HITLER, STALIN, BOB DYLAN, RODDY DOYLE ...AND ME

Over the opening credits of John Banville’s television drama, Seachange a musical mötif from Schubert’s song-cycle The Wanderer is played. He wouldn’t even consider using a similarly titled song by U2, or Dion’s cri-de-crotch of the same name. It isn’t just that such songs would clash with the tone of a play that is clearly the equivalent of a piece of chamber music. John Banville takes the relatively unfashionable view that pop culture is neither art nor particularly resonant.

As such, he obviously leaves himself open to accusations of being elitist, anachronistic and totally out-of-step with those cultural developments this century which have led to the breaking down of barriers between the so-called high-arts and the popular arts. Clearly relishing his oppositional perspective, Banville even argues that the breakdown of such barriers has led to a dilution of the life of the intellect, and imagination, and an undermining of all previously held standards of excellence in art.

From the age of the Enlightenment to the age of McDonalds and MTV; from Mozart and Beethoven to Bob Dylan and Bono is too long a fall, he believes.

All of this, of course, would be little more than the cultural equivalent of Ulster unionists holding on to the last vestige of a dying social order were it not for the fact that John Banville has himself produced at least three books which place him among the highest ranks of literary artists in this country over at least the last quarter century.

Starting with Mefisto and including The Book of Evidence and Ghosts, he has produced a series of novels which certainly legitimise his position as one of the five most notable modern Irish writers as featured in the Government publication, ‘Facts about Ireland’, alongside John McGahern, Francis Stuart, Aidan Higgins and Brian Moore. It was recently reported that he received a £300,000 advance for his next two novels.

Despite his ever-escalating status as a public figure, however, John Banville also advocates the politically unfashionable view that artists have no social responsibilities other than to themselves, or rather to their art. In this context, he frequently quotes a line from Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Fire: ‘The artist has only one responsibility, which is to create masterpieces’. We are speaking in the somehow highly appropriate, gothic surroundings of Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel.

JOE JACKSON: ‘The artist has only one responsibility, to create masterpieces.’ Is this a core belief of yours?

JOHN BANVILLE: I like to quote that piece by Cyril Connolly because it really annoys those who regard me as effete, arrogant, distanced!

All of which is true, of course.

Of course! And I do believe that the artist who thinks he has a voice in the world that is as significant as the politician is deluding himself. Politicians are the people who make the laws that rule our lives. That’s politics, to me. So, when people today say ‘everything is politics’ that’s nonsense. Everything is not politics.

Those who say ‘everything is politics’ surely mean that everything can be read politically – as in the premise that art can tell us where the artist and, by extension, his or her society was at a particular point in time?

That is what happens to art after art is done. Any artist who sets out to comment on society, politics or morals is going to produce defective art. But once the art has been made, then you can say ‘yes, this was representative of its time’. When I wrote Birchwood in the early ’70s, to me it was a completely closed work of art. Yet years later, when I came to do a screenplay of it and cut away all the literary flesh, I was surprised by how much of the Northern Troubles had crept into it, without my knowing. So, that book is representative of its time; but I didn’t do it to be that way. And that is the absolutely crucial difference, between what you mean to do and what is done.

What do you say to those critics who suggest that after Birchwood your books become largely irrelevant because you fail to directly address the changing political landscape in Ireland?

I say what I just said a moment ago. A writer does what he does. And I myself have reservations about the direction I went in, with books like Doctor Copernicus and Kepler. I was probably deluded because of the people I was reading at the time, like Hermann Broch and my wanting to do the great European novel. I was in my 20s, 30s taking myself very seriously, indeed! And I did make the conscious decision to leap over England to Europe, with a backward glance to America. That was very risky and I don’t know that the risks paid off. But I still don’t give a tinker’s curse about reviewers who say I should have followed this, that or the other.

Connolly, in that section from ‘The Unquiet Grave’ lists a dozen works he regards as masterpieces, from The Odes and Epistles of Horace, Intimate Journals of Bauedelaire to Byron’s Don Juan. What, to you, constitutes a ‘masterpiece’?

