I have an appointment with John Banville in Dublin. By email he suggests I go the north side of the Ha'penny Bridge – “which every taxi driver knows” – and call him from there. It is a warm, midsummer’s day and the white, cast-iron, pedestrian bridge over the Liffey feels as if it is about to buckle under a madding crowd of tourists. Soon Banville arrives to rescue me and leads the way to a nearby flat which he uses as his office. The din of people and traffic makes conversation difficult but the soon-to-be 70-year-old zips through the tumult like a thoroughbred parting a field of also-rans. Dressed from top to toe in black he could be mistaken for a priest hurrying to afternoon mass.

In the flat, in the absence of “anything stronger”, he produces an impressive espresso. The flat is modern, bijou and comfortably cluttered with pictures and photographs and books, many of them dictionaries. The view of surrounding buildings is not one to die for. Though he lives in Howth, a seaside suburb on the north side of Dublin Bay, Banville has long preferred to commute to the city to work. “Listen,” he says, smilingly broadly, “you can’t even hear the seagulls.” Even Proust, I say, who was so obsessed with avoiding noise that he had his walls cork-lined, would have approved. He nods, Proust being one of the writers with whom he is often compared. Indeed, the ending of The Blue Guitar, his latest novel, seems to echo the overture to À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, while it begins – “Call me Autolycus” – with a nod to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

Was this deliberate? “No,” he mulls, “no, it wasn’t”, pleasantly surprised at his ability instinctually to evoke past masters. As he told me on a previous meeting more than two decades ago, “It’s true that books are made out of other books. It’s an infusion of life. I’m quite happy with that. I quite like that; I like that sense of community.”

The Blue Guitar’s narrator, Oliver ‘Ollie’ Orme, is a once-successful painter who is uncommonly gifted with words. He is also, says his creator, “a monster”, like Freddie Montgomerie in The Book Of Evidence. “No painter,” Banville accepts, “could ever write like that.” In that regard, the novel is unrealistic but then aren’t they all? Banville’s are often related by cultured, intelligent, unsavoury men of the educated class whose use of language is that of celebrants who may have been weaned on the poems of Yeats and the prose of Joyce. Underused words such as ‘finical’, ‘cullion’, ‘rubious’ and ‘farthingales’ come naturally to them. Likewise lies and self-justification, cruelty and evasions. Above all, though, they are storytellers.

As Ollie is at pains to point out he is light-fingered, given to purloining objects and other men’s wives. When first we meet him he is in confessional mode, having stolen Polly, the wife of his friend Marcus. But since Ollie’s own wife, Gloria, discovered the affair he has bolted and is holed up in his childhood home where he has come to table his account of the year that has gone by in a blur of lust and deceit. “Now, as to the subject of thieving,” Ollie relates, “where to start? I confess I’m embarrassed by this childish vice – let’s call it a vice – and frankly I don’t know why I’m owning up to it, to you, my inexistent confessor. The moral question here is ticklish. Just as art uses up its materials by absorbing them wholly into the work... so too the act, the art, of stealing transmutes the object stolen.”

Thus does Ollie attempt to explain and perhaps excuse his actions. This is familiar territory for Banville, as he would be the first to admit, unapologetically aware that a degree of repetition is inevitable in a career that has spanned more than 40 years. In general, he prefers to write in the first person, the better to identify with whoever is at the heart of the narrative. Even in novels such as Kepler and Copernicus, where he used the third person, readers only see the world from one viewpoint, forcing us to consider whether what we’re told is trustworthy or otherwise. The unreliability of fiction, its partiality, says Banville, is one of its characteristics that appeals to him.

“You see, I don’t really like fiction as a form. It annoys me. I don’t trust the form; I don’t trust the way that novels cosy up to the reader and say, ‘Do you want to hear a story? Let me tell you a story.’ I feel there should be something harder – in all senses of the word – in literature. I suppose I read more poetry than I do fiction.”

He writes sentence by sentence, adding one on top of another, as if it was no more taxing than bricklaying. He knows things are going well when the afternoon metamorphoses into evening without him noticing. It’s then, when he is most intensely involved in whatever he’s writing, that he can lose not only all track of time but who he is. The man who writes such books as The Sea, which a decade ago won the Man Booker Prize, he insists, is not the same as the one who is in demand for signings and to opine at book festivals. Normal life is usually restored with a glass or two of wine which, he adds, is why many writers drink. If they didn’t, they’d go insane. Or so the theory goes.

Banville compounds the confusion by having an alter ego, Benjamin Black, under which pseudonym he produces thrillers featuring a whisky-soaked, pathologist-cum-sleuth called Quirke. Set in Dublin in the 1950s – “that low, dishonourable decade” – when it was a small, inward-looking, religion-ravaged, melancholically beautiful town, they stand out from others in the genre by being stylishly written. In terms of popularity, suggests their author, this is not necessarily a good thing, given how well many writers – no names, no pack-drill – do who write really badly. The problem, says Banville, without false modesty, is that he is incapable of writing that badly: “I just don’t have it in me.”

Nor, it seems, is he inclined to inject an excess of violence into the stories, which may account for their relative lack of success in places such as Germany where there is a correlation between dismembered bodies, sadistic serial killers and sales. In any case, in the era in which Quirke operates, “one murder would have been on the front page of the papers for weeks”, which as it is makes the fatality count in the novels improbably high.

Banville, who was born in Wexford in 1945, spent much of his early adult life in newspapers, initially at the Irish Press then at the Irish Times. It’s a period in which he needs no prompting to wallow nostalgically. It was the days of hot metal when the unions called the shots. “If you touched a piece of lead they’d down tools. You wanted to say to them, ‘Look, you’re destroying your own trade; you’re behaving like madmen.’ But they hated it, they hated it. Ah, it was great fun. Many’s the afternoon my secretary protected me when I stumbled back from a bibulous lunch. We should write something about the old days of journalism, shouldn’t we? That time just before it died.”

He left the Irish Press intending to make his living as a writer but luck initially eluded him and he had little option but to return to newspapers. At the Irish Times he had access to books by the lorry load which, he says, ruined his and his wife’s Saturday trips into Dublin to browse the bookshops. “I’d walk into a bookshop and I’d seen all the stuff. It destroyed bookshops for me. Mind you, I loved being books editor because you got new books every day. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to take them all home. Shall we go for a drink?”

Crossing the Ha’Penny Bridge Banville considers where best to aim for, settling on the Palace Bar, a haunt in Quirke’s Dublin of Flann O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan. There, I ask about Ireland and its economic implosion five years ago. Everybody, he says, has their own cautionary tale to tell over the dinner table, the bigger the debâcle the better. Even Mary Robinson, the country’s former president, I’d heard, had fallen victim to negative equity. Banville gives me look that says, “tell me about it”. At the height of the boom, when it seemed everyone in Ireland thought they had inherited a gold mine, he was told that a strip of land he owned might be worth 400,000 euros. Unsurprisingly, he was inclined to take the money and run but when an estate agent boasted he could double that for him and then some he wavered. Needless to say, the windfall did not materialise and that same plot is now worth little more than a peat bog. Banville takes a sip of his wine and shakes his head ruefully, as well he might.

John Banville is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Monday at 11.45am. The Blue Guitar is published by Viking at £16.99.