John Banville / Features / Untitled Books

“My work is frequently described as cold, which is baffling, since it seems to me embarrassingly, shame-makingly, scandalously warm."

John Banville

The Irish novelist and journalist John Banville is best known for his Booker prize winning novel The Sea. His exacting prose style divides opinion; damned as heavyweight and digressive by some; hailed as lyrical, wise and flawlessly crafted by others. He talks to Beth Jones.

"It's an absolute disgrace. They should be hanged," says John Banville of the decision by the Man Booker Prize judges not to include his latest novel, The Infinities, on this year's recently announced long list. Banville's tone is grave and during the brief pause which follows I am left wondering if the Wexford-born novelist does indeed have a hit squad on speed dial. But he continues with a smile in his voice: "No. The thing about having already won [for his 2005 novel The Sea] is that you never have to care about it again," he says.

While Banville is adopting an insouciant manner, others have questioned the judges' decision: writers for both The Sunday Telegraph and The Sunday Times have drawn attention to the fact that this wonderful, funny, warm and supremely stylish book is a notable omission for the biggest literary prize in Britain. Set across one midsummer's day, Banville's fifteenth book details the lives of the Godley family as they gather around the deathbed of the family patriarch, old Adam. The family is not alone. They are being observed not only by the reader, but also by various Greek gods: namely Zeus and his son Hermes, with the latter serving as one of the tale's narrators. The threads from which this novel is woven are similar in colour and texture to previous Banville works. There is the unreliable narrator: "It may well be that the entire book is a fevered dream in Adam Godley's head," Banville suggests. The book also returns to that familiar Banville leitmotif - times past. Most notably, just as The Untouchable's Victor Maskell reviews his life and writes his memoirs, or Max Morden in The Sea returns to the coastal village where he once spent a childhood, The Infinities is concerned with the way the past can never be entirely laid to rest. Old Adam's son, also called Adam, has returned to his childhood home: "Adam thinks of the past piled up behind him, its countless overlapping layers, and of what will have been his own brief moment on this so tender, frail and suffering earth." As soon as characters recall the past, it proves itself capricious, as in so many of Banville's books. Old Adam's wife, Ursula, clips her husband's fingernails and remembers an image of his mother performing the same task. But soon she only "seems to remember" and then "surely not - surely she is imagining it? Yet in her mind she sees clearly."

Across the waters in Ireland and along the echoing telephone lines on which we are speaking, Banville tries to explain why it is that the past, or people's perceptions of it, has proved such a fertile hunting ground for him. "I think," he posits, "it was Baudelaire who said that literary genius consists in the ability to summon up childhood at will. It's a wise observation. Childhood, and one's past in general, is the material out of which a writer makes his inspiration."

Such statements can make Banville, a former journalist with the Irish Press and later literary editor of the Irish Times, sound grand and even pompous. But The Infinities is far from that. It may deal with the serious subject of life and death, but it does so in a way which is often darkly humorous and sometimes laugh-out loud funny: at one point Zeus orders Hermes to delay the dawn so he can seduce Adam's wife, Helen, much to Hermes' indignance: "You try telling that hotspur Phaeton why he was reined in, or rosy-fingered Aurora why I had to shove her in the face." While Hermes may resent being the facilitator of such erotic acts, how did Banville, as their sexagenarian creator, cope? "Oh it's difficult [writing about sex] without being coarse, or stupid, or precious. John Updike can do it beautifully, but I find it very hard," he says. The coupling of Zeus and Helen in the book is, Banville says, "a straight description" of a Picasso etching which he has framed directly before his desk. It's from the Vollard Suite of etchings which he considers to be "Picasso's finest achievement" and it is this print which appears on the cover of The Infinities, at his suggestion. It isn't the first time he's had a hand in a novel's design. "I sent them a photo by my son [Douglas] for The Sea and they used it in a very creative way, setting it in a picture frame within the cover," he says proudly.

Banville lives in Ireland and writes "in my apartment office on the river in the centre of Dublin. My window looks out onto a large courtyard so it's very quiet." His desk faces a wall of postcards which have caught his fancy over the years: "three midget circus clowns, a photograph of the artist Yves Klein leaping off a wall, a print of Goya's little dog at the corrida, and a reproduction of one of the great Rover Thomas's aboriginal paintings." He also has a drawing of a man sitting in front of a computer screen which is telling him: 'You have no f***ing emails'. "I am addicted to emails," he says, "I check them every thirty seconds. The notion that the postman pops us every time is the perfect way of wasting time and that's what every author is desperate to do."

