“Banville is obsessed by sentences. Flaubert’s mother said about her son that he threw away his life for a mania for sentences. That’s what we do, you know. If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings I would say the sentence. I spent three, three-and-a-half hours the other day writing a paragraph. Black couldn’t do that. What you get with Banville is the result of concentration; what you get with Black is the result of spontaneity.”
He pauses, looks at the ceiling. The skylight reveals neither sky nor light, a portal into gloom. It’s still raining, still dark. It is nearly noon. My time is nearly over and neither one of us is sure who is being interviewed: Banville or Black.
“What John Banville writes is disguised poetry. You know, I think of my novels as a long sequence of… sonnets. Really. I can’t write poetry that has ragged ends on the page. My friend John McGahern always said, There’s verse, there’s prose, and then there’s poetry. Poetry can happen in either. Since we’re both novelists we agreed that it happens much more often in prose than it does in verse. But again, one has to be aware that there’s nothing more off-putting than “poetic prose.” You have to achieve a kind of harsh music to make poetic prose real. And the poet I look to constantly for that is Yeats. The older I get the more I read Yeats. His poetry is extraordinary. I keep reading him over and over. That harsh music that he gets is wonderful.”
For the moment, Benjamin Black is on vacation from his writing desk while John Banville finishes a book that he started in 2004—The Sinking City—with many interruptions.
“I’ve got to finish it now because it climbs slowly up, you know the feeling, and it’s got me by the throat, and it’s saying, Finish me, finish me. So that’s an obsession. I think becoming Benjamin Black was a way of doing that because the John Banville book that I’m doing at the moment is very personal. It’s quite different from its predecessors. Well, personal in that I’m the only material that I have. Everyone in the book is me, but it’s not autobiographical except that all fiction is autobiographical, except the autobiographical.”
Banville, Black, whoever it is that sits before me is clearly enjoying these Jekyll & Hyde shenanigans, but I take the bait, and ask him to tell me more about the book.
“It’s set in the countryside in a house, as usual, on a midsummer day. It’s about a family. The father of the family is in a coma and is dying but his mind is working. There is a first person, which is the god Hermes, and when I told my publisher this he said, ‘Oh, yes, John, another crowd pleaser.’ ”