First of all, I must say that the word ‘masterpiece’ is often misused. It’s not what we have come to take it as – this great shining star in the sky. It’s simply the best piece of work that a master of his craft can produce. And there are superlatively great works of art. But I keep changing my view of them. There was a period when I listened to nothing but Beethoven quartets, whereas, now, I haven’t, for at least ten years. But certainly, at the moment I would go back and read those few late texts that Beckett wrote. Those are supreme works of art.

When you begin to write a novel, do you aspire to create your own ‘masterpiece’?

Again, ‘masterpiece’ is a description people apply after the event. When I’m writing, all I want to do is get this thing done. The book I’ve just finished, Athena, took a year and a half to write, which is amazingly fast for me; whereas Ghosts took five years. But I am never aware of trying to produce a masterpiece. Yet I do like to strike a pose along these lines because it annoys people. But I don’t take myself that seriously.

When you receive a Booker nomination or read endless reviews which refer to how perfectly crafted, and beautiful your writing is, do you take that seriously?

My wife put it very well. When the Booker nomination came through she said ‘oh my God, they must have misread it!’ and ‘don’t worry, dear, you’ll write another book. Just put this one behind you!’ And I do, genuinely feel that when the world says ‘yes, you’ve got it right this time’, I immediately say ‘what did I do wrong?’

You, apparently, do not agree with those who claim that Booker winner Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is a work of art that rivals the writings of Sean O’Casey?

I’ve no interest in him. I think he is less a literary figure than a phenomenon of popular culture. And popular culture is easy and immediate. That’s fine, but let’s not confuse pop culture and art. And the way in which something like the Booker Prize has come to be regarded as an arbiter of good literature is nonsense. Ulysses would not have been short-listed for the Booker Prize, Beckett’s Molloy would not have been short-listed, Proust would not have been short-listed. So we have to keep a sense of proportion as to what is really good in literature.

So if good literature is not the decisive factor when it comes to, say, Roddy Doyle winning the Booker Prize, what is?

You get five judges who like one book and not another, basically. Roddy Doyle said the same thing himself. And Doyle is no fool. He knows, like the rest of us, that these things are arbitrary. And let’s not forget that money dictates many decisions in the world of publishing. When I started publishing, twenty four years ago you went to see gentlemen in garrets in Soho and they said ‘we’ll give you fifty quid for this but it won’t make any money’. Whereas, since around 1980, there has been serious money in fiction. But it would be dangerous if popular culture came to be seen as the only kind of culture and if it came to be confused with those very few works of art which will prove themselves to be such, in time. And I don’t think Roddy Doyle does confuse the two.

But why do you have no interest at all in the writings of Roddy Doyle?

I think Roddy is a sincere writer. He works as he sees fit and is working in an area that nobody ever thought of exploring before. Irish fiction has always been pastoral and he started writing about Dublin in a way that may one day lead to a masterpiece. But he hasn’t thus far. I read about seventy pages of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha but had to stop. It just didn’t hold my interest, that’s all.

Why do you despise popular culture and does this aesthetic dictate, say, the amount of space you give over to certain book reviews, in your role as literary editor of The Irish Times? Some would argue that, whatever about your social responsibilities as a writer, your role as literary editor carries with it obvious responsibilities.

I agree that it does. And I do draw a line between the two. A books page should be like a bookshop, containing something for all readers. And that’s what the books page in The Irish Times is. If I were to apply my aesthetic to it I wouldn’t be doing the job right. And despite immediately feeling that I now should jump into my liberal Irish Times literary editor mode to answer your original question and say ‘there’s nothing wrong with popular culture’ somebody has to be against it these days! And the problem is that people are coming forward too often and saying ‘I’m championing popular culture because it’s being marginalised.’ That’s absolute nonsense. We are up to our armpits in popular culture. We’re sinking in it. And people must continually be reminded that there is another kind of art, another kind of culture, which is difficult and it takes time to manifest itself.

What have you in mind when you say that?

Look at late Beckett. Most people regard those slim, little books he wrote during the last 15 years of his life as leavings. They are not. They are actually the pinnacle of his art. Yet you have to read them at least five times and then they open like a flower and you see what he’s doing. You follow the difficult process he went through, to write those books. And there must be a certain difficulty in art. To ignore this is to cut off a whole wing of culture, and of human consciousness, that it is very dangerous for us to cut off. Pop culture is, as I say, just too easy.

