John Banville

Early life

William John Banville was born to Agnes (née Doran) and Martin Banville, a garage clerk, in Wexford, Ireland. The youngest of three siblings, his older brother Vincent is also a novelist, writing under the name Vincent Lawrence as well as his own. Their sister, Anne Veronica "Vonnie" Banville-Evans, wrote a children's novel and a memoir of growing up in Wexford.

Banville was educated at CBS Primary, Wexford — a Christian Brothers school — and at St Peter's College, Wexford. Though he intended to become a painter and an architect, Banville did not attend university. The decision was influenced by a desire to escape from his family; however, Banville would later describe it as a "great mistake" to have missed "four years of getting drunk and falling in love", Yet — in contrast to what he had missed — Banville stated that college would have been of little benefit to him, and he doubted whether he then "would have had the nerve" to carry out some of his earlier writings, if he had been "beaten into submission by my lecturers". Earlier — while in his teens — Banville stole a collection of Dylan Thomas's poetry from Wexford County Library.

After school, Banville worked as a clerk at Aer Lingus, which allowed him to travel at deeply discounted rates. He took advantage of such rates, travelling to Greece and Italy. Banville began working as a sub-editor at The Irish Press in 1969, and — subsequently — worked as a sub-editor at The Irish Times. He was appointed literary editor of The Irish Times in 1988, a position he held until 1999.

Personal life

In 1969, Banville married the American textile artist Janet Dunham, whom he met in San Francisco the previous year while she was a student at the University of California, Berkeley. The couple had two sons together. Their marriage broke down after Banville had an affair with a neighbour, Patricia Quinn, who subsequently became director of the Arts Council of Ireland. Banville had two daughters with Quinn, born around 1990 and 1997. Despite separating, Banville and Dunham never divorced; according to Banville, they remained "on good terms." Dunham died at Blackrock Clinic on 22 November 2021, after which Banville claimed to have been overcome by "brain fog" that left him unable to write for six grief-stricken months. In a 2024 interview, he expressed regret over his relationship history, saying: "I caused Janet such anguish. I have caused Patricia Quinn such anguish. I wasn't good with my children. I was not a good parent. I am not a good person. I am selfish. But I have to have responsibility."

Writing

Banville writes in the Hiberno-English dialect, and dreads the loss of this ability if he were to follow the example of other Irish writers and move abroad. He has said that he is "trying to blend poetry and fiction into some new form".

Banville published his first book — a collection of short stories titled Long Lankin — in 1970. His first published novel —Nightspawn — he disowned, describing it as "crotchety, posturing, absurdly pretentious".

As an unknown writer in the 1980s, he toured Dublin's bookshops—"and we had a lot of bookshops back then"—around the time of the publication of his novel Kepler "and there wasn't a single one of any of my books anywhere". Yet — he noted in 2012 — "I didn't feel badly about it because I was writing the kinds of books I wanted to write. And I had no one but myself to blame if I wasn't making money, that wasn't anybody's fault. Nobody was obliged to buy my books".

Banville has written three trilogies: the first (Revolutions Trilogy) focused on great men of science, and consisted of Doctor Copernicus (1976), Kepler (1981), and The Newton Letter (1982). He said he became interested in Kepler and other men of science after reading Arthur Koestler's book The Sleepwalkers. He realised that — like himself — scientists were attempting to impose order in their work. The second trilogy — referred to collectively as the Frames Trilogy — consists of The Book of Evidence (1989), with several of its characters also featuring in Ghosts (1993); Athena (1995) is the third to feature an unreliable narrator and explore the power of works of art. Banville's third trilogy was published from 2000 onwards. Consisting of Eclipse, Shroud and Ancient Light, all concern the characters of Alexander and Cass Cleave.

Banville has compared writing to the life of an athlete: "It's asking an awful lot of one's self. Every day you have to do your absolute best—it's a bit like being a sportsman. You have to perform at the absolute top of your game, six, seven, eight hours a day—that's very, very wearing". His typical writing day begins with a drive from home in Dublin to his office by the river. He writes from 9am until lunch. He then dines on bread, cheese and tea, and resumes his work until 6pm, at which time he returns home. He writes upon two desks positioned at right angles to each other, one facing a wall and the other facing a window through which he has no view and never cleans.

Crime fiction

Beginning with Christine Falls, which was published in 2006, Banville embarked on a crime fiction spree under the pen name of Benjamin Black. Writing his Benjamin Black stuff much more quickly and with less care than the composition of his literary novels, he appreciates his work as Black as a craft, while as Banville he is an artist. He has described crime writing as "cheap fiction". According to Banville, he writes his crime and mystery stuff on a computer, each one taking three to four months. He writes his other novels with a fountain pen, with each taking from two to five years.

Sometimes, in the middle of the afternoon if I'm feeling a little bit sleepy, Black will sort of lean in over Banville's shoulder and start writing. Or Banville will lean over Black's shoulder and say, "Oh that's an interesting sentence, let's play with that." I can see sometimes, revising the work, the points at which one crept in or the two sides seeped into each other.

