John Banville
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John Banville
John Banville (born
8 December 1945) is an
Irish novelist. His novel,
The Book of Evidence (1989), was shortlisted for the
Man Booker Prize, and won the Guinness Peat Aviation Award. His eighteenth novel,
The Sea won the
Man Booker Prize in 2005.
Banville is regarded as one of Ireland's finest writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and a supreme stylist. He is known for his precise—some would say cold—prose style, Nabokovian in inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators.
Biography
Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland. His father worked in a garage and died when he was in his early thirties; his mother was a housewife. Banville is the youngest of three siblings; his older brother Vincent is also a novelist and has written under the name Vincent Lawrence as well as his own.
Educated at a Christian Brothers' school and at St Peter's College in Wexford, he did not attend university. After school he worked as a clerk at Aer Lingus which allowed him to travel at deeply-discounted rates.
He lived in the United States in 1968-9. On his return to Ireland he became a sub-editor at the Irish Press newspaper, rising eventually to the position of chief sub-editor.
His first book, Long Lankin, appeared in 1970.
When the Irish Press collapsed in 1995 he became a sub-editor at the Irish Times newspaper. He was appointed literary editor in 1998. The Irish Times, too, suffered severe financial problems and Banville was offered the choice of taking a redundancy package or working as a features department sub-editor. He left. Banville has been a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1990.
He has two adult sons (Colm and Douglas) by his first wife, the American textile artist Janet Dunham. They met during his visit to San Francisco in 1968 where she was a student at the University of California, Berkeley. His first wife described him during the writing process as being like "a murderer who's just come back from a particularly bloody killing."
He has two daughters aged 9 and 16[in 2005] (Alice and Ellen) by his second wife, Patricia Quinn, former head of the Arts Council of Ireland. He lives in central Dublin.
He was elected to Aosdána in 1984 but resigned in 2001 so that some other artist might be allowed to receive the cnuas.
Awards
| Year | Prize | For |
| 1976 | James Tait Black Memorial Prize | Doctor Copernicus |
| 1981 | Guardian Fiction Prize | Kepler |
| | Allied Irish Bank Fiction Prize | |
| | American-Irish Foundation Award | Birchwood |
| 1989 | Guinness Peat Aviation Award | The Book of Evidence |
| 1989 | Booker Prize (shortlisted) | The Book of Evidence |
| 2005 | Booker Prize | The Sea |
| 2006 | Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year | The Sea |
Style
John Banville is considered by critics as a master stylist of the English language, and his writing has been described as perfectly-crafted, beautiful, dazzling. David Mehegan, of the Boston Globe calls Banville, "One of the great stylists writing in English today;" Don DeLillo calls his work "dangerous and clear-running prose;" and the UK Observer described his 1989 work, The Book of Evidence, as "flawlessly flowing prose whose lyricism, patrician irony and aching sense of loss are reminiscent of Lolita."
He is also known for his dark humour, and sharp wit.
Banville quotations
[My parents were] small people, small, good, decent people, who lived very circumscribed lives. Leaving the nest so early was hard for them and, when I look back now, I realise how cruel I was.
(About his father's death) Someone said the best gift a man can give his son is to die young. When you think about it, it's true. I was in my early 30s and I did feel freed by it, awful as it is to confess.
...those who regard me as effete, arrogant, distanced. [Interviewer: All of which is true, of course.] [Banville:] Of course!
I regard Nietzsche as the greatest philosopher in our time
I don’t like fiction as a form. I think it’s childish. It’s too coarse. Which is why I’m trying to change it. My modest ambition in life is to change the novel entirely!
This book has come out which says that people who know me say I’m ‘prickly and arrogant’. Okay, I am!
(His books) ...they're all cold, or so I'm told anyway. I don't find them cold. I find them embarrassingly emotional, throbbing with anguish and aches.
I don't understand politics, how it works...I don't understand the intricacies. Power. I don't understand power.
All works of art are scar tissue.
I couldn't live on my own...I have to have people around me. Outside the door. I have to know they are outside that door.
...that is a large part of sex. The sense of mutual, joyful damage.
(Describing sex in The Book of Evidence) He inflicted his tender damage on her.
I find women very strange. I don't understand them at all...I don't much like the company of men.
I now belong to a small band of big Bs - Botticelli, Banville and Beethoven. But not necessarily in that order.
(On being reprimanded for a minor factual error in an article, one he dismissed as a technicality) Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the Department of Trivia.
(On the Booker Prize) There are plenty of other rewards for middle-brow fiction. There should be one decent prize for real books.
(On winning the Booker Prize) It is nice to see a work of art win the Booker prize.
I have been, at last, Bookered.
(On publicity) We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us. I'm afraid I'm not very demonstrative.
(Reviewing Ian McEwan's Saturday) In a note of acknowledgment at the end of the book McEwan names the various doctors who shared their expertise with him, including...the Nabokovianly named Frank T. Vertosick Jr., to whom he is indebted for an account of a transsphenoidal hypophysectomy—yes, there are many big words in this book.
(Adjectives used by Banville in his book, The Sea) Flocculent...cinereal...crepitant...velutinous.
(On bitchy reaction to his Booker win among London's literati) If they give me the bloody prize, why can’t they say nice things about me?
Works
Long Lankin (1970; revised ed.1984)
Nightspawn (1971)
Birchwood (1973)
Doctor Copernicus: A Novel (1976)
Kepler, a Novel (1981)
The Newton Letter: An Interlude (1982)
Mefisto (1986)
The Book of Evidence (1989)
Ghosts (1993)
The Broken Jug: After Heinrich von Kleist (1994) - a play
Seachange (performed 1994 in the Focus Theatre, Dublin; unpublished)
Athena: A Novel (1995)
The Untouchable (1997)
God's Gift: A Version of Amphitryon by Heinrich von Kleist (2000)
Eclipse (2000)
Shroud (2002)
Dublin 1742 (performed 2002 in The Ark, Dublin; a play for 9-14 year olds; unpublished)
Prague Pictures: Portrait Of A City (2003)
The Sea, (2005)
Love In The Wars (adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist's Penthesilea, 2005)
Christine Falls (crime novel published as Benjamin Black, 2006)
Further reading
John Banville, a critical study by Joseph McMinn; Gill and MacMillan; ISBN 0717118037
The Supreme Fictions of John Banville by Joseph McMinn; (October 1999); Manchester University Press; ISBN 0719053978
John Banville: A Critical Introduction by Rüdiger Imhoff (October 1998) Irish American Book Co; ISBN 0863275826
John Banville: Exploring Fictions by Derek Hand; (June 2002); Liffey Press; ISBN 1904148042
External links
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