‘I’m writing a memoir. It’s a pack of lies’: John Banville on a lifetime in books, bereavement, and the Irish love of words | John Banville

I’m going to get a glass of wine, will you have one?” John Banville asks. “I mean, we’re OK, it’s just about noon.” We’re sitting in Banville’s upstairs living room in the harbour village of Howth, just outside Dublin. The low, deep house is in a terrace that rises up behind the seafront. There used to be a good view across the bay from these top windows, he says, but he had to sell the parcel of land across the street and now they are building “a monstrosity” on it. The novelist has lived here since the early 1980s; it is where he has written nearly all of his books – including the 2005 Booker prize winner The Sea. For someone who, it is said, has spent eight to 10 hours a day writing for all of his adult life, Banville insists he is no lover of solitude. “You’re not really alone when you are writing,” he says, “and anyway there has always been a sense of someone else.”

These days he shares this house with his 51-year-old son. His sometime estranged wife, the textile artist Janet Dunham, died three years ago and he is still, he says, in a “fugue state” of grief. It didn’t help that it happened during the pandemic. “She was diagnosed with advanced liver cancer,” he says, “and got Covid five days after, and died four days after that.” He couldn’t write for months and remains, he says, not himself. “I now realise that there are only two kinds of people in the world. People who are bereaved and those who are yet to be bereaved,” he says. “And it’s no comfort really that you know it happens to every [couple]. Because those other people, they didn’t lose the person you loved.”

One of the strangest things was that for about a year after Dunham died, he says, “I threw something out every day. I don’t know why, it was just every day I had to throw something out. And now I go round the house looking for things muttering ‘where’s that fucken thing?’

“I don’t enjoy my own company,” he says. “I always feel there’s somebody missing. My wife used to say, ‘I bet that you were a twin, and your twin died, and your mother didn’t tell you.’ And I do actually wonder if that is true.”

For the past month, Banville has been testing his capacity for solitude in Madrid, where he has been writer in residence at the Prado museum – the ostensible reason for our interview. In many ways, he was the perfect choice for the gig. His writing – particularly the breakthrough trilogy that began with The Book of Evidence in 1989 – has always been intrigued by the lives of artists; his first ambition was to be a painter himself.

“I’m the fourth writer to be asked by the Prado,” he says, “JM Coetzee was first. I had an apartment about three minutes away, all sponsored by the Loewe Foundation. And all I had to do was one public event and then write a piece of fiction, 7,000 words.” He was reminded of a magazine assignment he once did, staying alone in Gianni Versace’s house in Miami, after the designer had been murdered. “I kept, you know, expecting to be presented with the bill…”

He knew the museum well but the opportunity to visit paintings such as Velázquez’s masterpiece Las Meninas after hours or before the museum opened seemed like a special gift. In the event, he says, he got very spooked in the gallery without crowds. “I’d go to see Las Meninas and it was very eerie to be there alone, you know, with Velázquez looking back at you from behind his canvas saying: ‘Look what I did. What are you going to do?’”

And does he know what he is going to write in his fictional response?

“I have a broad outline that somebody is in the Prado doing something like me, but he’s troubled, he doesn’t like the fact that the eyes of the paintings keep following him, and he begins to wonder if he is having a breakdown. There’s a painting by Rubens called The Garden of Love there, in which there are two almost identical women. They’re looking at him and I think they come to help him. Something like that.” He smiles. “You know, I make it up as I go.”

At 78, Banville has been making things up for longer than he can remember. He grew up in Wexford in south-east Ireland where his father worked in a garage. Writing seems to have been curiously ingrained in the family – both his elder brother and sister have published books. Where did that shared impulse come from?

“Oh,” he says, “my father’s side of the family were all fantasists.”

In the sense of being good storytellers?

“No, all just slightly mad. 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. At least three times a week I look up at my desk and I say to myself: ‘What on earth do you think you are doing?’”

How does he answer that question?

