For the first time since 1993, and only the second time in its history, the Booker Prize for Fiction has been won by an Irish writer. John Banville was declared the winner last night in London of this year's Man Booker with his novel The Sea.
Internationally respected as a major European novelist, Banville had only once previously been shortlisted for the prize, in 1989 for The Book of Evidence.
Although The Sea had been well-reviewed on publication and was regarded by many literary critics as the finest book on what was a strong shortlist, English writer and critic Julian Barnes had been expected to win. His robust period novel, Arthur& George, based on the life of Arthur Conan Doyle and a real-life miscarriage of justice in Edwardian England, had popular appeal.
Barnes is well-regarded by the British literary establishment and has yet to win the Booker prize.
Also well-placed throughout the month-long Booker countdown which followed the shortlist announcement had been Banville's fellow Irishman, playwright Sebastian Barry, whose romantic period piece, A Long Long Way, about the Irish soldiers who fought for the English king in the Great War, explored major themes, the complexities and contradictions of history and loyalty. Barry's folksy narrative tone caught the voice of innocence betrayed. The English writer Pat Barker had won in 1995 with The Ghost Road and the Great War continues to draw readers.
Barry's book always looked the likely dark horse despite the presence on the shortlist of a former Booker Prize winner, Kazuo Ishiguro, whose remarkable novel, Never Let Me Go, a strange and beautiful work about cloning, seemed to divide readers.
Yet Banville, who has always regarded the novel as art and the novelist as artist, not storyteller, and has to some extent paid for his refusal to compromise the role of the artist, won with his most personal, least consciously intellectual book to date. In The Sea, the narrator, now ageing and bearing the battle scars of life and regret, returns to the seaside town where he spent a boyhood holiday.
Narrator Max Morden is, in true Banville style, an art historian, but his responses are more those of an Everyman faced with mortality and physical disintegration. It is also very humorous, with his hallmark laconic wit. The prose is as beautiful as ever, but more relaxed, less austere. It is a portrait of a man deep in thought and a book with which readers will engage.
"There was a time when I quite liked what I saw in the looking-glass, but not any more. Now I am startled, and more than startled, by the visage that so abruptly appears there, never and not at all the one that I expect. I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself, a sadly dishevelled figure in a Hallowe'en mask made of sagging, pinkish- grey rubber that bears no more than a passing resemblance to the image of what I look like that I stubbornly retain in my head."
The omission of former double Booker winner JM Coetzee, Banville's literary kindred spirit of sorts, whose novel, Slow Man, also explored the themes of age and new vulnerabilities, seemed to make the path clear for Banville.
There was also the fact that some years before Roddy Doyle had won the Booker Prize for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993). Another Dublin-born writer, albeit one who always regarded herself as Anglo Irish and was claimed by the British literary establishment as English, Iris Murdoch, won the 1978 Booker Prize with The Sea, The Sea.
No matter how much the bookies backed Barnes, it always looked Banville's prize. Born in 1945 in Wexford, he is an Irish writer who has tended to look beyond Ireland. The themes of art and truth have preoccupied him, while he also explored the beauty of science with a quartet of books based on the lives of early European scientists. But he did write an Irish novel, indeed tackled the Big House book with wild comedy in Birchwood in 1973. In that narrative he looked more to Sterne than to Joyce but above all, captured the voice of Irish fiction.
Before the publication of the Book of Evidence, he had achieved a significant artistic breakthrough with Mefisto (1986), to date one of his best and most underrated works. In it, his themes of duality and truth, and also his flair for grotesque caricature, emerges. In many ways, Banville remains true to the Gothic. Mefisto was ignored by the Booker, as was Shroud. He has to date only once been shortlisted for the Impac prize, which has yet to find an Irish winner.
Prizes aside, this year's Booker highlighted the sophistication of two very different Irish writers. The shortlist also demonstrated that here was a panel of judges determined to highlight, in the absence of the North Americans, Africans and Australians, an impressive British and Irish selection.
This they did. Zadie Smith's third novel, On Beauty, is a good, often amusing domestic comedy of errors, while the clever Scot Ali Smith has immense fun with The Accidental, as will all who read it.
Man Booker 2005 will go down in history as the year fiction at its most human won. Not since the great tussle in 1983, when JM Coetzee's allegorical parable Life and Times of Michael K defeated Graham Swift's Waterland, has a contest looked closer. In the end mastery of language won and one man's personal story overshadowed history and bigger stories. Last year Irish writer Colm Tóibín should have won with The Master, but didn't. This year, John Banville deserved to win. And he did.
Bibliography
Novels
Nightspawn (1971)
Birchwood (1973)
Doctor Copernicus (1976)
Kepler (1981)
The Newton Letter:
An Interlude (1982)
Mefisto (1986)
The Book of Evidence (1989)
Ghosts (1993)
Athena (1995)
The Untouchable (1997)
Eclipse (2000)
Shroud (2002)
The Sea (2005)
Play
Broken Jug: After Kleist (1994)
Collections
Long Lankin (1970)
The Supreme Fictions of John Banville (1999)
The Revolutions Trilogy (2000)
Frames Trilogy 1 (2001)
Frames Trilogy 2 (2001)
Chapbook
God's Gift (2000)
Non-fiction
Prague Pictures: Portrait of a City (2003)