Are there any producers of pop culture that make you look at their work ten, twenty, thirty years later and say ‘that has crossed over the line’ into art?

I’d put it back further than that. Hollywood movies, of the late 1930’s to the mid 1940s crossed that line. People like Preston Sturges were producing absolute works of art. Genuinely popular, while holding onto a certain level of elegance and sophistication, which is now gone from Hollywood. All you have now is the Coen Brothers aping Preston Sturges. Yet works of high art also can be incredibly popular. The problem is that it all comes down to money. Money mesmerises the people who are spending it. They say ‘if I’m spending this amount of money on the production of a play, or of a book, or film, I have to make it appeal to a vast amount of people so they’ll buy it and I’ll get my money back’. That is the bottom line. And it’s a tendency that’s definitely growing in relation to the arts.

One imagines then that you deeply disapprove of the space newspapers are giving over to pop culture at the expense of what used to be known as the high arts – ballet, theatre, painting, literature etc.

It’s a very complex problem. Because, in a way, it’s better that the high arts are marginalised. It’s better for people to admit ‘this is not going to appeal to everybody, this is elitist’. Yet it depends then on the kind of coverage you give. If you only give ten column inches to the high arts every week in a daily newspaper, it depends what those ten inches are like. If they are really good and the person writing them knows what he, or she, is talking about, then that would be worth more than acres of coverage. On the other hand, if you take Hot Press and that interview you did with John McGahern a few years ago, that seemed, to me, to have the kind of value, in terms of high art, that would make up for acres and acres of stuff that treated McGahern’s books in a frivolous way.

In terms of rock culture in general, do you regard the work of songwriters like Dylan, Van Morrison or Bono as art?

No. Well, let’s say it’s the kind of minor art that has always been around. For every one real poet that worked in the ‘Beat’ school during the 1950s, there were about four thousand standing up in polo necks and simply eyeing the women. And I think that in popular art the doing of the work is the important thing, the production of it. Both for the person producing it, and the audience. The person producing it stands there on stage pretending to be moved, as in a Bob Dylan scrunching up his face. But it’s just theatre. And the audience will know he’s only acting. Yet it is expressing something of the anguish in the world, whatever.

But that precisely is the argument for the validity of popular culture, in that it is a democratisation of the arts because it does provide a form of self-expression for the widest possible number of people. And, when it works, gives a sense of transcendence to its audience, no matter how fleeting.

But I think self-expression should be discouraged at all costs. And transcendence has nothing to do with it. These are lofty terms people apply, whereas what an artist does is simply work. It’s either good work or bad work. But it’s a monstrous delusion to think it is just self expression. I don’t know how it is for other artists, but for me, as a novelist, the process starts off with you simply saying: ‘I’m going to start this thing’. And in order to preserve a sense of yourself at the outset, and believe there is a possibility that you might finish the work someday, you also tell yourself ‘this is going to be easy’. But then, after about six months, this thing suddenly turns around and gets you by the throat, digs its fangs in and says ‘I’m not easy. If you’re going to do this, then you and I are going to be locked together in this hideous embrace until I set you free’.

Aren’t you being just a shade dramatic?

I am not exaggerating. For example, when I saw that film Alien, and saw that thing clawing onto that guy’s face I thought ‘art’! And that’s exactly what it is. It just claws its way onto your face and says ‘I’m staying here, until I’ve sucked the life out of you’. Then, finally, it comes springing out of your belly, casts you aside and has its own little life in the world. That’s not simply self-expression. That’s being locked in mortal combat with something altogether different, wherever it comes from. And that, to me, is art.

It also sounds like fun! Where’s the joy in that process? When the work does begin to breathe on its own, out there in the world?

Not at all. That’s highly embarrassing and makes you just want to turn around and begin again, with a new work, hoping you’ll get it right the next time.

And is it true that, at the beginning of a book, you can spend up to a year on a first paragraph?