“Oh I don’t. I just get back to work.” The compulsion began, he says, when his sister, who was four years older, gave him a copy of James Joyce’s Dubliners when he was 12. “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. I immediately started writing hideous imitations. It’s a cliche, but the Irish are just in love with words. And we have to be very careful, because, you know, words are intoxicating.”

He reaches for his glass, and pops downstairs to fetch the bottle.

When he returns we talk a little about the connections between Ireland and Spain. Banville first went to the Prado in the early 1960s when Madrid was still Franco’s capital. “In some ways it was a very dark place, police everywhere,” he says. “But of course, you know, for me, coming from my grey corner of Ireland, the colour, the heat, the food, the wine were just incredible. I was telling them in Spain last month that when I was a little boy, every house in Ireland had a small bottle of olive oil, but it was never in the kitchen. You would heat a teaspoon of it soaked in cotton wool and stick it in your ears.”

Both societies back then obviously lived in the shadow of the Catholic church, but Banville believes it was more oppressive in his home country.

“Here,” he says, “we were entirely brainwashed. We were so poor, you know, poor economically, and poor in spirit. I’m just reading a book about the great famine in the 1840s. The English did what all great powers do. They reduced the people to serfdom, and then made fun of them for being serfs. We lived a long time with that.”

Within the fierce internecine rivalries of Irish writing, Banville has sometimes been characterised, he has suggested, as a “west Brit”, too anglophile in his sensibility. His early historical novels – though often about revolutionaries such as Kepler or Copernicus – refused to engage directly in the politics of the Troubles. “The fact is,” he says, “I haven’t got an atom of nationalism in my makeup anywhere. I don’t understand allegiance to a country.”

He has a typically contrarian view of Irish history. “The war of independence and the civil war were disastrous for us,” he says. “The bad people took over. The partition took away that Protestant dissenter tradition and the 26 counties were left to the priests. I remember as a little boy walking along Main Street in Wexford. A long, long pavement, and a priest coming towards me in all his splendour. Between us was a pregnant woman struggling with a pram and a toddler, and I watched as she got off the pavement to let the priest stride past. I’ve never forgotten that.”

I say to him that I remember the writer Colm Tóibín once suggesting to me that the abrupt loss of the confessional in Ireland, which followed the abandonment of the church among younger generations, helps to explain the boom in Irish fiction: secrets needed an outlet.

“It’s a nice theory,” Banville says. “But maybe it’s the other way around. We were storytellers and that’s why we took to the confessional.”

Did he have to go when he was a kid?

“Yeah, I hated it. I mean, you were shut in this box each week with an elderly man breathing hard. And it was all lies. My mother was very devout. She went to confession once and told the priest that she read Woman’s Own magazine, you know, recipes for plum pudding, and stories about the Queen’s corgis. ‘Cross-channel literature!’ the priest told her, ‘Stop that at once!’”

Banville has come a long way since Wexford, without ever quite losing that sense of being an outsider, of not always being given his due for a body of work to rival any writer in Europe. When he won the Booker prize there was a bit of controversy because he had given a withering review in the New York Review of Books to another of that year’s potential winners, Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Banville wound up any detractors further by suggesting in his acceptance speech, with a twinkle, that “art had won”. He received something of a comeuppance, those detractors might have said, when in 2019 he was hoaxed by a call purporting to be from the Swedish Academy informing him he had won the Nobel prize. By the time he found out the truth, Banville had been ringing around friends and rivals. He had to make a second series of calls: “Don’t buy the champagne, stop throwing your hats in the air.”

A couple of times as we talk he bemoans the fact that he has never been a fixture on bestseller lists at home. There are compensations. He has been variously honoured on the continent; at the end of his time in Madrid he was invited to stay for a weekend with King Felipe VI, who has been a friend since Banville won Spain’s prestigious Asturias prize in 2014. “It’s funny,” he says, “I have a bigger reputation in Spain than I have in Ireland; people there sometimes stop me in the street. Or they say to my publisher: ‘How did you persuade the famously reclusive Banville to come over?’” The publisher, he says, obviously replies: ‘Banville? Give him a free flight and a glass of wine and he’ll go anywhere.’”

