John Banville article from Irish author Paul R. Hyde. John Banville: Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, The Newton Letter.

John Banville

"All works of art are scar tissue." John Banville.

Among living Irish writers, Banville is outstanding and fearless. At a time when it was neither popular nor profitable, he wrote Doctor Copernicus, Kepler and The Newton Letter. Unlike many writers, he has no fear of ideas or of metaphysics. Widely considered to be the most distinguished Irish novelist of his generation, Banville is unafraid to make the unfashionable distinction between middlebrow and highbrow fiction. Indeed his novels often eschew (yes, eschew!) the basic ingredients of comfort reading — plot, character development, suspense and conclusion — all the essentials of naive consumer fiction which provide a screen around the drowsy reader to filter out all that is enigmatic, perplexing, difficult. Banville's novels differ from ninety percent of contemporary literary novels in that they do not engage centrally with the unending and infinitely boring barrage of social, ethical and political issues which delude average literate city-dwellers into believing they are thinking, responsible people. The issues which engage Banville are those which have troubled philosophers, thinkers and artists in many cultures over a very long time: truth and illusion, the nature of reality, time and identity, knowledge and perception. These perhaps attractive word patterns make up the delicious and exotic minestrone of incoherence that we call existence. However, they are merely word patterns caused by language delirium and it is the task of serious literature to propose possible antidotes.

Banville's writing is often deeply introspective, sometimes solipsistic, with fashioned sentences which suggest that meaning might be possible in language — but not yet. But like life/love itself, and precisely because of its grammar, language is a black hole from which meaning cannot escape.

The Newton Letter (1982), set in Banville's native County Wexford, is an exquisite and intricately patterned novella — a prose poem about the possibility of knowledge in which the inscrutable patterns of ordinary life, lurching between meaning and meaninglessness, are placed against the deterministic laws of the universe as described by Newton's laws of motion and gravity. Newton, it is supposed, suffered a crisis of faith in the intellect and his scientific creativity ebbed away; so Banville's narrator, immersing himself in the summer countryside, is similarly afflicted and drifts into a maelstrom of emotion which, failing to follow any perceivable laws, collapses into entropy. In trying to understand Newton's crisis, the narrator succumbs to a similar ailment and falls according to the gravitational laws of emotional and carnal desire. Appropriately, the two women with whom he gets involved are called Lawless; with one woman he achieves only emotional entropy when his love — "a passion of the mind" — goes to earth in an instant like an electrical charge. And with the other, driven by sexual instinct, he fathers a child. The novella evolves around abstraction and immediacy, intellection and surrender to the carnal/emotional ground of being.

Whilst Newton, one of those "high cold heroes who renounced the world and human happiness to pursue the big game of the intellect", consigned the ultimate mysteries of the cosmic order to God for safekeeping, we lesser mortals stumble through our lives demented by instinct and appetition.

Banville's book reviews are often better than the books he reviews. He is direct and honest in his book reviewing — a rare thing when authors often 'cultivate' their reviewers with gifts of wine, flowers etc. His NYRB review of a highly-regarded English writer's novel begins: "Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. Another source of dismay ... is the ecstatic reception Saturday has received ... Are we in the West so shaken in our sense of ourselves and our culture ... that we can allow ourselves to be persuaded and comforted by such a self-satisfied and, in many ways, ridiculous novel as this?"

Unusually, he is a writer who despises his own books "with a deep abiding hatred" and for this reason alone, John Banville merits election to The Good & The Dead.

Recommended reading:

The Supreme Fictions of John Banville by Joseph McGinn. Manchester University Press, 1999.
John Banville: Exploring Fictions by Derek Hand. The Liffey Press, 2002.
Mirrors and Holographic Labyrinths: Process of a New Aesthetic Synthesis in John Banville's Work by Laura Azarra. International Scholars Publications, 1998.