John Banville Copyright: Louise Kemeny

John Banville is the author of several novels including The Sea, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2005. After publishing three crime novels as Benjamin Black, he has returned with his latest work, The Infinities. He speaks to us about his new book, not despising the audience, lies, reality and pagan gods.

Interviewed by Katherine Wootton

TL: You write reviews and you were a literary editor and section editor for a while; how do you feel about things moving online and the newspaper books sections slowly diminishing or being put online?

JB: Well I think it’s a pity, but then I grew up in the era of hot metal. I was talking to a young woman the other day and I mentioned carbon paper and she said
‘what?’

Things have changed so much in my lifetime. The thought that I would finish a book and press a button and it’s in my agent’s office, my publisher’s office; I used to laboriously type those things up, with carbon paper, so I find it hard to – I mean I don’t really think about online things, I’m sorry to say it doesn’t occur to me. It’s the access that’s extraordinary.

I had a funny experience a little while ago – I went to Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival in Harrowgate in Yorkshire, I went because the name was so wonderful. And I like Yorkshire. I went to the festival as Benjamin Black, obviously, and there was a question and answer session, and I said that I wrote very slowly as John Banville and write quickly as Benjamin Black, and this seemed to annoy people, and bloggers wrote about this, about how incensed people were, and they weren’t in fact. I mean, this is all patent nonsense, nobody said anything to me, I didn’t hear anybody in the audience being annoyed by this, but it caused a great kerfuffle, I was in much odium with crime writers and readers and so on.

I’m quite proud of my Benjamin Black books, from the point of view of a craftsman; my John Banville novels I loathe and despise, I think they’re better than everybody else’s but they’re not good enough for me. They’re a standing affront to me – because I couldn’t get it right.

The problem is, it seems to me, that there’s very little chance of checking the accuracy, of these blogs; in the Harrowgate question and answer thing, I made a rather dim joke and said I fully expected Benjamin Black to win the Nobel Prize while I would be forgotten, this is reported by a blogger as me saying I have much more serious things to do than crime writing, I’m going to win the Nobel Prize as John Banville. Which bore no relation to the truth. But what am I supposed to do about that? I can see interviewers coming to me and saying ‘I believe you think you’re about to win the Nobel Prize’.

Also, of course, there’s the question of access, everybody’s opinion now can be heard, and most people haven’t got opinions, they just have received ideas, but they seem to have received most of them from taxi drivers.

Apparently, in a Sunday newspaper in Ireland, I was quoted by the interviewer as saying I thought budget airlines were a bad idea because they brought people to places they shouldn’t be in.

What I meant was I didn’t think they were made happy by foreign travel. Did you ever see happy tourists? They’d be much better off staying home.

In fact I have a plan, when I finally can’t write anymore, when I have to do a real job to make money, I’m going to start a travel agency, the stipulation being that you may not travel beyond twenty miles of your home so you discover your own place. So this is my plan.

But this was reported in the paper as me saying that the poor shouldn’t be allowed to travel.

There’s a hugely popular phone-in programme in Ireland, late in the afternoon, and I’m told that this got on; the guy running the show said ‘Banville says you people shouldn’t be allowed to travel, aren’t you aware of that’. So here I’m now pilloried for this as well. When I was growing up, if you phoned up a radio station, you were regarded as a crank and they would hang up on you. Now, you can speak on the radio for minutes on end.

On the other hand, I have to say, the internet and word processing and all that is incredible, it’s incredible that people can be in instant communication with each other, that people can check facts, even if the facts are slightly woozy.

You can check almost anything on Google and Wikipedia and so on, that can’t be bad. If I lived in a totalitarian country – Thailand or China – I would be very glad of the internet.

That instant access to information, it’ll be harder for tyrants to keep the truth from them, from the people.

I don’t write for reviewers, I don’t write for critics, I don’t write for my fellow writers, I write for the man on the bicycle and the woman at the checkout counter, and there are more of them, and they are more receptive than people imagine [...] and they shouldn’t be written down to.

TL: You talked a bit about the Booker yesterday (at a reading at the London Review Bookshop on September 8), because people were upset that you weren’t nominated for it. How did the Booker help you as a writer, or did it make a difference into what you were able to write?

JB: My bank manager wasn’t waking in the night when he thought about my overdraft.