The eponymous character in the Quirke series is a pathologist based in 1950s Dublin. The first three books, Christine Falls (2006), The Silver Swan (2007), and Elegy for April (2011) were made into a drama series, Quirke which — after being shown in Ireland — aired on British television. Subsequent books in this series were: A Death in Summer (2011), Vengeance (2012), Holy Orders (2013), Even the Dead (2016), April in Spain (2021), The Lock-Up (2023) and The Drowned (2024). The last three of those appeared under Banville's own name. A related book — this one also published under Banville's name — is Snow (2020). This featured a character named Detective Inspector St John Strafford, who appeared in subsequent books April in Spain and The Lock-Up.

Also published under the name Benjamin Black are crime books The Lemur (2008), The Black-Eyed Blonde (a Philip Marlowe novel, 2014), and Prague Nights (2017).

The Secret Guests (2020) is a work of alternative history crime, based on a scenario in which the young British princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, are evacuated to County Tipperary in 1940 to escape the London Blitz and a possible German invasion of Britain. Again featuring St John Strafford, this book was published under the name B. W. Black.

Style

Critics regard Banville as a master stylist of English, his writing perfectly crafted and dazzling. Called "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov", he is known for his dark humour and sharp wit.

Michael Ross called Banville "perhaps the only living writer capable of advancing fiction beyond the point reached by Beckett". Reviewing The Sea in the Irish Independent, Gerry Dukes called Banville a "lord of language".

Literary influences

Banville said in an interview with The Paris Review that he liked Nabokov's style, but, he continued: "I always thought there was something odd about it that I couldn't quite put my finger on. Then I read an interview in which he admitted he was tone deaf." Banville has written adaptations of three of Heinrich von Kleist's plays (including Amphitryon), and used the myth of Amphitryon as a basis for his novel The Infinities.

Banville has said that, as a boy, he imitated James Joyce: "After I'd read The [sic] Dubliners, and was struck at the way Joyce wrote about real life, I immediately started writing bad imitations of The [sic] Dubliners." A profile of Banville in The Guardian said he agreed that "all Irish writers are followers of either Joyce or Beckett—and he places himself in the Beckett camp." But in a 2012 interview with Noah Charney, Banville cited W. B. Yeats and Henry James as the two main influences on his work. Responding to a suggestion that Fyodor Dostoevsky and Albert Camus were worthy comparisons, Banville said: "Dostoyevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously... Ditto Camus".

Philosophy

Banville considers himself "incurably terrified of air travel", fearing "the plane going down amid the terrible shrieking of engines and passengers".

Women

Banville has often spoken of, and written of, his admiration for women.

He is in favour of women's rights and has welcomed the gradual freedom that has come about in his native land during his lifetime, over the course of which Ireland changed from a country dominated by Roman Catholic ideology, where women were trapped in the home with little career opportunities and subject to restrictions on the availability of contraception, to a country where the position of women became more valued and where one woman could succeed another woman as the country's President, a role previously the exclusive preserve of men. On women in his own writing, Banville told Niamh Horan of the Sunday Independent in 2012: "I don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people". Horan herself noted Banville's "special flair for writing about women and delving into the female psyche".

Banville contributed the introduction to the fifty-year retrospective of Edna O'Brien's work, The Love Object: Selected Stories, calling her "one of the most sophisticated writers now at work" and saying it was "hard to think of any contemporary writer who could match her combination of immediacy and sympathetic recall". He noted how "striking" is the figuring of O'Brien's characters and acknowledged that they all "are in some way damaged by the world, and specifically by the world of men". Banville concluded by calling O'Brien "simply one of the finest writers of our time".

Banville wrote the screenplay for an adaptation of Elizabeth Bowen's novel The Last September. Bowen's work was largely neglected at the time; Vintage published new editions of each of Bowen's novels and Hermione Lee's biography of her to coincide with its release. Banville later wrote the introduction to her Collected Stories.

Close to the literary editor Caroline Walsh, Banville spoke of his devastation upon learning of her death. He dedicated Ancient Light to her. Likewise, Banville was close to Eileen Battersby, at whose funeral he was moved to tears whilst reciting a poem in her memory.

Crime and punishment

Speaking to Niamh Horan in 2012, Banville related his thoughts on hurt and responsibility: "To hurt other people is the worst thing you can do. To be hurt oneself is bad enough, but hurting other people is unforgivable... Unforgivable. Literally unforgivable. I think that one has to take responsibility for one's life and one has to take responsibility for one's bad deeds as well as one's good deeds. One has to, as I say, be responsible... Failure in art, or failure in making a living, or a success—none of them compares, everything pales beside hurting other people, because, you know, we are here for such a short time and basic life itself is so hard one has a duty to try to be decent to other people".

Relationship with animals

Ben, a labrador, lived until the age of 11 before succumbing to cancer at Christmas 1980. Decades later Banville still regarded Ben as "a lost friend, and every few months he ambles into one of my dreams, snuffling and sighing and obviously wondering why there are no more walks. This may sound sentimental, but it does not feel that way".

