By this stage, he didn’t need to state his indiscretion policy. The man widely regarded as Ireland’s greatest living writer, renowned for his bejewelled sentences, has already told me that his country’s 1916 uprising was “a disaster”, and enabled “a bunch of fanatics to take over”.
He has described himself as “not a good father”, and explained how “for 40 years I divided my time between two women”. As for his latest novel, which we’re supposedly here to discuss, “it’s a hard book to love”.
The novel in question is Venetian Vespers, which, for the record, I did love. With its combination of carefully wrought prose and pageturning mystery plot, it’s a kind of halfway house between the uncompromisingly literary works that made Banville’s name and the thrillers he’s published every couple of years since 2005 – initially under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, until Banville “killed Black off ” in 2021.
Although he does them “as well as I can”, he has ruffled crime writers’ feathers by not regarding these as “real novels”. So does he mind that, as I discovered at Gatwick, if you go into a bookshop now, you’re more likely to find his thrillers than any of the masterpieces he laboured over, at a rate of a few bejewelled sentences a day: for instance, 1989’s Booker-shortlisted The Book of Evidence, or 2005’s Booker-winning The Sea, or what he’s called his “last real novel”, 2022’s The Singularities (an undeniably tricky summation of his long-standing themes of memory, science, art and the slipperiness of reality)?
“Good God no,” Banville replies. “I mean, they’re very difficult
books. They’re certainly not airport books. I was on a plane once and I saw a guy settling down, opening a book I’d just published, and after about a page and a half…” – at which point, he performs an amused impersonation of someone looking both baffled and indignant.
Now a well-preserved 80, Banville was born in 1945 to lower middle-class parents in Wexford. Despite their wishes, he decided against university. “I wish I’d had the three years of irresponsibility and drinking,” he says, “but I’m so glad I escaped academe.” Instead, aged 17, he moved to Dublin and worked for Aer Lingus, taking full advantage of the cheap tickets to which he was entitled, and travelling the world: “It was the best choice I ever made. I went to Paris, Rome, Greece. I remember flying first class on Lufthansa to San Francisco for two pounds.” In the late 1960s, he became a newspaper sub-editor, and ended up as the Irish Times’s literary editor from 1988 to 1999.
By then, he was also an established novelist – although not one who’d ever been keen on what he saw as his country’s parochialism. “I was going to be an international novelist of ideas,” he says looking back, with a half-indulgent, halfmocking chuckle. “So I read people like Thomas Mann, Rilke. I was especially fond of the Germans because I took myself very solemnly. But I was in my 20s. We all make fools of ourselves in our 20s – but, my God, it was so wonderful to be young as well.
“As I’ve got older, I’ve become more playful, and more aware of my own ridiculousness… There’s something wonderfully comic about being old. I don’t just mean forgetting why you came upstairs. But to see oneself falling to pieces, there’s a certain dark comedy in that which I enjoy.”
Banville’s age also means that he writes less. “I used to be able to work 10 hours a day. I can only work two or three now. So I start later and later, so I stay away from the booze.” I put to him Kingsley Amis’s observation that the trouble with retirement is there’s no reason not to drink. “Exactly,” he replies, lifting his glass. “And there’s many reasons to drink.”
But this clearly isn’t the only reason he’s unlikely to call it a day. “I don’t know what people do who don’t write,” he says, sounding genuinely puzzled.
Meanwhile, if his internationalist pretentions now strike him as funny, he’s still no Irish nationalist.
‘We all make fools of ourselves in our 20s – but it was so wonderful to be young’
“There’s a phrase here – ‘you have to wear the green jersey’. You have to be on the team. I’ve never believed in that nonsense. When one of the reports came out about child abuse in Ireland, I wrote a New York Times piece saying everybody knew. We knew in the same way that people living beside Belsen knew and didn’t know.
“That didn’t make me any friends in establishment Ireland. If I’d written it in the Irish Times, nobody would have cared. But I went outside the country and criticised it. That was the unforgivable sin.”
Banville bears an abiding hostility to the Catholic Church that dominated Ireland for much of his life. “When I went to Eastern Europe in the 1970s, I thought: ‘It’s Ireland.’ They had the Communist Party running their lives. We had the Catholic Church.” So was he surprised by how quickly its power crumbled from the early 1990s onwards? “Oh, that was amazing,” he replies. “The Catholic Church is no longer a state terrorist organisation.” He also recalls, with happy incredulity, the 2015 Irish referendum that approved same-sex marriage. “Dublin was in carnival. I thought, ‘Am I hallucinating? This is not the Ireland I grew up in.’”
Still, even in throwing off the Church, Ireland doesn’t escape Banville’s scepticism: “Any really grownup nation would have gone through a period of trauma after the collapse of what they’d believed in for so long. It took us about three weeks.”
Another cultural change of recent years, I suggest, is that unashamedly “literary” novels, of which Banville has written around 20, no longer occupy such a central place in the culture. “Yes, the big beasts, that’s all over. Does anybody read John Updike now? Saul Bellow? I very much doubt it.”
So does he regret having devoted his own life to serious art? In his 1982 novella The Newton Letter, his narrator talks of “all those high cold heroes who renounce the world and human happiness to pursue the big picture of the intellect”. Does that have a tinge of autobiography?
“There’s a certain irony there,” Banville points out. “But it’s absolutely true that I wasn’t a good father. I loved my children, but I didn’t give enough time to them. Patricia, the mother of my two daughters, has never forgiven me for saying in an interview that I’d exchange my children for a good paragraph. I suppose I shouldn’t have said that. But, although I was joking, it did express something about the ruthlessness of the artist.”
(In 2016, Banville found himself in what he learned to call a Twitterstorm when he said that no writer is ever a good father – and The Wire’s creator David Simon memorably tweeted in response, “Speak for yourself, f---nuts.”)
“I’ve been very fortunate,” he says, “that the people around me understood I had a project. Works of art would have to be written.”
And so to his somewhat tangled love life, and the two women between whom he divided those 40 years: his wife Janet Dunham, with whom he had two sons and who died of Covid in 2021, and Patricia Quinn, whom he met when he was in his 40s: “Behind my back people used to call me ‘the bigamist’, but I loved them both, and still do. The two women made the best of a difficult situation, Patricia more so than Janet, who felt I’d betrayed my vows to her – which I had. But I cherish my four children equally, and they’re friendly with each other. Despite griefs and regrets, I’m infinitely more fortunate than I deserve to be.”
Oddly, Banville seems more willing to talk about this stuff than about his “far too many” novels – which he claims both to dislike and largely to have forgotten. “Somebody asked Iris Murdoch, why did she write so many books, and she said, ‘I always hope that the next one will exonerate me for all the ones that have gone before.’ That’s exactly my opinion. The next one is going to be a masterpiece and live through the ages. I know rationally that it’ll be just another damn book, but…”
Then, just as he seems to be overdoing the self-deprecation, he applies a quote of Larkin’s to himself: “I don’t think I write particularly well – just better than everybody else.”