The Touchable

I don t like fiction, says John Banville. I don t like the novel form. It s too messy, too intractable. It s like trying to pick up jelly. It s always falling all over the place.
This is hardly a statement one would expect to hear from the lips of John Banville, Ireland s most revered novel producer and manufacturer of fictive goods. But then, there is much about John Banville that is unexpected.
As a writer, the convention goes, nobody comes near him. As a man, the convention continues, nobody wants to come near him. Banville has a reputation as a cold slice, an austere, aloof, stoical culture vulture who disdains the vulgarity of the human race and has time and tolerance for nothing but ahrt and liddarachure. He is said to have a rage for order. This is not a reference to his ardour for getting a round in of an evening.
Or so I would have thought. The John Banville I spent 90 minutes with in The Temple Bar Hotel bore scant resemblance to the pompous, pointy-headed boffin of popular prejudice. True, he is someone who unashamedly refers to himself as an artist and his conversation does froth with classical allusions and declarations about the transformative power of art and suchlike. However, he also emerges as an individual with a neat line in self-deprecation and barbed wit.
A scowl can cross John Banville s face as quickly and unpredictably as a summer squall but there is also a permanently mischievous glint in his eye. He can be very funny, in a dry, sardonic kind of way. Indeed, one could be forgiven for imagining that he has honed his soft, mannered, precise accent specifically for the delivery of some of his more deadpan put-downs and quips. On occasion, Banville even speaks out of the corner of his mouth, like a wise-cracking Jewish stand-up in a New York niteclub.
He arrives late, but positively excretes apologies, and immediately proceeds to buy himself a large brandy and whatever-the-hack-is-having. In the initial stages of our encounter, he sits motionless for long periods with his head bowed slightly, frowning at the backs of his hands while answering questions. But gradually, and by dint of stealthy digression on his part, substantial swathes of the interview are transformed into a gala gymkhana for some his most cherished hobby horses. As this happens, he becomes animated, voluble, unstoppable.
He is especially keen to puncture what he sees as the myths which surround his work, and his personality.
My favourite of all my books is The Newton Letter which I ve just been re-reading again today for a talk I m giving, he proclaims. Technically, certainly, I doubt that I ll better it. It s a rather cold book but, then, they re all cold, or so I m told anyway. I don t find them cold. I find them embarrassingly emotional, throbbing with anguish and aches.
And as for the John Banville persona as presented in the public prints?
After The Book Of Evidence, my first halfway successful book, a few profiles appeared in the papers. I read them; I don t read them anymore. I couldn t recognise this person. It was like my evil twin was out there in the world doing all these things. I m not saying the facts were wrong, it was just that it was no more the person that I knew, or that my loved ones and my friends knew, than the man in the moon. One is distanced from those things. I must admit that, for a while anyway, there is a certain amusement in them as well.
That amusement has diminished somewhat as articles about Banville have moved from the arts page to the back page. In recent years, the Sunday Independent, in particular, has published stories about his private life which, he insists, were as intrusive as they were inaccurate.
Well, I mean, I don t mind but it s very hard on others around one, Banville affirms. I think people who write gossip columns really should have a notice on their wall saying: Think Of The Children . Adults can cope with things but children, offspring, find stuff appearing in the public prints pretty hard to deal with. Life is hard enough without people making a few bob writing slime about you in the papers. The curious thing is, and I m sure everybody feels this, that you don t see yourself as the person that s been written about.
Still, he did enjoy at least one item of the tabloid tittle-tattle and that was the piece which suggested that he had spent a small fortune on a hair-transplant ( As my wife says, It didn t take very well, did it? . ).
It s just trivial nonsense, muses Banville, with a moue of distaste. Fortunately, I would never become so well-known as to make it worthwhile for people to write about me every week. I would have to be going about leading a fashionable life to be written about, and I don t. I never appear at Punchestown Races in a new hat. Or in new hair.
John Banville s latest book, The Untouchable, has been hailed as his most accessible yet and certainly looks like being his most commercially successful to date.
As with many of his earlier novels (such as Doctor Copernicus, Kepler and The Book Of Evidence), The Untouchable centres on fictionalised incarnations of real-life figures. In this case, the prototypes for the book s cast are Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and the rest of the so-called Cambridge spies, a group of British establishment fops who were recruited by Soviet Intelligence to act as double agents before the Second World war.