Wasting time is not something Banville has done with The Infinities. The overall impression is a novel which, as Banville himself notes, "people have found a bit warmer than [my] other books." Warmth is not a word typically associated with Banvillie's writing. John Sutherland, the former Booker chair, accused The Sea of "slit-your-throat-gloom" and said it was "too literary , perhaps, for some readers." But this is something with which Banville takes issue: "My work is frequently described as cold, which is baffling, since it seems to me embarrassingly, shame-makingly, scandalously warm. I find my work filled with sentiment and I can't imagine why people find it cold," he says. He also takes umbrage with the fact that: "People said The Sea had no plot, but I thought it was throbbing with plot right down to the twist in the end. I was slightly ashamed of it there was so much plot."

It was, of course, The Sea, (currently being made into a film starring Sinead Cusack), which won Banville the Booker prize back in 2005 (He had previously been short-listed for The Book of Evidence (1989) and long-listed for The Shroud (2002)). He triumphed over popular authors such as Julian Barnes, Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ali Smith and Sebastian Barry but remembers the event as excruciating: "It was absolute agony," he says. "It lasted about four hours. It starts with drinks, then you have dinner, trying not to drink too much. We didn't know [The Sea was going to win]. We hadn't a clue. Everyone was astonished, many people were appalled." Despite being compared to Beckett and Nabokov and being widely admired for the stunning way in which he sculpts language, Banville was not the popular choice. When he heard he had won, he remembers thinking: "Imagine how many people hate me". The comment he made about being "glad to see a work of art winning...for a change" was, he says, an attempt "to turn the knife a little further." "I meant what I said. Mainstream fiction normally wins and it's good from time to time for a book like this to win. It infuriated a great many people. I didn't care."

The literary prize which has meant the most to him is the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, awarded by the University of Edinburgh, which he won in 1976 for Doctor Copernicus: ""I was thrilled. It came out of the blue, announced in a small brown business envelope, enquiring if I would be prepared to accept the prize. I was prepared." But whilst that might have given him much needed confidence as a young man, it is still the Booker which he recognizes as "the only one which counts." He adds: "It's an important prize. It's important for all of us. Sales go up enormously, it's very good for one's editor who has taken a chance, it's good all round". Of this year's selection he says: "I don't think I've read any of the books on the list but it seems a good solid one. There have been some dodgy winners in recent years - there are those who consider The Sea the dodgiest of all - and it's probably good for the prize that this year the jury has gone mainly for mainstream fiction." He'd like to see William Trevor wins, but predicts a victory for Hilary Mantel.

He himself has been asked to judge the prize, twice. Both times he has turned them down. "Grown men don't read fiction," he jokes, explaining that he has no desire to plough through the plethora of pages involved in such a task. "I think after a certain age we stop having a need for stories. I read letters, poems, history, philosophy. For me, the novel never seemed to be an interesting form." So why is that his medium of choice? Because, he explains, "in my little way I'm trying to make a new form of novel, as deep as poetry, as dense and demanding."

As a light aside from his lofty ambition to re-fashion the novel form, Banville spends his time writing crime fiction under the pen name Benjamin Black which began with Christine Falls in 2007. It's murder and intrigue set on the streets of 1950s Dublin and is page-turning stuff. Writing as Black is, he says: "an entirely different process. As Banville, I write in longhand with a fountain pen. As Black I work straight on to the screen then do a print-out and revise the page. Banville writes painfully slowly, Black is more fluent" He originally chose the name Benjamin White after a character in his early works which, he says, "thankfully no one reads". He was persuaded to change from White to Black by his publisher. The reason he chose a pen name at all was because he wanted people to "realise it was something different" but he doesn't, he says, believe in genres. "Bookshops always want a 'crime' section, but I'd like to see them divide books into 'good' and 'bad' because that's all it comes down to".

So far, reviews of The Infinities have placed the novel firmly in the former category, not that Banville has seen them: "I don't read any of my reviews," he says. "Friends try to tell me about them. They say, "Did you read what they wrote in The Guardian about you? It's libelous. And I say no, no I don't want to know." Sometimes, however, there is nothing Banville can do to avoid his critics, and the results can be unexpected: "I was walking down the street one day and a workman was going past on his bike. He was going very fast and I thought he was going to attack me but instead, he shouted out: "Great fucking book!" Now that," Banville concludes, "is the best review I could hope for."

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The Infinities is published by Picador.

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Monday, 7 September, 2009