That’s what I mean by the work that is involved. I remember going to the first ROSC exhibition in the ’60s and it was a great exhibition, full of exuberant pictures. Big canvases that made you stand in front of them with your mouth open. But there was one picture there, by Barnett Newman and it was a blue, vertical canvas. Sky blue, with one white line down the side. And it was the best picture there. And I kept coming back to it, saying ‘but there’s nothing here’. Yet the whole point of it was that all of Bernard Newman’s life as an artist had gone into taking away from that picture. So the weight you felt was the weight of absence, the weight of all the stuff he had thrown away. And that’s what artistic work is. It’s not self-expression. It’s not putting things in. It’s finding a way of expressing something in the most economical way.

That, surely is an aesthetic principle you have since sinned against, particularly in terms of the baroque elements in your novels.

Of course. And the sense of carnivals. Yet I think those things too can be a part of art, which is something that really amused me about my adaptation of Kleist’s The Broken Jug, which was a great success. Throughout that play I was half-blushing and half-laughing myself silly, thinking ‘this is absolutely disgraceful’. But it was disgraceful! It was pure carnival, pure burlesque. And people came to me afterwards and sad ‘I was really amazed’, as if they believed I wasn’t capable of producing such a work. So I’d say ‘go back and read my books again!’ Because I really do regard my books as comedies.

Like which ones?

I regard The Book of Evidence as a comedy. But, that said, a book like Mefisto nearly killed me. I wrote it during a time when both my parents died. And I found it very hard to mourn for them. I didn’t really weep that much, didn’t do any of that stuff. But about six months after Mefisto came out I was at a dinner party and the person next to me said, ‘I read the book, really liked it, but what’s it about?’ And, without thinking, I replied: ‘it’s about grief’. I hadn’t thought of that at all. Yet I do really think that at some level, all my art is about grief and loss and about the awareness of death. Including the elements of humour, obviously.

Why didn’t you mourn more directly for your parents, instead of translating that into a book? Is this what your parents would have wanted? Was it enough?

(pause) One of the reasons people do art, in the first place, is a twofold. One is in order to stand back in the world, to be distanced and able to say ‘this is causing me pain but I can go away and write about it.’ That, obviously, is a kind of inspired cowardice. The other reason is that, for people like me, reality only becomes reality when it’s strained through another medium. For me, that medium is words. Reality has to become fixed, in some way. And least I thought that up until the time I wrote Mefisto. I allowed things to happen in Mefisto, not knowing why. I allowed instinct to take over at certain points, which is something I’d never done before. A book like Kepler is based on numerology, every section is a certain length and begins and ends in a certain way. It’s a whole circular movement, which is an intellectual concept I admire. But Mefisto, even though both parts are mirror images, is very loose, chaotic and dangerous within that form. I wouldn’t be able to go back and read that because, obviously, what I was allowing to happen, was something about my own life.

As in self-expression by another name?

It is, of course. But what I realised from that is that art is often self-expression by a roundabout way. Whereas, if you start out saying ‘I’m going to express myself here’, you’re no better than those poets who stand up and spend a half hour telling you about how, and why they wrote a particular poem and then the poem itself takes thirty seconds to read! If they just read the bloody poem it would be much more expressive. Self-expression is always something you discover afterwards.

But you yourself clearly can’t live at one step removed from feelings such as grief, love, joy in a familial situation, for example. In terms of expressing your love for your wife or children does reality only become reality when it becomes the written word?

(pause) There are certain, simple emotions, like familial love, that express themselves in a very direct way, that we can’t control. And it’s not problematic. Whereas my relationship with my parents was extremely problematic. I had a perfectly happy, lower middle class, provincial childhood. My parents loved me, even though my father was distant. But my mother was extremely near, which is the Irish norm. Yet when I became an adolescent I realised I wanted to get away from the life I was trapped into by an accident of birth. I happened to be born into this family, this town, this country at this particular time. It wasn’t what I wanted, so I said to myself when I was about 15, ‘I don’t have to put up with this, I can change it’. And I immediately started to work to change those circumstances. And, talking to you now, it occurs to me that I probably never got out of that habit.

You also once claimed that too many modern Irish writers are merely “killing their fathers” in their work. Aren’t there similar familial tensions in your books? Did you, for example, want to kill your father?

