'People are reacting to this book in remarkable ways," says John Banville of his new novel The Sea, in which Max Morden, his ageing protagonist, reacts to the pain of his wife's death by returning to the seaside house in which, as a young boy, all his hopes for happiness once resided, writes Belinda McKeon
Apparently, readers are finding themselves quite affected by this bereft man and his memories of childhood suffering. Apparently, they're even moved. "It seems so . . . I'm astonished," says Banville, half-chuckling in a way that suggests he's only half-joking. "I'm going to have to do something about this. I'm obviously doing something wrong."
Tracing the lines of Banville's literary rulebook, it's not difficult to do something wrong; anything less than the deeply controlled hand exhibited in novels from The Newton Letter to The Untouchable and his last novel Shroud, with a marriage of mordant wit and meticulous wordcraft, just won't make the grade. And throwing emotions like grief and nostalgia into the rigorous workings of such prose is quite a risk to take, even for a writer on his 13th novel.
But then, Banville worries that he has always toyed with such a risk, even in his most starkly-drawn fictions. "People accuse me of being cold or clinical in the books," he says, referring to the response elicited by narrators such as the killer Freddie Montgomery in The Book of Evidence and the failed actor Alexander Cleave in Eclipse; not men, it must be said, with whom you could ever imagine sharing a heart-to-heart. But Banville still seems to believe that he has crossed some line in their depiction. "To me, my books are embarrassingly full of sentiment," he says. "They're awash with emotion. But people don't seem to see that."
He laughs again, the laugh that always seems directed as much at himself as at a readership which demands more feeling, more generosity, more heart. "I know what they want," he says. "They want some comforting version of the world. But one would be deceiving them if one were to pretend that this is a comforting place that we find ourselves thrown into."
So often described as a post-humanist writer that the notion seems no longer even to require exploration, Banville speaks with conviction and eloquence about what he sees as the relative triviality, in the universal picture, of humanity; though unfashionable, his arguments are clear-eyed rather than callous.
"I don't regard mankind as the pinnacle of creation," he explains. "I think man's arrogance - the way we treat animals, the way we treat the world - I think that astonishing."
Suddenly, he draws back; it's not good, it seems, to be astonished too often. "No, that's too grand altogether," he admonishes himself. Then he pauses for a moment, and surveys the ornate tea room of the Dublin hotel where we sit.
He gestures toward a vast window, pushing light through a wisp of white curtain. "These people," he says of the hotel guests around us, "only exist for me within this particular form of light. The way that lamp fights with the light coming in from the outside. That , to me, is extremely important, that people are placed within that. Within a landscape, always, always, always." And if this perspective means that the landscape, or the lightscape, receives priority of depiction over, or at least on a par with, the life, so be it. Banville makes no apologies.
Intriguingly, however, as the novelist turns 60, and admits, albeit ruefully, to thinking of his own mortality ("I find a mad comedy to watching oneself begin to disintegrate," he almost smirks, as he reduces the dark journey to the foolishness of dropping a breakfast egg or tripping over a door jamb), the new novel seems quietly to make, not an apology, but an attempt at approaching the hurts of being human from a threshold closer to that humanity.
It brings Banville, after all, following a long excursus through openly metaphysical and artistic explorations, back to the seascape of his childhood, the Wexford of shell and shale and little girls unsympathetic to the longings of little boys. Why, incidentally, has it taken him so long to get thus far? "Well, in a way I've never left," he says. "But when I finished that series of books that culminated in Shroud, I thought I would do something different and write this simple little book set at the seaside when I was a kid. Well, it started out to be a simple little book." He laughs.
Simple this intricately-structured, masterfully imagined novel is not.
Widowed, trapped between a lonely past and an unbearable present, and staring at the walls of a house that holds hard memories, Max Morden seems a new departure for Banville in narrative voice; certainly, he is no less solipsistic than his predecessors, but unlike them, he suffers a sorrow for which it is difficult not to feel.
If landscape, objects, shadows have held a higher value in Banville's imagination up to now, so too does the sea itself, in this novel, swell into a place of prominence. It shapes lives, takes lives, bathes the heart both in saltwater and in sentiment; facing a harsh truth in the powerful final scene, Max feels as though he is giving himself up to its depths. Yet this feeling, this understanding of the power of a thing or a landscape, wins the final word over that power or that landscape itself; is this, for Banville, an inching back to humanism? Is this a transition, or just another way of envisioning the tininess of existence?