Speaking of which, he says, “shall we have another little one, and then we might go down to the harbour and get a bit of lunch”.

On the walk down to the seafront, we compare notes about our respective newspapers. Banville was first a subeditor (“changing other people’s words and coming home in the dark” as it was once described to him by a reporter) and then, for many years, literary editor of the Irish Times. He was made redundant from the paper in the millennium year.

What, I wonder, can they have been thinking of, in getting rid of him?

“Well,” he said, “I had been books editor for a decade or so, and the editor called me in one day and said I’ll give you a good deal: keep the same money and write for us instead. I had a wonderful time for about 18 months. And then I got called in again.” It’s always the same with newspapers, he suggests: the folk who can’t write are “always waiting to put the hatchet in”.

This harbour area has changed dramatically since he first moved here. He would bring his two sons down in their double buggy. “We’d watch fishermen in wooden clogs filling barrels of salted herring, like something out of Brueghel,” he says. “When all the boats were in harbour during a storm they used to say you could walk from one side to the other, on the boats.” That is all gone now – “we got the common agricultural policy instead” – and the harbourfront has become the site of commuters’ apartment buildings and cafes.

Banville doesn’t really eat lunch – bread and olives and a couple of glasses of wine. We talk about his most recent big novel, The Singularities, which was published in 2022, and which involved, in a typical conceit, the characters from many of his previous novels meeting in a country house, a device enabled by an ongoing meditation on the possibilities of theoretical physics – from all of which tricksiness he managed to conjure a fabulous yarn. That book ended with the words “a last stab, to mark a full, an infinitely full, stop”. At the time, with that Beckett-like finale, he said he would write no more “serious” books and would concentrate instead on his enjoyable side hustle in crime fiction. Does he still feel that way?

“No,” he says, “I’m writing something else, a memoir, at the moment. It’s a pack of lies,” he says, with a laugh. “It’s called Out of True.”

Has he had that title up his sleeve for a while?

“A friend of mine suggested it. It’s perfect because everything is slightly wrong. The truth is I had two ideas for books: one was this autobiography, and the other an idea to write a book about the last man. You know: a pandemic, a bomb, whatever, it’s killed everybody, and there is one survivor and it just happens to be me. I thought at my age I wouldn’t get the two books done, so I combined them. The last man is now writing his autobiography. But of course it turns out he’s not the last – there’s a woman too. So they sort of stalk each other…”

How far into it is he?

Oh, only just 8,000 words. I thought when I was this age, I’d have nothing but time. But I find you’re running around like a blue-arsed fly. And I can only manage to write from about 10 until two. The question arises: what do you do then? One thing is you have to avoid the drink.”

We reach for our wine glasses. It would be fair to say that Banville’s memoir will not be without the complications of love. He and his late wife, with whom he had two sons, stayed close after the breakdown in their marriage following the revelation in the papers of Banville’s longstanding relationship with another woman, the mother of his two adult daughters. Despite reports that he and Dunham had separated, he insists that they were reconciled. “I had two relationships and I eventually had to choose one,” he says now.

“When I was in the midst of this my wife used to say to me: ‘This is one of your best plots ever – I hope you are enjoying it, you bastard.’

“My trouble always was,” he says, “that I really like women. I remember I was at the university in Lyon, years ago, doing a talk. We had a lunch afterwards, 13 civilised French men in a room. I remember thinking, this room of only men is my idea of hell, if this just went on for all eternity.”

He warms to the theme. “The only woman that I’ve ever known who I don’t see any more is a girl that I fell in love with when I was 11. Her family used to come from Liverpool, to the seaside where my family took our holidays. She and I fell in love at 11. We’d see each other for four weeks every year and write to each other in between. I made the mistake of going and staying with her the Christmas I turned 17. She broke up with me on Christmas Eve. I’d just bought my first copy of Ulysses and it still has these little blisters of tears on the opening page.”

For a profoundly cerebral writer, Banville is in thrall to the romance of his vocation. He was part of a male literary generation in the 1980s and 90s that enjoyed its perceived glamour.

