Banville, John (1945- ) novelist

Born in Wexford, Ireland, on December 8, 1945, John Banville was the youngest of three children. Banville’s father was a clerk in a garage, and his mother was a homemaker.

Banville received his education at a Christian Brothers’ school in Wexford and also attended St. Peter’s College there. After having completed his schooling, Banville took a job with the Irish airline, Aer Lingus. Thanks to Aer Lingus’s employee discount, he was able to travel all over the world, once flying to San Francisco for £2. Of his family and his youthful travels, Banville has said his parents were “small people; small, good, decent people, who lived very circumscribed lives. Leaving the nest so early was hard for them and, when I look back now, I realize how cruel I was,” a comment that sounds remarkably like many of Ban- ville’s introspective, confessional narrators.

Banville lived in the United States from 1968 to 1969, where he met and married textile artist Janet Dunham, with whom he has two sons. It may have been Banville’s demeanor as he wrote that contributed to the end of the marriage; his wife has said living with him as he created was like living with “a murderer who has just come back from a particularly bloody killing.” He currently lives in Dublin with his partner, Patricia Quinn, and two daughters.

When he returned to Ireland after his time in the United States, Banville worked for the Irish Press, as a subeditor, then an editor. In 1970 he published a volume of short stories, Long Lankin, to very good reviews.

When the Irish Press went out of business in 1995, Banville took a position with the Irish Times, where in 1998 he was appointed literary editor. Banville left the Irish Times in 1999 and has earned his living as a writer ever since, although he continues to write reviews. He has written 18 novels including four that focus on the lives of scientists and scientific ideas: Dr. Copernicus (1976), Kepler (1981), The Newton Letter: An Interlude (1982), and Mefisto (1986), collectively known as Banville’s “scientific tetralogy.” In these works, Banville explores astronomy and mathematics as alternative methods or languages of perception. Following the scientific tetralogy, Banville wrote his “art trilogy,” three novels narrated by art collector and murderer Freddie Montgomery: The Book of Evidence (1989), Ghosts (1993), and Athena (1995).

Known as a writer’s writer, Banville writes deliberately difficult novels. His writing is philosophical and dense, full of literary allusions and esoteric language. Among the most accessible of his works, however, is the roman a clef The Untouchable (1997). A roman a clef, literally, a novel with a key, depicts true events and characters disguised as fiction. The Untouchable is based on the story of Anthony Blunt, a royal art curator who was also a spy for the Soviet Union during the cold war.

Banville has won numerous prizes for his work. In 1973 he won both the Allied Irish Banks’ Prize and the Arts Council Macaulay Fellowship for his novel Birchwood. Dr. Copernicus was awarded the American Ireland Fund Literary Award (1975) and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction (1976). The Book of Evidence was nominated for the Man Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious award for fiction, in 1989, and in the same year won the Guinness Peat Aviation Award. His novel The Sea won the Booker Prize in 2005.

Banville claims that every Irish writer must be influenced by either James Joyce or Samuel Beckett. Although he wrote his first, unpublished novel at the age of 12 (a poor imitation, he says, of Joyce’s Dubliners), Banville feels his literary ancestor is Beckett, and the similarity can be seen in the dark humor that characterizes Banville’s work, in his many narrators searching desperately for meaning, and in his Irish and European landscapes. Other influences include the French novelist Marcel Proust, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevski, and the British playwright Harold Pinter. Referring to his beautifully tuned prose and his clever and learned use of the language, many critics have compared Banville with the Russian-born novelist Vladimir Nabokov.

Banville has a reputation of being rather curmudgeonly when it comes to literary fiction, which he feels is not ordinarily given the recognition it is due, and he has very high standards regarding what he considers good writing. In a review of fellow novelist Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2006), Banville called the work “a dismayingly bad book.” When criticized by one of the judges for the Booker Prize for getting a few minor details about Saturday wrong, Banville replied, with deep sarcasm: “Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the department of trivia.” He thought the spat ended his chance of receiving the Booker for The Sea and was quite surprised when he won. Surprised or not, Banville could not help commenting that “It is nice to see a work of art win the Booker Prize,” implying that past winners were not. Many critics were dismayed that Banville was chosen over several more popular writers and expressed their opinions in the press. Banville responded, “If they give me the bloody prize, why can’t they say nice things about me?”