No. I wanted to kill my poor mother! But she understood that very well. And I do think that for Irish sons and mothers there is this extraordinary tension because the women in this country were somehow expected to be the powerful ones. Maybe if you were interviewing a woman, she’d say exactly the same thing about her father, which probably has to do with sex, maybe gender.

But there are many killings in your books, or characters who have committed crimes and are looking for release from guilt – whatever. Where does all that come from?

Certainly Long Langin, Birchwood, Nightspawn and Ghosts have those elements, particularly guilt because I do believe that is the human condition. Yet I honestly can’t tell you where it comes from, in terms of my own life. The book I’ve just finished is the third part of the trilogy that includes The Book of Evidence and Ghosts. In The Book of Evidence, the guy kills a woman who means nothing to him, whereas in this new book, Athena, he creates a woman.

Obviously that very much feeds into the suggestion that John Banville loves to play the ‘little God’, to cull a phrase from Ghosts!

Of course. This is what artists want. Artists want to be gods, in the sense that the artist is a man who is very interested in control and in subjugating reality to certain, quite well-defined laws. I wouldn’t deny that about myself.

Do you also agree, then, with one critic’s claim that, as an artist, your real starting point is that at which the “world has been abandoned by God” in a Nietzschean sense and that point at which we must begin to ask ourselves how do we replace that force or learn to live with an acceptance that the God-force can never be replaced?

Certainly I regard Nietzsche as the greatest philosopher in our time. So, yes, the books are, at some level, about solitude in the face of an incomprehensible world. But, because I am a novelist I take great delight in what we have done with this solitude. We’ve invented this extraordinary world to hold up, like a talisman, a crucifix, against death. And it does all comes back to death. In this sense I’m highly sceptical about Freud. He was a very good artist but not a good doctor. Yet I believe that, at the end of his life, when Freud wrote about the death instinct and the way in which practically everything we do is both the flight from, and the flight towards, death he was absolutely right. That is where our energy comes from, whether that relates to sex or art.

But, before Freud and other modernists, most artists argued that the energy came from believing one could escape death by flying into the arms of God.

I don’t think people ever did believe that. I think it was simply a powerful story people told themselves to ease their awareness of the inevitability of death. Many, obviously, still do. But it’s true that we live in a post-religious age and I think that, historically, the turning point came during the Second World War. At that time people thought to themselves ‘if this kind of thing can happen and we can bring ourselves to the very edge of destruction in the most savage ways then the notion of a personal God is absurd’. Religion died at that point. Yet I do still believe that the myth is absolutely necessary. And I don’t know what we are going to replace that religious myth with.

But surely the Nietzschean view of the world is one in which the artists do take the place of God?

They can take the place of God, in a sense, but it would be very foolish for us to imagine that this would have the same kind of effects that we imagine religion had. Art will not redeem us. It will not save us from death. But it will do other things, such as leave something after us, a mark on the world which will say: ‘we’ve been here’. It’s extraordinary to listen to a Beethoven quartet and say ‘this man sat at a desk, in grief and despair and joy and wrote this music. This is a definite thumbprint on the world’. That, to me, is the most redemption we can expect.

Earlier you described the impulse towards art as a form of emotional cowardice. And, far from describing it as “brave” some would say that, for example, when Tom Murphy claims he would step over the body of a bleeding woman to finish his play this is life-denying and self-centred to an obscene degree. Would you do what he said he’d do, for art?

I definitely do believe artists lack some final, human piece, no doubt about that. But I wouldn’t use the same kind of colourful language Murphy uses there. And, of course I wouldn’t step over the body of anybody in those circumstances. But what he is expressing, in terms of the way one uses everything for art, is something I can relate to. You suffer a death and you know that part of your mind is recording how you feel, how it looks for future use. Graham Greene, too, is right when he says there is a ‘splinter of ice’ in the heart of the artist.

Can that ‘splinter of ice’ slice a family in two? I’ve read of how, at one point in your life, while your wife and children were out in the garden enjoying the sun you were endlessly locked away in your room, with the curtains drawn, concentrating on writing. Can’t that kind of obsession create potentially damaging chasms in a family?

