The Irish writer John Banville will be celebrating his 79th birthday on Monday. It is an appropriate time, then, for him to be setting down his thoughts in a memoir. Apparently 8000 words have been written so far.
The Irish Tradition
The Irish have a reputation for stories and a love of language and Banville comes from that strong literary tradition which includes Yeats, Synge, Joyce, Beckett and Heaney. He speaks of his family’s history of story-telling or yarning:
I remember my aunt, my father’s twin. She used to claim that her relative had been the lady-in-waiting for Queen Mary. And she’d tell us that when Queen Mary died, her coffin was on a barge going down the Thames, and it went under a bridge and when it came out the other side it was covered all over in white lilies. She’d tell these stories and my mother would look at me and I would look at her. It was all like that. I guess I must have got that gene.
Though Banville sees himself more as a follower of Beckett than Joyce, it was the latter’s collection of short stories Dubliners that opened his eyes to the possibilities of fiction. He saw that it challenged what he has been used to reading:
Here was a book that was not a wild west yarn. Not a detective story. Not about boys in English public schools getting up to japes. It was just about life.
Read the full interview here.
It’s interesting that Banville also writes popular crime novels under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. The novels and stories published under his real name are seen as more challenging, including the Booker Prize winning The Sea. A Guardian feature on him commented that:
As a writer who values language above plot, suspense, pace and drama, Banville tends to divide critics… The reward, however, for persevering with Banville is stunning, lyrical prose. His writing is perfectly crafted, inventive and poetic.
The Influence of Henry James
Apart from the resonances of his Irish literary forebears, the writer who has influenced Banville most is Henry James, the American observer of human social nature both in Europe and America. As Banville has said:
…when I speak of style, I mean the style Henry James spoke of when he wrote that, in literature, we move through a blessed world, in which we know nothing except through style.
The former English cricket captain Mike Brearley, in his own memoir Turning Over the Pebbles, writes about James, in his own terms, ‘gaping and dawdling’. The phrase suggests taking time to observe and take everything in. Brearley says:
The writing of fiction, like many other forms of writing, involves standing back from experience, reflecting on it and making use of it, re-viewing and reshaping it… Henry James is, typically, the third, the one outside, the observer looking in and out.
A sign of James’ close, meticulous observations is his rendering of them in meticulous, carefully constructed sentences, clauses balanced and words placed with deftness. Banville’s interest in James’ novels led to him publishing Mrs Osmond in 2017. The eponymous figure is the American heiress Isabel Archer, who marries the sly and deceitful Gilbert Osmond at the end of Henry James’ novel The Portrait of a Lady. James’ novel ends in an open-ended way: Isabel knows the truth about her husband and her apparent friend Serena Merle.
Banville picks up the tale at that point, creating a sequel to explore James’ heroine further. He does so by imitating James’ own narrative prose style, much more in homage to James that pastiche. As Jonathan Keates wrote in the Literary Review:
As we read further in Mrs Osmond, it becomes obvious that Banville is thoroughly au fait with not simply the ethical and social complexities of James’s novel, but also the particular resonances and texture of its style; the novel is a perfect rendering of his middle-period manner in all its authoritative, unflinching lucidity.
Read a review of Mrs Osmond here.
Twentieth Century Novels
Edwin Frank is editorial director of New York Review Books and has for 25 years edited its classics series, so he is well placed to offer his view on the 20th century novel. Admittedly, his version of the 20th century is quite elastic, beginning well into the 19th, but he looks at the key developments in the modern novel in his new book, Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel.
While he does not consider Banville, or more surprisingly James, he ranges widely, beginning with Dostoevsky. He selects a broad range of international texts for his consideration, including Colette, Hemingway, Woolf, Soseki, Achebe, Nossack, Ellison, Márquez and Sebald.
In doing so, he explores biography, cultural history and the style and influence of key texts. His book forms a personal key guide to some of the most influential novels from the late 19th to the late 20th century.
As this review states, ‘Frank’s great gift lies in vividly bringing to life the books themselves and the specific time and place of the individuals who created them.’