The master

Banville the Booker Winner. Banville the Book Reviewer. Banville the master craftsman who fashions beautifully written novels like Mefisto, The Book Of Evidence and The Sea, mapping the inner psyches of his protagonists with forensic precision while co-opting neo-classical themes and allusions. Banville the cold Nabokovian prose sculptor who couldn’t make us care about his characters if he bludgeoned their puppies to death before our eyes. Banville the pariah of the chattering literati who accuse him of aloofness and arrogance. Banville the highbrow stylist slumming it in the noir genre under the non de plume Benjamin Black to the derision of an Irish crimewriting contingent who maintain he couldn’t plot his way out of a paper bag. Banville the hatchet-jobber who’s driven his pen into the hearts of everyone from Nadine Gordimer to Ian McEwan (whose Saturday he termed a “dismayingly bad book”). Banville the ungracious victor, who, after scooping the Man Booker with The Sea in 2005, sniffed something about being glad that the prize went to a work of art for a change.

You’ll have heard a lot of good, bad and ugly stuff about John Banville. The writer’s former wife Janet Dunham famously described him as being like “a murderer who’s just come back from a particularly bloody killing” during the creative process. He joined us in the Morrison Hotel a couple of weeks before this year’s Booker ceremony, straight from a dentist’s appointment, to talk about The Lemur, the third novel he’s written under the Benjamin Black alias, recently serialised in the New York Times.
Now, there’s no nice way to say this. The Lemur is a dud. Well written yes, and strangely, compulsively readable, but lamely plotted, with characters not so much drawn as cut out of cardboard. There are times the reader gets the impression that for all his professed love of the crime genre, Banville is looking down his nose at it, given to precisely the kind of men-emerging-from-the-shadows cliches the book’s narrator attempts to pre-empt and neutralise with glib references to Agatha Christie. Which is a pity, because both his Quirke books Christine Falls and The Silver Swan were serious and substantial works of Dublin noir.
“I’ll be doing two more at least,” the writer says. “One of them will be a Quirke book. People like Quirke. People like a rogue.”
To my regret, I never got around to telling Banville exactly what I thought of The Lemur. Without being rude, I usually consider it fair to tell a writer if I have problems with his book during the interview rather than in print. As it happened, Banville had to rush off to see a man about a shower instalment just as the wine had begun to loosen his tongue (Saint Emilion, €10.50 a glass).

PETER MURPHY: The Lemur is quite a fatalistic book. Everyone seems resigned to their preordained end.
JOHN BANVILLE: Completely unlike life! No, I mean, that’s how I see life. I think life is a dark business shot through with occasional gleams. Don’t you?
Well, my inner Hollywood screenwriter would like to think we make enough mistakes to at least recognise them and try to avoid repeating them.
Yeah, you’re younger than I am. You know something that really strikes me? When you’re young and you make some awful blunder that keeps you blushing for days, you think, “At least when I get old, I’ll look back on this and smile tolerantly.” You don’t. You still blush when you look back.
Much has been made of your dual role as a critic and novelist.
No, no, book reviewer.
There’s an argument that says it should be a pre-requisite for a reviewer to have written books.
There is an argument to say that you really should know the actual technical process of putting a novel together before you start commenting on it. But you can equally put the opposite argument and say, “No, it’s better to come to it fresh and not know, to read it as a reader, not as a writer.” At the very simplest level, one eye is constantly looking for representative pieces to quote in the review. No reader reads like that, and in a way reviewing destroys your capacity to read. I read very little fiction now because I can’t get back to that Garden of Eden stage, the innocent reader.
You’ve never had any trouble quelling your inner diplomat when reviewing novels. How do your contemporaries take it?
They take umbrage. A few years ago I was at a New York Review of Books party, and I was introduced to about four people, and I realised at the end of the party – because of course I’d forgotten – that I’d written scathingly of all their books. And I always assumed that people would not behave in society as they might when they’re ashen-faced reading your bad review of their book. But y’know, I was wondering why these people were moving away and looking daggers at me.
Any particular encounters that stand out?
The most famous one was years ago they sent me a book of short stories by Nadine Gordimer, and I wrote a very scathing review. And four or five years later there was this literary festival or something, I was coming to the reception for the opening, and I was passing through this empty room, and there was Nadine Gordimer standing alone, so I introduced myself and I said, “Ms Gordimer, I’m John Banville” and she turned her face away, wouldn’t speak to me. It’s fucking childish, y’know? She has the bloody Nobel Prize, she has people fawning at her feet, and here’s some obscure little Irish writer who wrote a bad review of her book and she won’t speak to me. Such childishness. Such childishness. And they never forget. They never forget a bad review.
How does it feel to be on the other end of a panning?
I don’t read reviews anymore because they just bore me. It was like becoming a vegetarian, y’know, you cut down and cut down and cut down. I was eventually reading the first paragraph and the last paragraph, and then the first line of a review and the last line, and then I just stopped altogether. Martin Amis said writers never get enough attention. You’re stepping up to get the scroll from the King of Sweden and you’re still whining!
People said the same thing about your comments after you won the Booker. You said you were glad the prize went to a real book for a change. Was that a reference to any previous Booker winners in particular?
Well, most of them are duds. Most people get the prize for the wrong book. It’s interesting, I was talking to the literary editor of The Guardian at lunch the other day about this, saying that the Booker is a very important prize, and it shouldn’t go to my kind of book except once in a while. There’s been a run of odd wins in the last number of years. I’m not sure that mine should have won that year from the point of view of the prize or the point of view of the publishing business, because the Booker is there to get books off the shelves, that’s important. If the business doesn’t thrive, we don’t thrive. If Zadie Smith or Julian Barnes or Kazuo Ishiguro had won the year that I was in, their books would probably have sold a million copies more than mine sold. I really think what the Booker should do is have a permanent cadre of judges who are there for life, and bring in two new people from outside. You cannot have five new people each year. And they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel now.
So what’s your idea of a good Booker jury?
There should be a publisher, a critic and, shall we say, a layman, and they should be permanent jury members, they should know what the business is and know what this prize requires to keep it in front of the public, because it’s immensely powerful.
Have you met Ian McEwan since the furore over your Saturday review?
No I haven’t. I suppose if I went back there now I wouldn’t write the same review, because I didn’t think there would be such a to-do about it. I didn’t think it was a good book. I was mainly writing about the fact that it had been so enthusiastically received as a 9/11 book, which I thought was a bad thing. I was really taking a swipe at the reviewers – unfortunately Ian McEwan was standing in the way of my swipe.

The Lemur is published by Picador