Who Is John Banville?
by Sybil Steinberg -- Publishers Weekly, 11/7/2005
The name of Irish writer John Banville rings few bells for U.S. readers. Certainly he's not as well known as Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Zadie Smith or even his fellow countryman William Trevor. Yet Banville, this year's winner of the Man Booker Prize, has been garnering rapturous reviews here since the 1970s. Clearly, Knopf now has the opportunity to raise his literary profile here.
The Sea, Banville's 14th novel, carries many of the identifying marks of his previous work. The protagonist of each novel is a man haunted by the past, and agonized by guilt. He is dismayed by life's ironies. He is an educated man whose melancholy philosophical reflections unfurl in dazzling metaphors. His voice resonates with fluent literary allusions and references to artists and their works. But the reader gradually realizes that the narrator is unreliable; things are never what they appear.
Beginning in 1971, when Banville (then a writer for the Irish Times, where he later became literary editor) published his first novel, Nightspawn, each work has been beautifully composed, elegantly phrased and sustained by a vibrant lyricism.
Why, then, in the ensuing three decades in which his U.S. publishers have included Norton (Nightspawn; Birchwood; Doctor Copernicus), Godine (Kepler; Mefisto), Scribner (The Book of Evidence, shortlisted for the 1989 Booker; Ghosts; Athena) and Knopf (The Untouchable; Eclipse; The Shroud), has Banville failed to achieve wide reader recognition? For one thing, the plots of some of his novels are complex, sometimes contrived, and freighted with symbolism. It should be no surprise that the writer Banville most admires is the word-hoarding perfectionist Samuel Beckett. In a 1993 PW interview Banville said that he tries to give his prose "the kind of denseness and thickness that poetry has."
From the point of view of potential reader popularity, however, The Sea offers all of Banville's seductive characteristics and few of his obscurities. The mystery hinted at in the first paragraph is developed with clear strokes; even the surprise at the end is signaled early on. Knopf president and editor-in-chief Sonny Mehta is hopeful that this novel will be Banville's breakthrough book. "While John has always had a devoted following, I think his complex stories and precise prose have prevented him in many ways from reaching the much wider general readership he deserves," Mehta says. "Obviously, the Booker Prize has already expanded that audience exponentially in the U.K. But here in the States, I think the prize, coupled with the quality of reviews we anticipate, will at long last bring John his just rewards."
