by Tom Mooney
The week gone by will be remembered fondly, you hope, by John Banville in – if we are to believe him – his obfuscatory dotage.
He was the first novelist to give a public reading (from Ancient Light) in the splendid new Co. Library and, 48 hours later, received the PEN Award at a literati-glitterati-bash in Dun Laoghaire.
Banville, on the back of a plethora of projects – novels, screenplays, essays – was in sparkling form in his native town, even if he once told Mike Murphy that he was terminally bored from the age of seven to seventeen and couldn’t way to escape Wexford.
Perhaps the point with Banville is that nothing is always what it seems. The artist is not really interested in the material he uses: the material is just material.
If you need a thorough introduction to Banville and his fifteen novels, some of which took mountains of drafts toward fruition, I would highly recommend the just published ‘Possession of A Past: A John Banville Reader’, selected by Raymond Bell.
Two recurring themes are significant: possession and the living past, a co-mingling of growing up in Wexford – an extraordinary feeling for nature – and a kind of spiritual horror.
The spiritual aspect, deftly touched upon by Billy Roche at Banville’s reading in reference to his novel Eclipse, was addressed momentarily by Banville in a remembrance of the passing of his mother.
There are cleary several writers inside the head of John Banville, each as richly adept as the other: novelist, crime writer, adaptor for cinema and television, and is clear that he loves what he has called ‘the beautiful life passing across the screen.’
Bell’s book reacquainted me with a quite beautiful if brief memoir of Banville, Lupins and Moth-laden Nights in Rosslare, which I first read in The Irish Times aeons ago, a brilliantly vivid and warm-hearted evocation of an Irish childhood in Co. Wexford, from the pen of a writer with a professed dislike of artists who try to wear their hearts on their sleeves.
Never, therefore, a fellow-well-met, I can surmise, having attended his readings for twenty years, that Banville might still be difficult to get to know (who can say?), but he is not as unapproachable.
To his many admirers he will continue to be a writer who reminds us that the impossible in art is possible with this line from The Infinities: ‘ Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works
