John Banville/Benjamin Black (1945-)
Bio, British Council Literature:
Irish novelist John Banville was born in Wexford in Ireland in 1945.
He was educated at a Christian Brothers’ school and St Peter’s College in Wexford. He worked for Aer Lingus in Dublin, an opportunity that enabled him to travel widely. He was literary editor of the Irish Times between 1988 and 1999. Long Lankin, a collection of short stories, was published in 1970. It was followed byNightspawn (1971) and Birchwood (1973), both novels.
Banville’s fictional portrait of the 15th-century Polish astronomer Dr Copernicus(1976) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) and was the first in a series of books exploring the lives of eminent scientists and scientific ideas. The second novel in the series was about the 16th-century German astronomer Kepler(1981) and won the Guardian Fiction Prize. The Newton Letter: An Interlude (1982), is the story of an academic writing a book about the mathematician Sir Isaac Newton. It was adapted as a film by Channel 4 Television. Mefisto (1986), explores the world of numbers in a reworking of Dr Faustus.
The Book of Evidence (1989), which won the Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction, Ghosts (1993) and Athena(1995) form a loose trilogy of novels narrated by Freddie Montgomery, a convicted murderer. The central character of Banville’s 1997 novel, The Untouchable, Victor Maskell, is based on the art historian and spy Anthony Blunt. Eclipse (2000), is narrated by Alexander Cleave, an actor who has withdrawn to the house where he spent his childhood. Shroud (2002), continues the tale begun in Eclipse andPrague Pictures: Portrait of a City (2003), is a personal evocation of the magical European city.
John Banville lives in Dublin. The Sea (2005) won the 2005 Man Booker Prize. InThe Sea an elderly art historian loses his wife to cancer and feels compelled to revisit the seaside villa where he spent childhood holidays. His latest novel is The Infinities (2009). He received the Franz Kafka Award in 2011.
…Regarded as the most stylistically elaborate Irish writer of his generation, John Banville is a philosophical novelist concerned with the nature of perception, the conflict between imagination and reality, and the existential isolation of the individual.
While his writing flirts with both postmodernism and magic realism, it is best understood as metafiction in the tradition of Samuel Beckett, Banville’s acknowledged mentor. Like Beckett, he moves fluidly from Irish landscapes and characters to European contexts and histories, and from conventional narratives into fabulism and distortion. Relentlessly and some might argue, pretentiously allusive, his works play with both overt and hidden references to his literary idols, particularly Proust, Dostoevsky, and Nabokov.
…One of the hallmarks of Banville’s writing is an inter-textual repetition, the carrying of motifs or allusions from novel to novel. Mefisto (1986), the fourth book of his scientific tetralogy, is a Faustian tale of a mathematical prodigy, Gabriel Swan, whose carnivalesque adventures in a fun fair, (together with his Proustian associations) artfully recall the earlier Birchwood. In the enigmatic trilogy of novels which succeeds the tetralogy, this pattern of recurrence is conspicuous, and a central character, Freddie Montgomery, traced across three dramatically different contexts. Here the figure of the scientist gives way to the painter, as visual art becomes the primary channel for the author’s meditation on perception and representation. And where the tetralogy threw the role of human imagination into crisis, the trilogy, to some extent, offers a reinvestment in the necessary creative fictions of human invention. Collectively, therefore, these novels mitigate some of Banville’s earlier scepticism, despite their flirtation with the archetypal postmodernist jeux of gapped and inconsistent narration, non-sequential chronology, and the blurring of ‘truth’ and fantasy.
…The black humour and lucidity which save Banville’s work from becoming abstruse are dominant in what some regard as his finest novel. The Untouchable (1997) presents the recollections of Victor Maskell, a figure loosely based on the Royal art curator Anthony Blunt, who was exposed in 1979 as one of the Cambridge spy ring. More accessible perhaps than its predecessors, this work is a biographical study of individuality in freefall, released from the constructions of nationhood and patriotism, and obsessed with the abnegation of self required by the act of betrayal. Quite unlike the existential Gothic melodramas to which he has returned in his most recent fiction, Eclipse (2000) and Shroud (2002), The Untouchable also offers salient reminders of Banville’s roots in the fractured condition of Irishness, an identity which continues to provide him with traditional thematic and narrative mainstays beneath the veneer of a cerebral European experimentalism.
Website for his alter ego, Benjamin Black:
A really terrific interview at The Paris Review:
…As a novelist, he is famous for his difficulty. In their architecture and in their style, his books are like baroque cathedrals, filled with elaborate passages and sometimes overwhelming to the casual tourist. For this, Banville makes no apologies—he says he is committed to language and to rhythm above plot, characterization, or pacing. Being Benjamin Black, however, allows him to play more loosely with character and storytelling; in interviews and in correspondence, he refers to Black (“the rogue”) fondly and mischievously, delightedly playing this identity against his own. As Black he has written three novels in as many years: Christine Falls (2006), The Silver Swan (2007), and The Lemur (2008). Although the company of Black diverted him awhile from the agony of producing what he calls “a Banville book,” a new novel under his own name, The Infinities, is forthcoming.