It’s a wonderful prize to win, it’s still in the English speaking world the most important one there is; it probably sells more books than the Nobel prize does. It’s that big red fire engine that you want for Christmas, you know, I’m a little boy, I want that fire engine, we all do, because it makes a fantastic difference: certainly for the particular book but also one’s reputation goes up a couple notches afterwards.

So it’s a wonderful thing to have; but as far as the writing is concerned, the writing is no different, it’s always work, makes no difference whatsoever to it. I’ve never been pressured by publishers, nobody’s every tried to tell me what I should write or what I shouldn’t write or that I should write by a specific time. Maybe I’ve been very lucky in my publishers, but I’ve always found them wonderful to work with – with one or two exceptions obviously, but I suspect I’ve been very lucky.

The Booker prize is very good for publishing. Publishers need to sell books, because nobody’s going to be able to afford to do that slim volume of poems, if at the other end they haven’t got big blockbusters, selling lots and lots of books, so it’s very important.

It’s also important for editors – because my editor believed in my book The Sea, and against all expectations it won the Booker prize, my editor then can say to the money people, to the accountants, when he gets some 24-year-old with a book that’s difficult and awkward and not an obvious bestseller, he can say to them, ‘well, you know, this book is a little like Banville’s book and Banville’s book won the Booker prize’ – it strengthens their hand as well, so all down the line it does an awful lot of good.

Now, the downside of it is, if you’re not on the list, you can forget about it, so it’s reduced the number of books in a year to six; it makes it very difficult to sell The Infinities, because it wasn’t on the longlist.

But, as far as the writing is concerned, it makes no difference whatsoever; well everything in life makes a slight difference, we’re constantly being shifted and changed and carried away, so of course it has some, but not a notable difference.

TL: Have you read any of this year’s nominees?

JB: No, I haven’t read any. I read very little fiction. I don’t like novels, I read poetry and I read philosophy and I read history and so on. I should read more fiction, but when I do I’m usually disappointed.

And you know, I’m getting to an age where I’m starting to re-read novels, it’s a phenomenon, everybody over sixty starts to re-read, turns into an old codger who won’t, doesn’t want to read new stuff. I’m sure there’s a whole world of wonderful new writers out there; I don’t read them.

TL: Are there any writers that you particularly enjoyed that you thought were sort of unsung or underappreciated or underpublicized?

JB: You mean contemporary writers?

TL: Yes, or if you think there’s someone secret in the past.

JB: Well, I’ve been championing [Georges] Simenon’s, what are called his hard novels, his romans durs, and I’ve been championing Richard Stark, his crime novels, his Parker novels are far superior to crime novels, these are wonderful.

The University of Chicago Press has just brought out six of them, reissued, and they’re masterpieces. There are at least half a dozen I’ve read that are as good as anything being done in so-called literary fiction; he’s a wonderful writer. Richard Stark – powerful books. Start with The Outfit, which I think is the first one.

TL: You’ve said in interviews as well that you consider writing [Benjamin] Black novels as craft and the books you write as yourself as art –

JB: Yes. It’s a silly distinction, but it’s one that I make.

I would prefer to see no genres at all; the fact that there are genres, I think it’s mainly to do with publishing and marketing; booksellers like to have a crime section, a literary fiction section. “Literary fiction” is a new phenomenon, when I was starting out there was just fiction; literary fiction – I wonder what the other kind is.

I would just like to see bookshops with stands to say ‘good books’ and all together.

I don’t like making that distinction, but if I have to make a distinction – and obviously I work this way- I’m quite proud of my Benjamin Black books, from the point of view of a craftsman; my John Banville novels I loathe and despise, I think they’re better than everybody else’s but they’re not good enough for me. They’re a standing affront to me – because I couldn’t get it right.

Of course I never get it right, which is why I keep scratching that particular itch. But the Benjamin Black ones I can get satisfaction from doing, a certain craftsman’s pride.

TL: So after writing the Benjamin Black books and coming back to doing this sort of fiction was there anything that you were really keen to do, now that you weren’t writing within the certain specific trope of the genre? As you were saying you don’t particularly like the idea of genre –

JB: Well, most of my books have plots, despite the fact that people say that they haven’t.

The Sea is full of plot, there are twists at the end, this [The Infinities] has a twist at the end. It’s more common than we think – Beckett for instance does that all the time, Beckett was a great fan of series noir - French crime fiction, and all of his books have plots, even the most abstruse and the most apparently arid and they all have twists at the end.