It did, in those days. That was when I was doing Kepler or Copernicus, which was during that very good summer, in 1976. And, yes, I did sit in a room the sun shone into and close the blinds, so I could work in the darkness. But I don’t work like that anymore. And I can’t, and won’t work for anything more than about three hours a day now. Partly because it is potentially damaging to all concerned.

Metaphorically speaking, your critics would say you have stepped over if not the bodies of women then their psyches during the process of creating your books.

It’s true that if you look at my books, women are constantly being battered over the heads, and having all manner of deeds done to them – including murder.

Which is, maybe, a manifestation of your desire to ‘murder’ your mother, or at least strike back at her in some way.

Yes. But, then again, maybe not because I also know that men have a deep, deep fear of all women. They fear the power women carry. The power to cause them pain, the power to rob them of their equilibrium, which, of course, has to do with the mother, but also has to do with the ways in which men are taught to treasure women. And I must admit that I’ve always felt that women came from Mars! We were put here, then the spaceships came down and the women sprang out of pods and men said ‘my God! Look at this’ and stood there with their mouths open – which is how we’ve been ever since! Forget this stuff about spare ribs, women are pods from Mars! But they are just so absolutely ravishingly beautiful. They are everything we’re not. They have this kind of tentativeness and seem to understand how things work, whereas we spend a lifetime trying to find out the same things.

If you see women as so beautiful and perfect why are they battered over the head and silenced in your work?

(pause) They have great power in the books. Their presence is formidable. And if they are battered over the head and pushed aside it’s probably because they are too real for, yes, this mad monologist, who’s telling these stories. Yet I’ll be interested to see what women will make of the new book, which is about a love affair that involves a certain amount of sado-masochism. I’ve been reading The Story of O, which is a masterpiece. But it’s about the way in which O is in control, she’s the woman with power. She’s dealing with these men who are clawing at her, like children. ‘Let me suck this. Let me get into this. Let me do all these things’. And she’s saying ‘of course I’ll do it. Tie me up. Beat me. Do all those things’. But she has only to look at them and they melt. And the woman character in my book is referred to as A, though I was going to call her O, which would have been too obvious. But there are lots of nods of acknowledgement towards The Story of O. And maybe, read superficially, the feminist reading of Athena will be ‘oh, Banville’s just doing the same old thing again’.

As in reducing, marginalising women?

Yes. But if they read it closely they will see it is a man who is just debasing himself before a woman, feeling adoration, saying ‘I don’t understand the power you have in this world’. The power of existence, the power of authenticity. Certainly I , as a man, don’t know how to be authentic. Women seem to be that, simply by existing.

Feminists would see even that claim as an idolatrous perspective on woman, which is also offensive.

Yes. Of course they would, And I have a male friend who has said to me ‘you have a much too high opinion of women, they’re not like that at all’. But I just say ‘I know they’re from Mars, they’re not of this space’ because that’s what I believe.

Feminists might even balk at the title of your book, Athena, as it signifies woman as Goddess.

Of course. But I don’t care what they want. And I think the realities of life will not be wished away. What men have done in the past ten years is take a feminist stance. We don’t refer to women as ‘girls’ anymore, for example, but beyond gestures like that, we’ve just learned the language. Because that is what women want at the moment. But it’s much better for someone like me to express the real war that now exists between women and men. It never ceases. That is the reality of the way in which men and women operate together these days. All this notion of the ‘new man’ and the ‘new niceness’ is all balls, absolute nonsense.

So when you do sex scenes in Athena, does that become problematic because of this distance you perceive between yourself and women?

I don’t do ‘sex scenes’ as such, as in the mechanics of it because that would be like talking about blowing up a football. And about as exciting as that! Sex has nothing to do with this physical pumping motion people go on about. It’s the weight and the ways in which we give up our privacy to another, the ways we allow ourselves to be known and our flesh to be known – this is where sex is at its most powerful. And that can be written about in the same way that anything else is written about. But to write about the mechanics would be ludicrous and something I don’t even attempt to do. It’s up to readers to decide if I succeed on those other levels, or not.

