfaction.
“That cheered me up enormously.” There it was again, that now unmistakeable sound of a chuckle filled with wry pleasure. “But then when John Sutherland (who just happened to be the chairman of the judging panel of the Booker) joined in the fray on McEwan’s behalf, I thought to myself, well, there goes my chance at the Booker.”
As it turned out he had underestimated the Booker chairman. With the judges locked in disagreement to the very end, it was Sutherland’s casting vote that gave the Booker to Banville. The whole thing had been “painful”, Sutherland admitted publicly, “it was by no means a decision of acclamation”.
But in the end, and in the words of the judges collectively, the prize simply had to go to Banville’s “extraordinary meditation on identity and remembrance”, so “utterly compelling, profoundly moving and illuminating, it is unquestionably one of the finest works yet from a sublime master of language”.
This sublime master of language has all his writing life been striving to bring his kind of fiction to that condition of poetry Auden speaks of.
He remembers with amusement his first clumsy, overblown attempt at an opening line for a novel he was attempting at the age of 12: “The petals of white May blossom swooned slowly into the black mouth of the open grave.”
Fourteen novels later, and each sentence, each finely wrought paragraph, is crafted in such a way that the reader has no choice but to go with him into a Banville place, a place both enchanting and disturbing. This place is highly sensuous, where smells are pungent and rank, putting all the senses on edge, where light casts ambiguous shadows, and the language sometimes seems cloaked with inexplicable menace and uncertainty – everything so finely tuned it is as if the whole edifice is balanced delicately on the cusp of the irrational. It is the kind of writing where there is no in-between, you have to take his fiction as a whole or leave it.
“I spend hour upon hour on a sentence and a paragraph,” says Banville. “That’s why I say I hate my books, every one of them. It is because I cannot read them. I know them so intimately, I am so knowledgeable about each part of it, I cannot read it as a reader would.
“When I do, I always see how I can make them better. I think they are just not good enough, compared with the idea of them. I read them with a kind of profound embarrassment.”
Writing fiction, Banville says, is like trying to write a dream.
“At least, that is the kind of fiction I write.
“You are saying to yourself, I am going to take this dream I have in my head and find the language for it, find how to put it into words. That is fiction; and the only analogy I can think of for it is the dream.”
When we dream, says Banville, we dream the most fantastic, complex things. This is what he wants his fiction to be.
“In my kind of dream, you can’t let your mind wander away. Some people don’t want that kind of reading experience, I understand that.
“In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high. It is strange, the imagination, the human imagination, don’t you think? What it does? And how we inhabit other people’s imaginations?”
Banville breaks off and then, quite unexpectedly, as if prompted by something or someone lurking in his own imagination, he says: “You know, I am having a shot at that other kind of writing that I was talking about. Only it won’t be me, it will be Benjamin Black writing it.
“These books Benjamin Black will write, they will not be the kind of books John Banville writes. They will be the kind Benjamin Black writes.”
Benjamin Black is Banville’s newly minted pseudonym. He was born in Banville’s imagination one day recently when he had just finished reading a Georges Simenon detective story.
“Those novels of Simenon, the neglected ones, what I call his hard novels, those novels to me they are the great unacknowledged novels of the 20th century. They are magnificent. And I thought to myself, well, if you can do this with unadorned prose, then I am going to have a go at it, too.
“So this novel Benjamin Black has written (Christine Falls, Banville’s attempt at a detective story), which is me as Benjamin Black, is a piece of craftwork,” says Banville. “It is not an art book, it is completely different to my usual work.”
Nor will Banville let Black take any notice of the critics, whatever they might say of his craftwork. Banville does not read his critics; he does not write for them, he says. He writes “to delight and terrify” his readers.
There is one review, however, that he does cherish.
“It was in 1989 for The Book of Evidence (which was also shortlisted for the Booker that year). I was running for the train and a workman came toward me on a bike, and as he rode past me he yelled out ‘Great f–kin’ book!” and whistled by. That was the best – best! – review I have ever had.
“I suppose the point I am trying to make is that the truth is that all kinds of people read my books.
“It is one world we live in, but our experience of it is different. I want my art to make people look at the world in a new way. I mean, what’s the point of the art of writing if it doesn’t take you into the mysterious?”
John Banville will be a guest at an Age Dymocks book event on May 30. Bookings and information: 9660 8500.
He is a guest at this month’s Sydney Writers’ Festival. The Sea is published by Picador; Christine Falls will be published by Picador in October.
John Banville
1945 Born December 8, in Wexford, Ireland. Educated at Christian Brothers’ School and St Peter’s College, Wexford.
1970 Publishes first book, Long Lankin, a collection of stories.
1971 Publishes first novel, Nightspawn.
1973 Second novel, Birchwood.
1976 Dr Copernicus, first in series of novels about science, wins James Tait Prize.
1981 Kepler wins Guardian fiction prize.
1982 The Newton Letter.
1986 Mefisto .
1989 The Book of Evidence shortlisted for Booker Prize.
1988-99 Literary editor of Irish Times.
1993 Ghosts.
1995 Athena.
1996 The Ark.
1997 The Untouchable.
2000 Eclipse.
2002 Shroud.
2003 Prague Pictures.
2005 Most recent novel, The Sea, wins Booker Prize.