The book is narrated by Victor Maskell (the Anthony Blunt character), a gay art historian and former Keeper of the Queen s Pictures who, at 71, has just been exposed by Margaret Thatcher in the House Of Commons as a Russian spy. It is November 1979, Maskell has cancer, most of his friends are dead and he himself feels betrayed. It is from this vantage point that Maskell recounts the story of his life.
Through the finely-sculpted imagery of Banville s stunning, lyrical prose, we gradually see how Maskell s innate selfishness has spread like a bloodstain to every corner of his life.
To some, this thumbnail sketch may seem inauspicious, if not downright unappealing, but it is Banville s dazzling writing that makes The Untouchable one of the most compelling and unforgettable novels of the past decade. It is a genuine page-turner, and one that leaves the reader humming with pleasure after every chapter.
Maskell is an emotional cripple, explains Banville. Because he s telling his own story, he has the leeway to be stylish and funny. I hope the book is funny. It s meant to be funny, in a grim, horrible way. When you laugh, you show your teeth. The book is meant to be serious but it s certainly not meant to be solemn.
I was writing an anti-thriller. What Maskell keeps saying is, Look, it s all farce! . I ve always worked against the form. My first novel, Nightspawn, was written against the thriller form. One never advances really. Here am I, damn near 30 years later, doing the same thing. I ve always liked to take clichid, worn-out forms, like the thriller or the popular novel or the picaresque novel, and do something new with them.
This book is more easily acceptable because I wanted to do something that would be like a piece of public art that you could look at from a distance and get the gist of it, a mural. And then, the closer you get, the more intricate it becomes, the more you see of the design and the more you re puzzled by the design. There are a lot of things within the book that are traps for the unwary.
Banville denies the charge that he s fashioned the book with commercial success in mind.
All these people are saying about The Untouchable, You ve written this book obviously to make money and win The Booker Prize . Nobody could spend two or three years writing a book that was meant to have popular success. It s simply not possible. Art is an absolute. You can t do art and do other things as well. You can t make a work of art that is also aimed to be a commercial success. It would fail. It would be neither one thing nor the other. And if The Untouchable has anything, it has coherence. It s all of a piece.
Why does Banville base so many of his novels on rea-life stories?
Laziness, I suppose. No, that s a glib answer. When I did Birchwood back in 72, I thought about giving up fiction altogether because I thought, I don t want to do anymore of this stuff . But yet, I can t resist storytelling. I seem to be infected with the bacillus of storytelling.
I had read Koestler s The Sleepwalkers when I was in my teens. I didn t really understand it but went back to it and discovered that writing about Copernicus and Kepler and people like that was a way of writing about creativity without writing about the man sitting in a room writing a book about a man sitting in a room writing a book . . . which is what people tended to do then in those days. I ve always also been infected with ideas. I wanted to import ideas into a novel. I don t think it s possible but I wanted to do it.
I d always been fascinated by the Cambridge spies, fascinated by Blunt. Blunt seemed to me the perfect image of the non-productive artist. He had all the attributes of an artist. He just didn t produce any art. I loved the style of Guy Burgess, Maclean and all that gang, their sense of tragic gaiety. There is something in the English character that has a real sense of the tragic but they never use it in the same way we do. They don t have the kind of music we have. Our folk music is practically all tragic. Our folklore is tragic. The English don t really have that but they have a very, very highly-developed sense of the tragic which comes out in this very brittle, light comedy style.
Are there any contemporary Irish figures that Banville would be interested in writing about? On the political stage, for instance?
No, not at the moment, he drawls through a wide grin, amused at the very idea.
Does he believe that there might be a novel in the epic saga that has been the life of Charlie Haughey?
(laughs) There is, but it s not for me to write. I think that there is a novel in contemporary Ireland but it will require a broader interest than I have in things. It will require a real interest in the political arena which I just don t have.
Do Irish politics simply bore him?
I don t understand it. I don t understand politics, how it works.
Does he vote?
Oh yeah, of course. But I don t understand the intricacies. Power. I don t understand power. I don t understand the way in which people are fascinated by . . . If you listen to the radio during the weeks leading to an election, the airwaves are jammed with talk, talk, talk about it. There s a great joy in it. One can hear the people enjoying it. But I still can t figure it out.