What do you think of the “anything goes” tendency in fiction at the moment in relation to sex?

It’s a kind of infantilism. We began to be allowed to do it at the end of the ’60s, so we do it. But that development is almost at an end, thankfully. Yet, let’s face it, most fiction is infantile anyway. It’s people writing about their lives, their love affairs, it’s nonsense. I don’t like fiction as a form. I think it’s childish. It’s too coarse. Which is why I’m trying to change it. My modest ambition in life is to change the novel entirely!

Summing up, it’s been suggested that you are stand-offish socially in order to keep bores at bay- as in those you might see as your subordinates, in a Nietzschean sense. Is that true?

(laughs) This ridiculous notion has risen up of me as that kind of person. The truth is that I’m constantly making a fool of myself, fawning over people. And I hate that view of the artist. But this book has come out which says that people who know me say I’m ‘prickly and arrogant’. Okay, I am! Yet the trouble is that when you get any kind of reputation you are immediately required to be this, that or the other. I’m what I always was. Being an artist doesn’t make you any different from what you would have been were you a plumber. I can see the fascination people have with those of us who get our names in the paper – especially, as we said earlier, in a post-religious age, where we have to have, if not Gods, then at least angels, saints and holy men. Let’s face it: they don’t exist. And the only piece of fictional writing I’ve ever done, which is absolutely expressive of what I feel, in this context, was a passage in The Book of Evidence. It’s where he’s coming home from Holyhead to Dublin, looking at this absolutely beautiful evening and says he always felt that our being here on this earth was a cosmic blunder. That we were meant for a planet on the other side of the universe and that this incredibly tender, beautiful earth can’t cope with monsters like us.

Monsters, in what sense?

I do really believe that we are absolute killers. We will destroy anything, including ourselves. Other creatures will not kill each other, except out of necessity. They don’t do it for fun. We do. Therefore we are the most dangerous thing that ever appeared on the face of the earth, if not the most dangerous thing in the universe. If we could destroy other worlds we would do it.

Women, on the other hand, claim that their core urge is to create, not kill – and that what you’ve just described is, fundamentally, a male urge and that we men shed blood in wars to ‘compensate’ for the fact that we can’t give life through birth.

I would go along with that. War may be a completely male thing. And that’s why I would never pretend to be writing as anything other than a man. I do not pretend to be androgynous. I can look in, from the outside, at how women think, and I can speculate on how they might run the world, but I don’t know. Yet seeing as how we do run the world at the moment and will be doing it for a long time to come, this is the way things are. And it would be foolish, dishonest and dangerous for the ‘new man’ to pretend that the world is anything other than this male jungle that we live in.

That comment makes pretty accurate the suggestion that the “tragedy of his fiction is as much one of the masculine personality as of the intellect” which is how Joe McBinn concludes his analysis of your work. That, he relates to the silent role played by women in your books, the prevalence of the male dynamic, the need to kill.

That is true. And I’m not going to pretend it is otherwise. I can feel in me the beast pacing up and down. Given the circumstances, given the necessity it would come out and it would do horrors beyond belief. Beyond my belief. That, in essence, is the tragic situation of human beings. And you only have to look at our century, our country, to see what we are capable of doing.

So, in the end, does John Banville basically create art to cage the beast?

To tell you the truth, I don’t know exactly why. And though that is a good question the trouble with me answering is that it would be like you asking me why do I breathe? I breathe to stay alive. Likewise, I create art to stay alive. But I suppose if I could go way back to my adolescence I might find some reason as to why I do art in the particular way I do. Yet if I were to do that, the whole thing might unravel. It’s like my wife saying to me, ‘if you wrote a book that made you say ‘I got it right’ then maybe you’d stop writing. Then what would you do?’ And she’s right. What would I do?

Crucify yourself?

No. I’d probably get a lump hammer and do a few people in! And I guess that answers your earlier question about all the killings in my books! But, let’s not forget that Hitler wanted to be a painter and Stalin wanted to be a poet! The great monsters of this century were failed artists! Thank God I succeeded! What things I would have done!

There is still time.

That’s true. I guess I could still go into politics!

• John Banville’s Seachange will be screened on RTE on September 22nd.