In Company, there’s talk about all this stuff and at the end he says ‘alone’ – it turns out that all this is invention. It’s a wonderful thing, [and] falls apart at the end.

In Molloy, he has the character Moran who is on a long, long quest and he starts out by saying ‘It is midnight, rain is beating on the window’ after this immense quest he comes back, he says ‘I sat down, I wrote ‘it is midnight, rain is beating on the window,’ it was not midnight, it was not raining’ and again the book collapses like a house of cards.

So I see my books as quite straightforward, within the tradition, I’m certainly not an avant-gardist, you know, these are quite traditional books, but they have a particular inflection to them that strikes some people as strange because the prose is very demanding.

I try to make the prose as dense and as demanding as poetry, and I quote Auden as saying that the poem is the one thing that you either take or leave; if you listen to music you might drift away to think about your dinner or sex or something, the same is true of painting, the poem – you have to read it or you don’t read it, and I want my books to have that quality, you either read them or you don’t. The mind can’t drift.

I’m trying to recreate reality; I’m trying to get the reader to see, to hear, to smell, to taste, the world as it is. Not as other novelists and poets tend to think reality is, I want to get at the real thing itself, which is behind our everyday concerns, I’m trying to get at the essence of the thing itself – it’s not easy.

TL: I think that is the thing that people find difficult about it [Banville’s writing] is that it is written in a very poetic language and people aren’t used to reading poetry, they’re used to reading workmanlike prose.

JB: People have said to me ‘why are you always talking about the weather? Why, why don’t you just tell us the bloody story?’ and I said ‘because the weather is part of the story’.

I am, if I’m anything – people say I’m post-modernist, which I’m not – if I’m anything I’m post-humanist, because I do not see humans as the centre of the universe, I don’t think we own the place.

This is sort of a hangover from the inculcation of religion into us when we were children.

When I was six, seven years old, the most influential book on my life, I suppose, has been the Catechism of the Catholic church:

Who made the world? God made the world.

Why did God make the world? God made the world for man’s use.

All lies, all nonsense, but extraordinarily influential. I mean, that Catechism was an amazing book, it has the answer to everything, and also when you get to the end of it, it tells you all about concupiscence and lust and things like that, which you’re never going to find out about elsewhere.

But I don’t believe any of this, I don’t believe that man is the centre of the universe; we’re highly evolved animals, we keep forgetting that, we think that at some point the connection between us and the animals broke, and we floated away and became gods, and we’re not.

We are immensely, immensely clever creatures, and we are the most successful virus in the world, but we’re still animals.

I think that it’s a great tragedy that we’ve lost our connection with the animal world, I think that’s a real disaster for us, this extraordinary arrogance that we have about ourselves and what we are and what we’re capable of. We’re capable of magnificence, we’re capable of producing Johan Sebastian Bach, and Einstein, a Rembrandt, Samuel Beckett. We’re also capable of many lesser things, but this arrogant attitude we have, we’re destroying ourselves, we’re destroying the world- this is my green speech – I do think it’s a disaster that we’ve lost our connection with the larger world.

TL: In The Infinities your sometime narrator is a god, one of the Greek pantheon, who says ‘I’m only omniscient sometimes’. Is that sort of a way of poking fun at the idea of the whole ‘well, the gods created the world’?

JB: Oh, no. I suspect the whole thing is taking place in Adam Godley’s head, it’s all made up. As of course, it’s all happening in my head.

I wrote the gods in because I was originally going to base the book quite closely on Kleist’s play Amphitryon, the skeleton of it is still inside the book.

But no, I wasn’t commenting on religion.

Of course, as a citizen, rather than a writer, I would say that monotheism has been a total disaster for us. All the war, mayhem and power in the world – a return to paganism would be a wonderful idea.

To call them Zeus and Hermes and Athene and so on is to give names to things that we don’t understand, and the Greeks were very clever in that, because we live within a very, very narrow band of reality.

We don’t even see things that cats and dogs can see – they can see in the dark, they can smell things – we don’t have any of that, we just exist in this tiny, tiny band, we don’t see infrared rays, we don’t see the neutrinos that are streaming through you and me and through the entire world even as we speak – we have no sense of any of this, so there’s a whole enormous version of reality that’s out there that we know nothing about, that we don’t see.

Einstein was always very interested in this. He was always very suspicious of the fact that mathematics – which is man made, and we forget that, we tend to think mathematics is this natural entity, but we invented it – that all these new discoveries about reality, they all fit in with mathematics. Einstein was always suspicious of that, which makes me think he might have been thinking in the same way as Wittgenstein: we only say those things that we have the words to express.