To me, anything that depends on appealing to a huge number of people, getting them to approve of you enough to give you a vote, seems baffling. It s not like selling a book. While I could imagine myself into the mind of a politician, it wouldn t be worth doing. This is the strange thing about fiction. You can write fiction about things that you don t understand at all. I can t figure out the process.
I can write about a mathematician. Being barely able to add two and two, I can still write about a mathematician because I know how it works when I come to put it down on the page. The imagination is a very powerful force.
In The Untouchable, Victor Maskell repeatedly stresses his belief that he has betrayed nobody with his political treachery because he felt no loyalty to his country in the first place. As a writer, John Banville has long ago raised the drawbridge on his native land. Artistically, he insists, the world into which he was born wasn t any use to me. He despises nationalism in all its forms, not least when it s flown as a cheap flag of convenience by novelists in search of a photofit identity.
But, on a personal level, are there never moments when John Banville feels even a twinge of national pride?
Oh no, he retorts briskly. I don t think anybody feels national pride, do they? I mean, how could you love a country? You can love certain parts of it but you can t even see all of a country. There are parts of Ireland I ve never been to, and parts of Ireland you ve never been to. How can you love places that you ve never seen and know nothing about?
Does he understand what others mean when they speak about being proud to be Irish ?
It depends what you mean by Irish . . . I m not trying to wriggle out of your question. If I write a sentence that is pure Hiberno-English, a sentence in English that no other English speaker other than an Irish person could write, then I feel a certain satisfaction and a certain love, I suppose, for what is expressed in the rhythms of Hiberno-English. I can t give a more comprehensive answer than that.
So he doesn t experience a lump in the throat when Michelle Smith wins three Olympic golds or when Ireland wins the Eurovision Song Contest?
No! Banville gasps. Goethe said, Blessed is the land that has heroes . Brecht said, Woe betide the land that needs heroes . I don t think that kind of thing matters a damn. Like everybody else, if I m in London and I hear the uilleann pipes play, something clicks in there (places hand on heart) but that s a reflex action and it s of no good to the country.
And yet, the fact is I have stayed here. I went away in 68, I came back in 69. I ve stayed here through all kinds of vicissitudes. I would ve been much better off living in London, in New York or in Paris. Certainly, doing the kind of work that I do, I would be far more appreciated, not just there but here.
One of the problems with writing the kind of writing that I do is that they say, This is not Irish. Why doesn t it have shamrocks and bejapers and begorrahs, and people saying fucken all the time . This is what is taken for Irish writing abroad. So, I would probably do better to be a writer living abroad and therefore freed from the expectation that I be an Irish writer . But I ve stayed here, because I like it. I can t pretend to be staying here out of patriotic duty. I stay here because I can t do without the climate. The Irish climate seems to me to be absolutely perfect (laughs). Not many people feel this but I do.
Why?
Oh, I think it s so heartbreaking, Banville asserts. Spring arrives at the end of April and you have these extraordinary switches of colour and light throughout the day. It s just amazing. I couldn t go and be what Philip Larkin calls the shit in the shuttered chateau , living in the South of France producing my books. I couldn t live like that. I d feel like the Sarah Miles character in that film White Mischief, set in Kenya or somewhere. She goes to the curtains, looks out and says, Another beautiful fucking day . That s the way I d feel in a place like California or France.
Though ensconced in Ireland, Banville is happy not to belong here, and happier still to be seen by his contemporaries as an outsider. I m not going to pretend to be a patriot or to wear the green heart on St. Patrick s Day but I do have a commitment to this country, he avers. The only line that I ve ever written in a book that was a direct statement from myself was at the end of Birchwood, which I always think of as my Irish novel, when the protagonist takes over a ruined house and says, I will stay here but I will live a life different to any the house has ever known .
That s what I have tried to do. I ve tried not to be Irish. I ve tried not to play the Irish card. I ve tried not to be a bejapers and begorrah character. There is never going to be an interview with me in an English, American or Japanese newspaper that will have me dropping the g s off the end of my words, or saying that everything is shite or that everything is fucken great. That s never going to happen. That s a travesty of Irishness which makes my blood boil.