INTERVIEWER: When did you first know that you wanted to write?
BANVILLE: It must have been in my early teens. My brother was living in Africa at the time, and although he has no memory of this he would occasionally send me books, one of which was James Joyce’s Dubliners. The book was a revelation to me—the idea that literature could be very elevated but still be about life as I knew it, about the rather grim, gray, mundane life I was living as a boy in Wexford in the fifties. When I finished Dubliners, I started writing terrible pastiches of Joyce on an enormous black Remington typewriter borrowed from my Aunt Sadie. I threw them all away many years later, of course, but I remember the opening of one of them: “The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.”
A boy in his teens! What did I know about death? This is a problem for Irish writers—our literary forebears are enormous. They stand behind us like Easter Island statues, and we keep trying to measure up to them, leaping towards heights we can’t possibly reach. I suppose that’s a good thing, but it makes for a painful early life for the writer. Anyway, hunched there over my Aunt Sadie’s Remington, I was starting to learn how to write. Now, fifty years later, I’m still learning.
…INTERVIEWER: What attracted you to novel writing?
BANVILLE: Language. Words. The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language, and this was as true then as it is now. I also had that wonderful conviction that writers have at the beginning that the possibilities are infinite. I didn’t realize just how difficult it was going to be. I thought that within five or six years I would be a fully fledged writer. Here I am now, at the age of sixty-two, still diligently practicing. But I loved, and still love, the craft. I am a graphomaniac. I cannot not write. If I find myself with a spare forty-five minutes at the end of my working day, I will turn to adding a few sentences to something. One of the reasons I love doing journalism—that is, reviews and literary articles—is that I can do it quickly. It gives me a craftsman’s pleasure. Fiction doesn’t do that. Fiction is just a constant torment, and an embarrassment. I loathe my fiction. I have a fantasy when I’m passing a bookstore that I could click my fingers and all my books would go blank, so that I could start again and get them right.
INTERVIEWER: Do you really hate your own novels?
BANVILLE: Yes! I hate them. I mean that. Nobody believes me, but it’s true. They’re an embarrassment and a deep source of shame. They’re better than everybody else’s, of course, but not good enough for me. There is a great deal more pain than pleasure in writing fiction. It’s only now and then, maybe once every three or four days, that I manage to write a sentence in which I hear that wonderful harmonic chime that you get when, say, you flick the edge of a wine glass with a fingernail. That’s what keeps me going. When I read the proofs of a new novel—which is the last time I will read or even glance at it—I approach it with one eye closed, so to speak, thinking, God, what am I going to find here? And I find horrors, horrors that can’t be fixed. Everything in the text now seems hopelessly flat and deadened. Where I imagined a dancing rhythm, I find clumping and stumbling.
…INTERVIEWER: Where do you think your discipline came from?
BANVILLE: I am essentially a religious type. In my teens I gave up Catholicism, and at the same time I started writing. Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one’s living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn’t ask for anything better. It’s as near to godliness as I can get.
…
INTERVIEWER: When did you begin to write your Benjamin Black books?
BANVILLE: I finished The Sea in September 2004, and it was published in April 2005. I started writing Christine Falls in March 2005, and it went very quickly. I was staying at the house of a friend in Italy. I sat down at nine o’clock on a Monday morning, and by lunchtime I had written more than fifteen hundred words. It was a scandal! I thought, John Banville, you slut. But then I remembered it was Black, not Banville, who was writing. I had fun doing it and I thought, if this has to be my day job, if Benjamin Black is going to earn some money so that John Banville can have freedom, then this is no more difficult than working in the newspapers.
On the day The Sea was short-listed for the Man Booker, my agent handed my publisher the manuscript of Christine Falls. No one knew it was coming—I hadn’t announced my new project to anybody. My publisher was just beside himself with glee. Of course, everyone tried to persuade me not to use the pseudonym, but I wanted people to realize that this wasn’t an elaborate postmodernist literary joke, but the genuine article, a noir novel from Banville’s dark brother Benjamin Black. It was pure play when I invented Benjamin Black. It was a frolic of my own.
…INTERVIEWER: Is Benjamin Black’s process really so different from John Banville’s?
BANVILLE: If I’m Benjamin Black, I can write up to two and a half thousand words a day. As John Banville, if I write two hundred words a day I am very, very happy. A Banville novel will take me up to five years to write. When I’d finished The Lemur, the third Benjamin Black book, and sat down to become John Banville again, I worked one Friday for six hours straight, and I ended up with one sentence. Not a particularly good sentence, either. But I was thrilled to be back working in that strange, deep level of concentration. That’s the distinction—what you get in Banville is concentration, what you get from Black is spontaneity. I know there are readers who consider Black a better writer, certainly a better novelist, than Banville, and perhaps they’re right.