Einstein was suspicious that we see only what we are capable of seeing, and we take this to be the totality of the world and reality, but it’s not.

So there are all kinds of things we know nothing about, to give them names is a wonderfully poetic way of dealing with reality.

My friend John Gray, the English philosopher, he always insists that religion is a kind of poetry, and it is, it is a poetic version of the world. The trouble is, as we know to our cost, when people believe it absolutely – they have the right one, their god is the only one – things get very sticky indeed.

So, return to paganism.

TL: It’d be much more fun, anyway. You said earlier, something one of your characters says, something that Adam the elder says, that he hates his work, it’s better than anyone else’s, but it isn’t good enough for him -

JB: Did I say that, did I put that in the book?

TL: You did, I can even tell you the page number –

JB: Oh, I believe you, I believe you.

TL: But then he goes on to say ‘All my peers are dead’ – how do you feel about that? Is that a continuation on a theme, or is that just Adam?

JB: I suppose I feel, to some extent, like Keats wrote, I’m living a posthumous existence.

The people whom I would have seen as my heroes, my exemplars, are all gone, I don’t see a Joyce or a Kleist or a Beckett or a Henry James, I don’t see them in the present world, we seem to be in a cultural trough at the moment.

But then, everybody over sixty says that – oh, in my time, there were giants striding the earth – but we seem to be in a period of what we were talking about earlier at the beginning, these rapid changes.

When I was growing up, life was very slow indeed, and even then in the fifties and into the sixties, artists were still regarded as figures of significance.

The artists are probably still there, but the significance has moved over into the pop word, pop music and all the popular culture, they are now the upcoming figures, and that is a world that I don’t really understand – I never said that before, I’m not sure it’s true.

It sounds true when I say it.

John Banville Copyright-Louise Kemeny

People say to me – ‘how can you start a book talking about Zeus, Hermes, all this – people will have to look it up’ and I say, well, so what? Why shouldn’t they look it up? Why shouldn’t I demand that they do a little bit of work? It’ll be good for them. They’ll enjoy it. The Dictionary and the Dictionary of Mythology, these are wonderful books, full of adventure and play, sexy as anything.

TL: You’re also assuming that your readers aren’t stupid or uninformed.

JB: Of course, I think that this is something that has happened in my lifetime, the audience has become completely despised, and I don’t despise the audience.

The two best reviews that I’ve ever had; in 1989 when The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Booker, I had a period of notoriety– three minutes out of my 15 minutes of fame. I was running for the train one morning going to the newspaper office, and there was a man on a bicycle, riding by, saw me, recognized me from television or newspapers, came towards me riding very fast.

I thought, Oh Christ, I’m going to be attacked, and just before he got to me, he said, ‘Great fucking book.’ And I thought I’ll never ever have a review as good as that.

The second one is; my wife was in Marks and Spencer’s in Dublin, and when she gave her credit card, the woman said ‘are you related to John Banville? Tell him The Sea is the most beautiful thing I ever read.’ And she said ‘tell him that came from a checkout woman at Marks and Spencer’s.’

Isn’t that wonderful? These are the people I write for.

I don’t write for reviewers, I don’t write for critics, I don’t write for my fellow writers, I write for the man on the bicycle and the woman at the checkout counter, and there are more of them, and they are more receptive than people imagine, and they shouldn’t be talked down to, and they shouldn’t be written down to.

I think that we got this extraordinarily beautiful place to live in by accident. We don’t deserve it, we’re doing our best to destroy it, but it keeps forgiving us.

TL: You started to base your book on Amphityron and it went somewhere else; Hermes again, is kind of like that, he is portrayed in the story as sometimes interfering and making people-

JB: He’s says I’m only omniscient sometimes, yes –

TL: Do the characters get away from you? Do they start doing things on their own when you’re not paying attention?

JB: Oh no, writers say that but I always think they’re either fools or liars.

Your characters are you – they’re all me, they have to be, I’m the only person I know from the inside. Know is an ambiguous word there, too.

But I’m my own material.

In this book I found myself curiously drawn to these little marionettes of mine; I liked Helen, who is sexy as anything, I liked Petra, poor Petra. And I sort of almost missed them when the book was finished. This is very strange, it’s probably to do with getting old, I miss my little people.