Banville says that he cannot see such a transition himself - though he will agree, with a surprising shake in his own voice, that Max is "more vulnerable" than previous narrators, "more willing to entertain the possibility of other people" - but says that others, too, are insisting upon its presence. He seems uninterested in contradicting them, and talks almost gleefully about the meanings and motifs that readers have detected in his novels but which have nothing to do with him.
He remembers how people commented on the cleverness of the final scene in The Untouchable, where Victor, gun in hand, wonders whether to shoot himself through the heart or in the head; he murmurs with interest when I suggest Shakespearean undertones to the interplay of the twins and the sea in the new novel. He has no quarrel with such interpretations, he says, but they are of little relevance to him.
"All one wants to do is make a small, finished, polished, burnished, beautiful object," he says. "I mean, that's all one wants to do. One has nothing to say about the world, or society, or morals or politics or anything else. One just wants to get the damn thing done, you know? Kafka had it right when he said that the artist is the man who has nothing to say. It's true. You get the thing done, but you don't actually have anything to communicate, apart from the object itself."
And we're back to the notion of the object, and of a novel as a sculpted thing, described in terms more familiar from the visual arts than from the literary toolbox. A concern with visual artists, and with the individuals who seek to understand them, has long been to the fore in Banville's fiction, most especially in his so-called trilogy on art - The Book of Evidence (1989), Ghosts (1993) and Athena (1995) fuelled both by a belief in the transcendent power of art, and artistic style, and by a preoccupation with the double-edged sword that is the artistic consciousness, both victim and villain.
"I think there's something about artists," he says. "I mean, I don't know what the right word is to use, but they are slightly autistic. They don't really relate to other human beings as other human beings seem to relate to each other. I look on in bafflement at people's love affairs, hate affairs . . . " He shakes his head, shrugs. "But then, I'm maybe just a cold bastard."
Cold is not a word that can be used to describe Banville's regard for the French modernist painter Pierre Bonnard, who died in 1947 after a long career combining an apparently figurative technique - self-portraits and portraits of his wife, Marthe - with a startling ability for innovation in colour and perspective. In The Sea, Max is erratically researching Bonnard with a notion of writing his biography; the fruits of such a project, you sense, are something Banville himself would be fiercely interested in reading.
"It's quite simple," he says, when asked to explain the presence of Bonnard in the novel. "I've come to realise, since the big Hayward show back in the early 1990s, that huge retrospective of Bonnard, that he is the greatest of them all. That he is the greatest. A lot of them [ the modernist painters] thought so too, Matisse . . . Picasso hated him, but hated him with a passion that showed that he was afraid of him. And the closer you look at Bonnard, the more you see how extraordinary is the technique. Just painting a woman lying in a bath, over and over again. How he makes such complex and diverse art out of these obsessive returns to the same subject over and over again."
Coming from Banville, who has been shaking his head and muttering about writing "the same book over and over" as I've been making comparisons between Max and his previous narrators, his previous themes, this seems significant. Neither, it emerges, has Banville's painterly technique developed by accident. "I tried when I was in my teens to be a painter," he laughs. "But I couldn't draw, had no sense of colour, no sense of scale, was a disastrous draftsman. These are all distinct disadvantages if you wanted to be a painter. But it was very useful, that couple of years I spent daubing. Because it made me look at the world in different ways. In terms of colour and texture and surface. I don't regret it. I regret the daubs."
He grimaces. "I suspect my brother is hiding some of them. I've offered him good money for them. But no."
Speaking of family, it's interesting that The Sea is dedicated to all four of Banville's children, Colm, Douglas, Ellen and Alice; his sons were born of his marriage, his daughters of a second relationship, and the transition between the two was relatively public and presumably difficult for all involved. Does the dedication signal an end to that difficulty? Banville is understandably reluctant to comment. Anything he says, he argues, will look "wrong" when it appears in print. And this comment does not come lightly from a former journalist and sub-editor. "When you get to my stage of life," he will say, "everything has settled down like geological strata. I mean, I love my children, all of them . . ." He reaches for the safety of that dry humour which he has made his own. "I don't beat them. Not very frequently . . . But really, one tries to have as few sources of strife as possible. And when you get older, time just abrades. That's all. Sorry."
The Sea, by John Banville, is published by Picador, £16.99