Don t people speak like that simply because, well, that s the way they speak?
I couldn t say what their motivation is, Banville replies disdainfully. It s what they ve chosen to do. But it s a kind of carelessness that allows lazy, foreign journalists to fall into the trap of This is Irish, therefore it must be amusing and colourful and full of four-letter words . They never got over Brendan Behan. I think that Behan was, in many ways, a very delicate, a very tender sensibility but he played into the hands of lazy journalists abroad and this spurious notion of Irishness came out. It s something which I find utterly reprehensible.
Has John Banville ever felt ashamed to be Irish?
No, he states firmly, after a short pause. I feel deep anger against the Provos and the Loyalist killers, and so on. But every country has its monsters. England has its Yorkshire Rippers, America has its Unabomber and the people who blew up the Oklahoma building. We re not any more savage than any other race. Again, I can t think of Irishness as being specific enough to feel proud or ashamed of it.
My wife is American and she always laughs when I say this but I think that I am utterly free of nationalistic feelings. She says, Oh yeah? And I m sure that she s right and I m wrong but I feel that I don t have any sense of nationalism. I think nationalism is a poison. I think it s absolutely corrosive. It eats countries alive. We only have to look at the history of our century, even at the history of the past ten, 20 years to see what nationalism does to peoples and to countries, this mad delusion.
All of which is not to say that John Banville believes that literature can have no impact on how the people of a nation view themselves. As an example, he approvingly cites William Butler Yeats and his stated attempt to make a country through poetry.
Building a nation is the greatest subject an artist can have, argues Banville. I wrote to Richard Ford, who s a friend of mine, when he brought out Independence Day and I said to him, You American novelists are so lucky that you still have this great subject, you re still building a nation . I m not saying that he s some kind of patriotic, nationalistic writer, but his country is still being made. I envy that.
It s a curious thing but we never had that here after the 1920s. We should ve had it. All we had were rather dubious people who were tied into De Valera s and John Charles McQuaid s version of Ireland. We never had the really free spirits. The free spirits left. It s a great pity, in a way, that Joyce and Beckett and Shaw left. Yeats stayed! And if Yeats had been anything less than a complete and utter megalomaniac, it would have destroyed him. But he was able to subdue the whole thing to his ego.
The problem was we only had Yeats on one side and then we had . . . well, no names, but little people on the other side. We didn t have strong, tough people who could have shaped this country in an entirely different way, people who could have stood up to the De Valeras and all those greasy ideologues up there in the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Department Of Justice.
This is one of my hobby horses and I won t stay in the saddle for very long, I promise. But, you know, people are inclined to think that censorship here was something put in place by ignoramuses, bogmen who didn t know any better. They re wrong. This country was run by ideologues. De Valera had deeply reactionary, deeply right-wing ideologues in the judiciary, in the Church, in the civil service. I m not saying he placed them there, I m not saying there was conspiracy, but this is the way it worked.
I always think of De Valera as a non-militarist fascist. He had seen what violence did in 1916 and then in the civil war and the war of independence. He didn t want any more of it. But he was a deeply conservative, reactionary man. And he had a country, completely cut off from the outside, to experiment on.
When I was a kid, I remember priests in the pulpit fulminating against (adopts thick-tongued Wexford accent) cross-channel newspapers! . They were still at it in the 50s and 60s. I went to a school, Saint Peter s College in Wexford, where there were no newspapers, no radios, no television. We were cut off from the outside world so that they could experiment on us.
And we see now what was being done, what was being produced, the horrors that we re having to confront now, everything from the nationalist violence that s tearing the North to pieces to pederastic priests and nuns beating up kids and so on. As somebody said to me recently, we ve now discovered that Ireland really was a priest-ridden country.
This is the last canter on the hobby horse I ll get off soon. But, you know, I m just so sickened when people, certainly of my age, express amazement at these priests, for instance, abusing boys. Everybody knew that was going on, everybody knew. It was general knowledge. It just was not spoken of. So, to express amazement and horror now is really a bit much.