“You know,” he says of that time, “when Martin Amis and I met first, I was books editor at the Times and we had lunch in Notting Hill. We did some small talk for about 10 minutes. And then I said: ‘Look, Martin, let’s put our cards on the table. If you win a prize I will really hate you. And if I win a prize – you will hate me. If you get a half-page glowing review in the Sunday Times then I’ll really loathe you.’ He said yes, fair enough, and we shook on it. Friends for life.”

It must give him a sense of satisfaction when he looks back on the books he’s written, the shelves filled with work?

“Up to recently,” he says, “I felt nothing but embarrassment at all these failures. But in the last year or two, especially when I’ve have had a drink, if I come across one of my sentences, I might think: that’s not half bad. But I never go beyond that.”

Which books is he most proud of?

“You mean which ones disgust me least?” he says. “I suppose The Infinities and The Singularities. I came as close as I’ll get in those books. And the next one of course. As Iris Murdoch used to say: ‘This one will exonerate me for all the ones that went before.’”

Quick Guide

John Banville’s best books

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• Doctor Copernicus (1976), that year’s winner of the James Tait Black memorial prize, is an imagined life of the great astronomer. It was the first in a trilogy of books centred on the lives of singular revolutionaries and heretics – Kepler (winner of the Guardian fiction prize in 1981) then The Newton Letter, about a biographer of the scientist.

• The Book of Evidence (1989) is told in the voice of one of Banville’s unreliable narrators, Freddie Montgomery, who murders a servant girl in one of Ireland’s “big houses” while trying to steal a painting. The story was very loosely inspired by the notorious case of double-murderer Malcolm Edward Macarthur. In an interview Banville conducted about the book at Trinity College, Macarthur, released from prison, was reportedly seen in the audience.

• The Sea (2005), winner of the Booker prize, is told in the voice of Max Morden, a retired art historian who has retreated to a house on the coast in which he had holidayed as a child, to reflect on some of the tragedies of his past. The setting was based on Banville’s own childhood memories of holidays at Rosslare. It was made into a film in 2013 starring Ciarán Hinds and Sinéad Cusack.

• Snow (2020) is perhaps the most successful of the series of crime novels originally written under the nom de plume Benjamin Black, featuring the Dublin pathologist Garret Quirke and a young detective called St John Stafford. Banville began writing the books after being inspired by Georges Simenon (whom he thinks of as “one of the great writers of the 20th century”). William Boyd described this one, in the New York Times, as “an entertainment, perhaps, but a superbly rich and sophisticated one”.

•The Singularities (2022), the novel Banville suggested at the time would be his last big book, is a clever summation of some of the themes and characters that have populated his fiction. Freddie Montgomery from The Book of Evidence pitches up at the ancestral home of the Godley family, who were introduced in Banville’s 2009 novel The Infinities; Adam Godley was a wayward physicist who proved the presence of simultaneous universes. Banville’s alter ego narrator Mr Jaybey (geddit?) offers fabulous fictional evidence of his own. Tim Adams

Photograph: Tristan Hutchinson

We look out to the harbour. Does he still love embarking on these new voyages of self-discovery?

“I used to say to my wife at the start of a book: ‘You know, it seems to be going really well.’ And she’d look at me and say: ‘I know, and a year and a half from now, you’ll be in tears on the ground.’”

He laughs at the memory. “She was always brilliant at taking the wind out of my sails. I’ll tell you one last story,” he says, and leans forward. “In the early 70s,” he says, “we lived right at the top of the hill over there and I was on the late shift at the paper. It was a black night in January. I got home about half past four in the morning. Janet had been asleep for hours and the house was in total darkness, so I didn’t turn any lights on. I just got undressed and crept into bed beside her, this lovely, warm body. And she turned over and things got amorous, as they do. Given the circumstances, it was quite quick and quiet, you know. And afterwards there was a bit of a pause, and then, with her superb sense of comic timing, my wife said: ‘John, is that you?’”