John Banville cuts a rather severe figure at the beginning of John Kelly’s profile of the novelist (RTÉ One, Thursday). The Works Presents … opens with a shot of the writer tramping along a beach in slow motion, brow furrowed, eyes dark and narrowed.
Yet it is warmth and humility that are in abundance in the interview that follows, as Banville reflects on a life in letters and his dual career as Booker winner and a furnisher, through his crime books, of pulpier thrills (his latest whodunit Snow is fresh off the press).
The surprise in this revealing and even-handed snapshot is that Banville is as fond of the crime capers – initially published as “Benjamin Black”– as he is of the more astringent stuff.
That perhaps runs contrary to the image many will have of him as somewhat self-serious. Kelly, essentially here to pay homage to Banville rather than pin him to his collar, does well in bringing up the author’s notorious musings following his Booker win for The Sea in 2005.
“It’s nice to see a work of art winning the Booker Prize,” Banville infamously told the BBC’s Kirsty Wark. Fifteen years on he doesn’t regret his remarks, which were at the time regarded as the outpourings of an untrammelled ego.
“I did it partly for mischief, to annoy the reviewers,” reveals Banville. He says this with a twinkle, which those who know him only for his “serious” work may not have guessed he possessed.
These aren’t the only headline-grabbing comments Banville has made. He has been sniffy about crime writers and once said “I have not been a good father. No writer is”. And his recent critiques of “wokeness” – “I despise this ‘woke’ movement. Why were they asleep for so long? The same injustices were going on” –has naturally whipped the internet into a lather of digitation.
Kelly doesn’t bring up any of this (the “woke” statement may have been too recent). But that doesn’t detract from what is a less a deep dive into the id of a great Irish novelist than a cosy fire-side chat with storyteller who has been around, seen a few things and is in a mood to reminisce.
Banville, true, isn’t the sort to ramble or go off on tangents. Still, it is fascinating to hear him confess that it “makes him physically ill” to read his own work. And that he “much prefers” his crime novels – the latest of which is published under his own name – to the “Banville books”.
“They’re well crafted,” he says of Snow and its predecessors. “Written as honestly as I can do.”
He goes on to explain why Ireland, under the cosh of the collar, is the ideal setting for murder-mysteries. “1950s Ireland is perfect for crime fiction, “he says. “It’s already noir.”
There have been denser and more forensic attempts to get to psychoanalyse Banville as a writer and a figure in Irish intellectual life. But this brief profile is in its way as revealing. Banville, now 75, comes across as wry, down to earth, not all that caught up in his reputation.
“When I was young I thought I was in control of everything,” he says of his career. “Now I realise I’m not in control of anything.”