This is what Ireland was reduced down to. So, if you ask am I ever ashamed to be Irish, I am certainly ashamed of the failure of nerve of Irish intellectuals in the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. There were certain grand exceptions; a magazine like The Bell and people like O Faolain. Now, whatever one may think of O Faolain, and I have certain ambiguous feelings about him, he was very courageous. But it wasn t enough. There were not enough civil servants, not enough people in the judiciary, not enough people in the Church prepared to fight. They allowed it all to happen.
In The Untouchable, Maskell recites what he claims is the one truism that every spy knows: The worm in the bud is more thorough than the wind that shakes the bough. As far as Banville is concerned, it was the parasites and maggots within which ultimately gnawed down the gnarled oak of reactionary Catholic supremacy in this country. The light breeze of Irish intellectualism did nothing but lick the bark.
What fascinates me is the way the old Ireland was shrugged off, about 1989, Banville attests. Our Berlin Wall came down between 89 and the early 90s. Thanks to great figures, great modern heroes, like Bishop Casey. I hope to see a big statue to Bishop Casey in O Connell Street. Perhaps with a girl in one arm and a little boy in the other.
John Banville was born in 1945, in Wexford town, where his father worked as a garage mechanic. John was the youngest of three children and remembers his early childhood as really rather spoilt and happy.
By the age of seven or eight, however, he knew he wanted out. He recalls experiencing a terrific sense of impatience and exasperation with the dismal, stifling monotony of small-town life long before he had the words to express such feelings. His discovery of those words was extremely liberating and he took to literature like a flea to a dog pound. Banville claims that he never picked up a Wexford accent because he spent most of his formative years reading English poetry aloud to himself.
In 1968, while working as a clerk for Aer Lingus, Banville met the American woman who would soon become his wife during a visit to San Francisco, where she was a student at Berkeley College. Though he received no formal higher education himself, Banville is one of the most stylishly erudite novelists currently writing in the English language. He dates the first real arousal of his thirst for knowledge and ideas and new experiences to that fateful, eye-opening trip to Frisco.
I was very naive, he says. Dublin in 68 was still very, very hidebound. We were all still in the pockets of the priests and knew little of the wider world. I remember seeing my first Afro on Telegraph Avenue on a spring afternoon in 1968. It was incredibly liberating. As was mixing with the woman who was going to be my wife and her circle. I discovered all kinds of things, the weirdest things.
Did the voraciously inquisitive John Banville go through a communist phase himself during his youth?
No more than the rest of us, he maintains. We all thought we knew about Marx. Look, I think Marxism is a wonderful system. I think it s perfectly flawless except for the fact that it doesn t work with human beings. It would probably work on Mars or one of those pulsars out there, with little green men. It doesn t work with human beings because we re greedy and we just won t do all that stuff. But intellectually, it s a wonderful system, a beautiful system. I thought that I was a socialist for a long time. But then, you see, I m a child of the 60s and we all thought we were left-wing in those days.
When did John Banville stop thinking he was a socialist?
That s a good question. I suppose, in the middle of the 70s when I looked back and saw what the 60s was actually like. It was the most ferocious decade that we d had. On a personal level, in terms of individual violence. It was an incredible decade. Just think of the people who were assassinated, the two Kennedys, Martin Luther King and so on.
I also feel that the so-called sexual revolution in the 60s was simply a lot of men, who hadn t had much sex up to then, suddenly realising that it was unlimited. They could get any amount of sex. All they had to say was, Hey baby, just drop this tab, chill out, drop in, drop out . It was an amazing time for men. It wasn t a good time for women.
A few women, the Germaine Greers and so on, yes, they had a whale of time. But, for most women, it was just a time in which they were being used. I m not the knee-jerk who says, All our troubles are the fault of the 60s . That s absolute nonsense. It was a wonderful time to be alive in many ways. But, along with that, went a lot of very, very shoddy, murderous stuff.
I think that, in the 70s, I looked back and realised that the so-called socialism that was being put forward then was really just selfishness. And that the so-called personal liberation was just another guise for getting it off cheaply.
Did John Banville do much getting it off during those days?
No, no, he insists, shaking his head. This is probably what s wrong with me. Why didn t I get my share? But I couldn t. I wasn t built like that. It wasn t interesting enough for me. Sex is never interesting without all the stuff that goes along with it. At least, it wasn t, and isn t, to me. Perhaps, though, I should have lived more and written less. n
The Untouchable is published by Picador, at #15.99.