As clear as mirror glass. John Banville in interview

Author: Shane Barry

 

John Banville’s new novel, The Sea, presents us with Max Morden, recently widowed (or is that widowered? as Max mordantly wonders) and returned to the sea-side resort of his childhood. While turning over fragments from his married life with Anna, Max also recalls the strange bond he formed many years ago with the dazzling Graces, a family whose inestimably superior social status is signified for the young Max by a touring map of France casually askew under the back window of Carlo Grace’s stylish car. At first Max’s dawning awareness of the opposite sex is stirred by Carlo’s wife, Connie, but it is finally through his experiences with the children—the precocious Chloe, mute Myles and the au-pair Rose— that Max finally forfeits his innocence.

John Banville discusses with Shane Barry aspects of The Sea as well as the eternal verities for the novelist: death, comedy and book reviewing.

Barry: In The Sea, Max Morden initially seems like a prototypical ‘Banvillean’ narrator: erudite, solitary, and nursing a secret. Yet Morden, in his willingness to share the vulnerability of his childhood and the anguish over losing his wife, seems more simpatico than, say, either Freddie Montgomery or Axel Vander. Are your characters’ hearts thawing out or am I being unfair to your earlier protagonists?

Banville: Readers do seem to find Max more sympathetic, more warm, than my other narrators. I find this odd, as I would have thought Axel Vander, Victor Maskell (whose name, by the way, I could not recall, and had to look it up in The Untouchable just now—so much for one’s attachment to one’s creatures) and Freddie Montgomery were fairly heaving with emotion, in their pitiable way. It is, I suppose, my failure that the sadness and desperate self-protectiveness of these characters is not more apparent. For my, shamefaced, part, I regard my novels as overly emotional and far too hot. But who am I to pass judgment? The books are in the public domain, and I can no longer claim, nor would I wish to claim, proprietorship over them.

Barry: The Sea is a death-haunted novel. One of the things that popped into my head when reading the book (and The Sea is a book designed, I think, to prompt reverie) is that the novel itself is a genre obsessed with death. Other non-abstract forms such as painting or poetry might feature death at times but they don’t circle around it to the same extent. What is it that draws writers to the subject, or is there something about the form that almost cries out for its treatment?

Banville: This is an interesting point, and one that never struck me before. I think your insight is valid—the novel as a form is haunted by death. I wonder why this should be? If one thinks of Beckett, of course, one realises that the voice in the novel, even a third-person voice—or last-person voice, as Beckett liked to say—is engaged in a constant babble against the encroaching dark. There are great exceptions in the other arts—Mahler, for instance, or Edvard Munch, but yes, the reigning god of the novel is Thanatos.

Barry: One of the enjoyments that comes with The Sea is its dark humour, which partly stems from the narrator’s occasional weariness or impatience with his task of describing the world around him. For example, during the visit to the ominously named consultant Mr. Todd, Max looks out at world beyond the glass and sees “..an oak, or perhaps it was a beech, I am never sure of those big deciduous trees, certainly not an elm since they are all dead…”

What I sense behind such digressions is that the traditional omniscient narrator, our guide to the 19^th century novel, now seems absurd. All that is vaguely appropriate is the first-person voice, a voice that is forced to filter the world because there’s only so much knowledge behind it. Do you agree?

Banville: Well, what is behind such digressions is the desire to provoke a laugh, or at least a melancholy smile. Just as you contend that the novel is death-haunted, I would say that it is essentially a comic form, just as life itself seems a comical venture with occasional irruptions of the tragic. I know what you mean about the 19^th-century omniscient narrator, but I feel increasingly that we are deluded in our patronising attitudes to the great Victorians. Think of Thackeray’s knowing Grand Narrator, or Tolstoy and his impatience with “mere fiction”. Postmodernists avant la lettre.

Barry: On the issue of style (which every critic seems obliged to mention when discussing your works), I’d like to offer a fairly well-known quote from Cyril Connolly, a figure you’ve considered in a number of your reviews. It’s from Enemies of Promise, in which (as you know) he undertakes the fairly arbitrary division of writers into Vernacular and Mandarin:

"The Mandarin style [...] beloved by [...] those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel."

What’s your view of Connolly’s pronunciamento in the light of your own work, which many might see as belonging to the Mandarin tradition?

Banville: First of all, I hope it doesn’t seem that I am trying to make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. In fact, my style strikes me as a form of inward rhetoric, a rhythmical chanting that is very close to the way in which we all speak inside our heads. Nor do I try to make my language convey more than my narrators mean or feel. My aim is to write in a clear, straightforward style, and I am bold enough to believe that I occasionally achieve some success in that regard. There is not a sentence anywhere in my work which, in terms of syntax, grammar and vocabulary, would not be understood by an eight-year-old equipped with a dictionary. I would not expect a child to absorb the nuances of meaning and suggestion in those sentences, but I do strive to make them as clear as mirror-glass, with all the ambiguity that implies. The Mandarin’s gown would sit very awkwardly on my frame.

Barry: In a review of The Sea in Prospect magazine, your Irish Times colleague Fintan O’Toole seems to suggest that your wish to avoid stereotypically ‘Irish’ topics paradoxically makes you “so recognisably an Irish writer.”

Yet The Sea, as with so many of your other works I’ve read, seems acutely aware of the dirty (open) secret of Irish life: class. The young Max Morden describes climbing the tiers of petty society in the seaside resort as “ascending a ziggurat.” Class is not so much a nightmare Morden wishes to wake up from—it is his petit bourgeois status he wishes to escape. Is there any validity to this reading?

Banville: Yes, I suppose The Sea does have some things to say about class, but not in any social-commentatory way. The gap between the world of the Graces and of Max’s parents is meant only to heighten the poignancy of young Max’s love for Connie and then Chloe, and is certainly not intended to make comment on the realities of Irish life. I believe I’m recognisably an Irish writer because I write in Hiberno-English, a literary patois which I find wonderfully rich in poetic ambiguity.

Barry: A character in Aldous Huxley’s Point-Counterpoint, who works in that nebulous profession, literary journalism, famously reflected that “A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.” Given your own extensive reviewing and the recent hoopla over your negative assessment of Ian McEwan’s Saturday, how much of the novelist’s travails do you keep in mind when passing judgement?

Banville: I remember that Huxley line—Cyril Connolly frequently made the same point—and I agree with it. As I emphasised in my review of Saturday, it afforded me no pleasure to say the things about the book that I did. I am acutely aware of the labour and sometimes anguish that goes into the making of a novel, and I would not lightly dismiss even the poorest effort in the genre—and whatever might be said about that review, it was not written lightly. It pains me to criticise a colleague’s work, although I have no doubt Ian McEwan would consider himself a colleague of mine only in the most strictly technical sense. Sometimes, however, one has to say clearly and loudly what one thinks. The novel is taken less and less seriously these days, and one has a duty of care for the poor old battered medium.

Barry: Finally, who do you rate among your peers in the fiction-writing business?

Banville: Always an invidious question. I will give a conditional answer. I think the early death of W.G. Sebald was a disaster for literature. He was doing something entirely new, forging a novel synthesis—all puns intended—and I believe would have done wonders, had he lived. His death is the most significant event in contemporary letters.