Critical Analysis. The Sea (2005) has been praised as Banville’s finest novel. Like many of his works, the plot of The Sea can be summarized in a few words. The richness of the story is in its language and the complex consciousness of the narrator rather than in the sequence of events. Max Morden, an aging Irish art critic, has recently lost his wife of many years. Overwhelmed by grief, Morden, whose last name itself suggests death, can no longer stand to stay in the house where he and his wife lived together. Thus, he decides to return to the Irish seaside town of Ballyless, where he spent his summers as a youth. His stay at Ballyless this time is punctuated by memories—memories of meeting his wife, Anna; their long marriage; her diagnosis of cancer; her long dying; memories of his parents and youth; growing up in shabby apartments; and staying in the humble chalets at Ballyless, where those who could not afford better spent their holidays; memories, too, of the Graces, a family staying at a beautiful home known as “The Cedars,” whose wealth and sophistication fascinated Max. It is through the Graces—whose name, too, is suggestive of all Max sees in them—that Max first learns about both love and death.

Banville’s prose style is rich. His descriptions— which some have called baroque, referring to the highly ornamented style of painting and music that was popular in the 16th and 17th centuries— are unforgettably vivid. The Sea begins:

They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for years had known no wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes . . . 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 green.

These are, of course, the words of Max Morden, and his anguish and despair can be heard in every syllable. The world he sees is grim, cancerous, dangerous, and insignificant at the same time. He imagines his fellow lodgers at the Cedars (now a rooming house where he stays) as sleepless as he, “lying awake . . . glooming gaunt-eyed into the lead-blue darkness,” and even a piece of furniture seems to reflect Max’s despair: “A chintz-covered sofa sprawls as if aghast, its two arms flung wide and cushions sagging.”

During his stay at the Cedars in Ballyless, Max does little but thinks constantly, sorting out his youth, his marriage, his work, his relationship with his daughter Claire, and the summer he spent adoring the Graces. This is a dark, elegiac novel, and it cannot be said that Max recovers from his wife’s death or even that he gains a reason to go on living, in any conventional sense. Yet he does learn something about himself. He worries that he did not really know his wife, then thinks, “I know so little of myself, how should I think to know another?” Then he is struck with another realization, “The truth is, we did not wish to know each other.” Then another, “I wanted to be someone else.” This final realization links Morden’s marriage to his youthful love of Chloe Grace and of her mother. Desperately trying not to be the person he was, Max adores the Graces and loses himself in their world. His marriage to Anna was part of the same process of escape.

The sea is the controlling metaphor of the novel, as it comes to represent both change and the indifference of the universe to human hopes. The sea even invades Max’s dreams. He sits near the water’s edge, where the little waves “speak with an animate voice, whispering eagerly of some ancient catastrophe, the sack of Troy perhaps, or the sinking of Atlantis. All brims, brackish and shining. Water beads break and fall in a silver string from the tip of an oar. I see the black ship in the distance, looming imperceptibly nearer at every instant.”

American novelist Don DeLillo cites Banville’s “grim gift for seeing people’s souls.” Indeed, Banville writes with a terrible honesty about the human condition: everyday dishonesties, mistakes, misremembered memories, and cruelties.

Other Works by John Banville:
- Christine Falls. Writing as Benjamin Black. New York: Holt, 2007.
- Eclipse. New York: Vintage, 2002.
- Shroud. New York: Vintage, 2002.
- The Silver Swan. Writing as Benjamin Black. New York: Holt, 2008.
- The Untouchable. New York: Knopf, 1997.

Works about John Banville:
- Hand, Derek. John Banville: Exploring Fictions. Dublin: Liffey Press, 1991.
- Imhoff, Rudinger. John Banville: A Critical Introduction. Dublin: Irish American Book Company, 1998.
- McMinn, Joseph. John Banville, a Critical Study. Dublin: Gill and McMillan, 1991. The Supreme Fictions of John Banville. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.