This is a tricky way to begin a conversation but the thing needs to be settled from the start: what is it about John Banville which causes some folk to grimace at the very mention of his name? Here he is at 64, his international status glowing, a Man Booker winner of 2005 vintage for The Sea, and his every work before and since deemed vital to review. Is it his obvious erudition that annoys: that elegant, finely wrought prose which has readers gasping for air and, not infrequently, the dictionary?
Ah, the dictionary. He seizes the word, and one senses the imminence of a Banvillean surge. “The dictionary is a wonderful book and people should be sent to it regularly,” he says. “Do you know, when you get up in the morning and you stretch and you yawn, there’s a word for it? Not a beautiful word, not one that trips lightly from the pen, but a marvellous word: pandiculation. Isn’t that wonderful? So now, when you yawn and stretch, you’re pandiculating.”
Banville is the author of 18 books whose fastidious sentences are, for some readers vexingly mannered, and, for others brilliantly spellbinding. But even his critics concede he’s unrivalled in contemporary Ireland as a literary stylist. In 1989 he made the Man Booker shortlist for The Book Of Evidence. In 2002 he was on its longlist for The Shroud. Back in 1976 he won the James Tait Black Memorial prize for Doctor Copernicus, and over the years there have been many other honours including the Guardian Fiction prize for Kepler, and the American-Irish Foundation prize for Birchwood.
The Infinities, the latest Banville novel published this month in paperback, unfolds over a single summer day. Like a pinched nerve, the pain of being human invades the story but so, too, does bawdy mischief as the gods look down on the Godley family, spying, teasing and seducing them as they totter towards mortal dysfunction.
In person Banville possesses an eloquently wicked sense of fun. His conversation is witty, sometimes withering, often provocative, and in those moments when he does sound rather highfalutin for a former newspaperman – “I’m a classic autodidact, anxious to show off every little bit of learning” – he saves the situation by pulling the rug from under himself, as when he told his Infinities publisher that the main voice in the novel would be that of Hermes. The poor chap’s face fell and, in a long-suffering voice, he replied “Oh, another crowd-pleaser, eh John?”
So, he accepts that some do find his novels hard work - for all its critical acclaim, a Banville title may sell no more than 5000 copies. But here in the Morrison Hotel, overlooking the Liffey on Merchant’s Quay in Dublin, we veer towards his other identity, the more commercially driven Benjamin Black, whose output might seem the very stuff Banville appeared to slight in that 2005 acceptance speech when he remarked of The Sea, that it was “nice to see a work of art” winning the Booker.
Black’s distinction is a series of thrillers which began in 2007 with Christine Falls, a powerfully atmospheric piece of crime fiction set in 1950s Dublin. Achingly moving but threaded through with the irreverent drollery of Irish life, its central character is Quirke, an irascible pathologist who in childhood was adopted from an orphanage by distinguished Mr Justice Griffin. Now, in adulthood, Quirke moves in lofty legal and medical circles, but in his grim line of business he stumbles across a heinous secret whose exposure not only convulses respectable lives but also shatters everything he holds dear.
It’s a tale resonating terribly with the real-life scandal of child abuse which has capsized the moral authority of Ireland’s Catholic hierarchy. In February its 24 bishops were summoned to the Vatican for an unprecedented trouncing by Pope Benedict because of their obsessive protection of errant cleics in the Dublin archdiocese, who, over decades, violated children in their care.
Why did Banville choose to mine fiction from such buried shame in the persona of Benjamin Black? Writing as Black, he says, comes easier to him than when he’s writing as Banville. “What you get with Banville is the result of concentration. What you get with Black is the result of spontaneity. The first is an artist, the second a craftsman. I don’t want the novels to be social-realist tracts, but I do want them to be about the way things actually are.”
Originally Christine Falls was intended as a mini-television series. When those plans fell through, he turned the plot into a book. “I sat down at 9am one Monday morning and the writing flowed. By lunchtime I’d done 2,000 words which for Banville would have been a scandal. By then he would have only done 200 words.” But this slow, consuming insistence on finding precisely the right words is Banville’s way of telling the reader: “Look, if you are going to read this, you have to read it this way…”
That sounds like intellectual bullying. “Well, sometimes it’s good to be bullied like that. What I’ve always tried to do is give my prose the same denseness and weight of poetry, and you cannot read a poem and do your knitting at the same time, or think about sex, or what you’re going to have for dinner. You have to read a poem or not read a poem. I want my books to be the same. You read them, or you don’t. If you don’t, that’s fine.”
Such single-mindedness lands Banville with the “arrogant” tag, a claim he bats away in bafflement. “How could I be arrogant? There’s nobody more critical of my work than I am. The more people tell me how beautiful it is, I think: ‘What do they know? They must be fools because I see it as botched, botched, botched.’”
When the official reports into the child abuse scandal were published, Banville was struck by the degree of physical violence also meted out to impoverished, vulnerable children in the church-run “industrial” schools which were virtually workhouses and subject to state inspection. “The sexual abuse was horrendous, but the violence was also extreme. In effect children were sent to a bloody gulag.” But if, as Banville contends, everyone outside those hideous walls had their suspicions, why did no one speak out earlier?
“You can know and choose not to know at the same time,” he says bleakly. “The Germans did that. The Turks did it and are still doing it with the Armenians. The Rwandans did it. This is a very, troubled, dark, little country.” Could he live anywhere else? “I’d love to live in Italy but I wouldn’t be able to write a word there. I’d just live. I can only write here.” He points through the window to a rain-filled, platinum sky. “Isn’t that absolutely beautiful. That’s the colour inside my mind.”
In the years when the Celtic Tiger was rampant, the Irish, says Banville, thought everything had changed. “But things don’t change. Look, I’ll be criticised for saying this, but the problem with Ireland is that we have no sense of social responsibility.
“That’s a terrible indictment but it doesn’t make us feel guilty at all. We simply don’t believe it’s incumbent on us to grow up, and that’s because we always have someone to blame. It used to be the English. Now it’s Brussels.”
Is he saying that people are more appalled by the financial crisis than they are by the church’s disgrace? “Take a wild guess. Of course they are, because money is power. Everything is money. My favourite 19th century novel is Vanity Fair which is about money, sex and power. It’s not like Jane Austen where there’s the pretence of a couple hating one another until the day they discover they’re in love. Thackeray has no sentimental notions of love or any of those things. He just says: ‘Look, this is the world.’”
By now the Morrison Hotel is shaping up for the cocktail hour, but John Banville has work to do. He stands, stretches his arms and politely stifles a yawn before putting on his coat; a moment of sly pandiculation. Then he’s off through the door, heading along Merchant’s Quay under that metallic sky still leaking rain on Dublin.
The next Benjamin Black novel, Elegy For April, will be published by Mantle in October. The Infinities by John Banville is published by Picador at £7.99.
