February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
But he doesn’t seem to have dwelled on his surprise for a moment longer than necessary.
Winning the year’s major literary award for writers from Britain, the Commonwealth and Ireland comes with more than enough additional and time-consuming responses.
One of them is travel.
Banville was in New York last week to sign copies of “The Sea” and give interviews about what is his 14th novel and the first work by an Irish author to win the Booker since Roddy Doyle carried off the laurels in 1993 with “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.”
Doyle’s win raised a few eyebrows and so has Banville’s success — which came against the odds and most of the literary world’s expectations.
“We were astonished. We really had no hope that I would get it,” said Banville during an interview given in his midtown Manhattan hotel.
“I didn’t realize until I watched the television coverage a couple of days later, a recording of it, how very little chance anybody had given me. The resident critics had just dismissed my book.”
Banville, who was previously nominated for a Booker on the back of his 1989 novel, “The Book of Evidence,” has an idea as to why “The Sea” surged to the top of the judging panel’s estimations.
“It’s funny, he said, “I was talking to a journalist in Chicago and she was saying how the book matched the mood of America at the moment. That hadn’t occurred to me, but it is about mourning and looking for something in the far past to hold on to.
“Three of the judges really liked it immensely. Two of them wanted (Kazuo) Ishiguro and the chairman cast his vote for me, which I was very surprised at.
“It’s a lottery. You would very foolish to take it seriously as any kind of judgment of your work because it’s chance in the end.”
Banville, who worked for years as a journalist before turning to full time book writing, is clearly a fecund author. As a result, he has given himself a fair few chances.
“I’ve been doing it for a long time, over thirty years since I published my first book,” he said.
“Each book grows out of the one before by some process that I don’t understand.”
Is he working on one now?
“No, I haven’t started yet. There will come a day when I walk into my study and say Christ I have to do something.”
Banville, who lives in Wicklow, has an apartment in Dublin where he researches and writes.
“When I get in I work from nine until six. I suppose I’m a workaholic. I always remember what Noel Coward said, ‘work is more fun than fun.’ I do a lot of reviewing as well; too much really. I can’t say no. I suppose it’s the old journalist’s training. Work work work.”
Banville is wary of critics and says he doesn’t read reviews of his works. However, there are some critics who now argue that he has emerged as Ireland’s pre-eminent living author. Banville has been compared to James Joyce, although he is different to Joyce in a key respect.
“I can’t write fiction outside Ireland, I don’t know why,” he said.
“I need the light, the weather, the climate. But the country had changed so much, it’s not the same. I suppose it’s not as marked in the countryside, but Dublin is unrecognizable. I think it’s fantastic. It’s what the country needed but it’s happening so quickly.
“I think for the moment the Irish are thrilled by the fact that people want to come to Ireland. We’re kind of dazed by it. And the drug problem is so bad, there’s an entire generation dying off from heroin.”
“In the 1970s and 80s a murder was a big front page story. Recently there was a murder and the theory was it was a ritual voodoo killing. It’s scary. It’s now a very violent place.”
Banville’s “The Book of Evidence,” was a fictionalized account of the crimes committed by one of Ireland’s most notorious murderers, Malcolm MacArthur.
“There will never be as good a story as that again,” said Banville.
“I was chief sub (copy editor) at the Irish Press. I remember the chief news editor coming to me saying they have surrounded this guy where the attorney general lives. About ten minutes later he comes over and says he’s in the attorney general’s flat.”
Is Ireland, for all the changes, still holding its literary end up, or is it being affected by the dumb and dumber factor.
“Well there are still a lot of writers for a tiny place,” is Banville’s response.
“There’s been a huge sale of this book in Ireland. I went to Wexford the other day to give a reading in a local library and there must have been two hundred people who came up to me to have the book signed. People do still read.
“And I think Wexford was particularly pleased that I won this prize because the Ferns report (into abuse of children by priests in the Ferns diocese) came out about the same time. It was something good to report.”
Banville’s appeal reaches far beyond his native county – and country.
“It’s weird, he said, “I have a huge readership in Australia, way bigger than Britain or Ireland. And in Germany and Italy I sell a lot of books and I have no idea why.”
Despite the fact that there is a Rue Jean de Banville in Paris (no known relation) Banville has found France a near impossible nut to crack.
“If I sell two or three hundred copies of each book in France I’m doing well,” he said.
Banville drew early inspiration from mostly English novelists such as P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.
“I learned a lot from them. I read them more than I read Irish writers. I was never very fond of Frank O’Connor or Sean O Faol_in or those writers. Of course I read Beckett, I read Joyce.
“I have great admiration for Beckett as a phenomenon as well as a writer. Because of his courage, his tenacity. To hold on for all those years without any recognition at all took a lot of nerve. If I have a hero, it would be Beckett.”
Banville’s desk is relatively clear at the moment with most of his time taken up with turning the critical success of “The Sea” into hard sales for both himself and his publisher, which in the U.S. is Alfred Knopf.
“Usually when I finish a book I have the next one planned. This is unusual because I finished “The Sea” in September, 2004 and that’s quite a break,” he said.
The setting for “The Sea” is Rosslare, the seaside resort in County Wexford where Banville spent his childhood summers.
“When I finished the book I went down to Rosslare and was astonished at how much of it is still there. In fifty years there’s been very small change.”
Does Banville feel that writers get better by sheer volume of production?
“You don’t necessarily get better,” he said.
“You learn how to use language the more you practice. But there’s a danger in that because if you get to a point where you have a real facility with language, where you can say anything, that’s the danger. You can just say anything. You have to be very careful not to let the language run away, just doing it for the sake of the language.”
There has to be a story line?
“I’d rather there weren’t,” he said. “It would be easier. But there has to be a story, a plot.”
Banville’s use of obscure and archaic words in some of his novels has been criticized by some reviewers.
But he does not feel the need to apologize for plunging deeper into the dictionary than most of his contemporaries.
“As one of my friends in the Irish Press used to say, ‘why do you use big words all the time? Big words like screwdriver and marmalade.'”