JOHN BANVILLE AT PLAY
'The consciousness of death gives us life'
You can (occasionally, faintly) hear seagulls in the background when you listen to my podcast with John Banville, recorded at his home in the ancient fishing village of Howth, near Dublin. We reached his address a little early and had some time to wander up and down the narrow street. A low wall between houses suddenly revealed a stunning view below: a very old but neatly kept cemetery with a time-ravaged abbey, and the sea beyond, idyllically adorned with a stationery fleet of sail boats. On this clear day there was a lot of blue, above and below, sky and water seamlessly merging into a peaceful expanse. It all felt fresh and crystalline, even the gravestones and the ragged, hollowed walls of the ruin. Predictably, I thought of the sea motifs in Banville’s writing - from his Booker winner THE SEA (2005) to the latest novel in his Strafford & Quirke crime series, THE DROWNED. The sea is rarely peaceful in a Banville narrative. Neither character nor backdrop, it layers his storytelling with mood and history. And foreboding. THE SEA opening contains this passage: ‘ The seabirds mewled and swooped, unnerved, it seemed, by the spectacle of that vast bowl of water bulging like a blister, lead-blue and malignantly agleam. They looked unnaturally white, that day, those birds.’ In THE DROWNED, the sea speaks of danger, and death.
John Banville is solicitous when he receives us, aware of our long day (Max Anstruther, the podcast audio producer and I had landed in Dublin early that morning and had already recorded another interview - and we would be flying back to London that same evening). We go up a flight of stairs into a bright, airy room and are warmly invited to settle down with a glass (and bottle) of excellent white wine. While Max works on setting up the microphones, our elegant host appears to be getting a little worried: ‘How long will this take?’ He has a dinner appointment, very soon.
I had saved my Ryanair cabin allowance for a small but heavy bag full of books by John Banville. It didn’t seem possible to talk to him only or even mainly about the forthcoming paperback of THE DROWNED, or the crime novels alone. Some of his novels interconnect, in surprising and quite playful ways. And all speak in one voice, the intricate, sinewy Banville dig at the human heart.
He began by presenting a pessimistic take on the world today, and his own place in it, convinced that no one reads him or authors like Philip Roth anymore. ‘The great era of the European culture is dead. It began to die in the first World War. It was killed off in the second World War. We live now in an age of frivolity. Self-regard. Nonsense.’ But this wasn’t said without a bit of a twinkle, and sounded more melancholy than doomsaying.
Approaching eighty, Banville is surprised he is still here, and still writing. ‘I really thought I would be dead by my mid seventies. But, he says, ‘I don’t know what else to do. I live by words. I interpret the world to myself through the mesh of words and I can’t do otherwise.’
I LIVE BY WORDS. I INTERPRET THE WORLD TO MYSELF THROUGH THE MESH OF WORDS AND I CAN’T DO OTHERWISE
He speaks of death a great deal. ‘My wife died about three and a half years ago. And when you lose a loved one, especially a close loved one, you enter partly into the land of the dead.’ But he doesn’t sound morbid. On the contrary: ‘A certain irresponsibility has crept in, which I like. In my middle years, I was much too serious.’ He corrects himself: ‘No, much too solemn. Serious is fine. Solemnity is the death of art.’
John Banville takes his art very seriously, but not himself. This makes for a deeply enjoyable, fun and often funny conversation, despite the earnest themes only a writer of his depth, scope and history can share, with a light touch. He thinks some of his novels are considered ‘too difficult’. This doesn’t worry him: ‘I love putting puzzles into books.’ He is a great admirer of Georges Simenon’s writing, both his crime and his literary (so-called ‘hard’) fiction: ‘Georges Simenon was the father of my crime novels’. John Banville points out that Simenon himself seems absent from his books. It seems to me Banville inhabits his novels completely, in a filigree of thought and emotion and especially language entirely his own.
By the end of our interview, the initial pessimism is overshadowed by an ode to the power of imagination: ‘The imagination is our greatest, most precious faculty. It’s as precious to us as sight, capacity to speak, capacity to hear, because imagination makes the world, makes life. Imagination is always battling against tyrants. It makes the world complex. Makes the world intricate, makes the world deep… Ideas are a constant interrogation of the world by way of the imagination.’
John Banville allows us a glimpse of the room in which he writes, every day. In longhand, in notebooks made especially for him. They begin by looking like empty books, and are gradually filled with his rich, often provocative narratives. But then he types up those words himself. There is a gleaming Mac desktop on another desk. And at an interesting angle, his late wife’s old loom (she was an accomplished textile artist). He is still weaving stories. ‘I’m on the brink of my second childhood, so of course I’m at play.’
EVERY DECEPTIVE LIE IS A CRIME BECAUSE IT’S A SUBVERSION OF THE REAL
Later, it will occur to me that I should have asked him why his crime novels are set in 1950s Ireland (he was born in 1945). For the greater simplicity of those times? There is nothing simple about the darkness of the Strafford & Quirke themes; but maybe it was a period that had just survived the recent horrors and was not yet aware of the new ones.
We say goodbye to John Banville and walk towards the harbour. As we stand admiring its changed light (it now has some of that rosiness he mentioned), we spot him, hurrying past us at a distance, a determined figure of a man who needs to get somewhere on time and has much to do, and to enjoy.
THE DROWNED by John Banville is published by Faber