I think this book is something of a break with the books that I’ve been writing since the early 1980s, that a lot of it’s in third person, there are different perspectives, it’s not just one maddened eye, as in Eclipse and Shroud and all those books, so I suppose it’s probably closer to being a traditional novel than many of the books so far.

So maybe I’m becoming traditional and soft – the new soft, caring Banville. But I did, I quite liked some of the characters and sort of miss them.

TL: Did you not feel that way about your earlier characters, do you loathe and despise them, or hold them in contempt?

JB: Oh, no, I just regard them as my invention, the puppets at the end of my string.

Of course I tried to give them as much life and as much bone and blood as I possibly could, there’s no point in writing fiction if not.

I love Borges, I love Italo Calvino and so on, but I don’t love them very much because the people in them, there’s no blood, there’s no blood there, they’re just mind.

My project is an examination of reality. I came across a wonderful formulation in the Goncourt journals the other day; Jules de Goncourt wrote ‘Flaubert and my brother and I have ushered in a new kind of writing’ which he said is a scrupulous investigation of reality in the style, in a prose that speaks the language of poetry, and that absolutely sums up my project, but there’s as much evidence put on this meticulous examination of reality as there is on the poetic quality of the style.

I’m trying to recreate reality; I’m trying to get the reader to see, to hear, to smell, to taste, the world as it is. Not as other novelists and poets tend to think reality is, I want to get at the real thing itself, which is behind our everyday concerns, I’m trying to get at the essence of the thing itself – it’s not easy.

One way that I do it is by a highly developed prose style that wants to mesmerize the reader.

I imagine that my books are either – you love them or you hate them – I imagine a couple of the Booker judges just absolutely hated that book, just – ‘all that god stuff, what is he doing’ – and I can understand that. I don’t approve of it, but I can understand it.

But that’s the risk that I take, four years ago the Booker panel saw what I was doing, or enough of them did for me to win the prize, and I like to think that readers see it as well, and they do, they come up and tell me that they do.

TL: A lot of your characters – certainly I would say the primary male characters, somewhat less with the women – are somehow bifurcate, they’ve got their outside face, the person they have that interacts with the world, and then this sort of ogre within who’s trying to get out and do something –

JB: But this is true, isn’t it? Isn’t this true of human beings?

The example I always use is the man who gets out of his lover’s bed, walks into the street, and meets his worst enemy – they are two different people.

The person that you talk to now is not the person who will go and have lunch with my wife.

As Eliot says, we present a face to meet the faces that we meet, this is not a new discovery of mine, and of course, we all need secret in our lives.

Our sexual lives are veiled, have to be, otherwise there’d be no civilized society, and that is not just our sexual lives, I think that the inner life is a – I do have that strong sense that there’s another person there.

Of course Stevenson got it perfectly in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, there is somebody else inside that has to be kept in, otherwise there would be anarchy.

But I think that’s what the books are trying to do, they’re trying to be a celebration of this extraordinary place we live in, and of us as well. That’s all any artist ever tries to do – is to say look, isn’t it wonderful, isn’t it terrible, but isn’t it wonderful as well?

The only thing that I ever wrote in one of the books that was me speaking directly is a paragraph in The Book of Evidence where he says “I never got used to being on this earth, I think our presence here is a cosmic blunder”, and that we got the wrong planet, and he says “but what about the people who were meant to be here? Are they off on the other side of the universe feeling unhoused and lost like us?”

And he says no, they would become extinct long ago, for how would they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world made to contain us?

And that’s how I think about it. I think that we got this extraordinarily beautiful place to live in by accident. We don’t deserve it, we’re doing our best to destroy it, but it keeps forgiving us.

I’ve been watching those trees across there, the gods have been playing in those trees since we’ve been talking here.

Absolutely beautiful place. Astonishing, and tender, and cruel and so on as well, doesn’t mean us any harm. The world will swipe us down, it doesn’t mean us any harm, it just happens to be indifferent to us, which of course, causes our fury.

But I think that’s what the books are trying to do, they’re trying to be a celebration of this extraordinary place we live in, and of us as well. That’s all any artist ever tries to do – is to say look, isn’t it wonderful, isn’t it terrible, but isn’t it wonderful as well?

All of the talk about the intellectual approach, all of that is incidental to that project: trying to, I suppose, celebrate… Isn’t that what art tries to do, to celebrate?

Anyway, that’s my little testament for you.

TL: Thank you so much.

JB: You’re very welcome