On 21 August 2017, the RTÉ Radio 1 weekday afternoon show Liveline was discussing a report on Trinity College Dublin's use of 100,000 animals to conduct scientific research over the previous four years when a listener pointed out that Banville had previously raised the matter but been ignored. Banville personally telephoned Liveline to call the practice "absolutely disgraceful" and told the tale of how he had come upon some women protesting:

I was passing by the front gates of Trinity one day and there was a group of mostly young women protesting and I was interested... I spoke to them and they said that vivisection experiments were being carried out in the college. This was a great surprise to me and a great shock, so I wrote a letter of protest to The Irish Times. Some lady professor from Trinity wrote back essentially saying Mr Banville should stick to his books and leave us scientists to our valuable work. After that my late friend, [Lord Gahan,?] wrote another letter to The Times and he suggested well, if vivisection is not harmful and painful to animals, why don't the experimenters themselves volunteer to undergo the experiments? ...I claim no expertise but I'm told that vivisection is of no consequence, that you don't really need it... I think if, as the vivisectionists assure us, the animals don't suffer, then why don't they volunteer themselves? It would be much better to have a human being to experiment on than an animal... [At this point the presenter questioned whether he really meant this]. I'm absolutely serious! ...why don't they conduct experiments on each other? ...We certainly should not be inflicting needless pain on innocent animals... If there's no pain, no distress... ask for human volunteers. Pay them money.

Asked if he received any other support for his stance in the letter he sent to The Irish Times, he replied:

No... I became entirely dispirited and I thought, "Just shut up, John. Stay out of it because I'm not going to do any good." If I had done any good I would have kept it on. I mean, I got John Coetzee, you know, the famous novelist, J. M. Coetzee, I got him to write a letter to The Irish Times. I asked a lot of people. Oddly, I asked uh, uh, well I won't say who it was, but I asked an international anti-vivisection person, well no, an international animal rights person, to contribute, but he said that he wasn't actually against vivisection, which seems to me a very peculiar stance to take.

Awards and honours

Booker Prize

Banville wrote a letter in 1981 to The Guardian suggesting that the Booker Prize, for which he was "runner-up to the shortlist of contenders", be given to him so that he could use the money to buy every copy of the longlisted books in Ireland and donate them to libraries, "thus ensuring that the books not only are bought but also read – surely a unique occurrence".

When his novel The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize, Banville said a friend he called "a gentleman of the turf" instructed him "to bet on the other five shortlistees, saying it was a sure thing, since if I won the prize I would have the prize-money, and if I lost one of the others would win ... But the thing baffled me and I never placed the bets. I doubt I'll be visiting Ladbrokes any time soon".

Banville was not shortlisted for the Booker Prize again until 2005, when his novel The Sea was selected. The Sea was in contention alongside novels by Julian Barnes, Sebastian Barry, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ali Smith and Zadie Smith. The chairman of the judges was John Sutherland. Earlier that year Sutherland had written approvingly of Ian McEwan's novel Saturday. Banville had dismissed the work in The New York Review of Books and expressed his dismay that McEwan was increasingly showing "a disturbing tendency toward mellowness". Anne Haverty later called Banville's critique of Saturday "devastatingly effective". Sutherland sent a letter (signed "Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus") in response to Banville's review, in which he took Banville to task over his misreading of a game of squash in the novel. Banville issued a written reply with the opening line: "Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the Department of Trivia", before begging Sutherland's pardon for his "sluggish comprehension" after managing to make his way through "all seventeen pages" of the game. He later admitted that, upon reading Sutherland's letter, he thought he could "kiss the Booker goodbye".

At the award ceremony, BBC Two's Kirsty Wark quizzed Financial Times arts editor Jan Dalley, the Independent on Sunday literary editor Suzi Feay and The Observer literary editor Robert McCrum. Banville, Barry and Ali Smith were dismissed outright and much of the discussion focused on Barnes, Ishiguro and Zadie Smith. In the end, the judges' vote was split between Banville and Ishiguro, with Rick Gekoski one of those favouring Banville. It fell to Sutherland to cast the winning vote; he did so in favour of Banville. Banville later recognised he had "not been the most popular person in London literary circles over the past half-year. And I think it was very large of Sutherland to cast the winning vote in my favour".

Kafka Prize

In 2011, Banville received the Franz Kafka Prize. Marcel Reich-Ranicki and John Calder were members of the jury. Banville said he had been "wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent", said the bronze statuette trophy "will glare at me from the mantelpiece" and called the award "one of the ones one really wants to get. It's an old style prize and as an old codger it's perfect for me".

Nobel Prize in Literature hoax

On the day that the 2019 and 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature were to be announced, the Swedish Academy's number appeared on Banville's telephone. A man purporting to be Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy Mats Malm told him he had won and even read out the customary citation and asked whether he would prefer to be designated the 2018 or 2019 laureate. Banville was attending a physiotherapy appointment at the time and was lying face down on a couch when the call came, but had retained a mobile telephone nearby should he be contacted to give his view on an Irish winner. He informed his daughter; she called her father back while watching the live announcement at midday to tell him his name had not been mentioned. Banville telephoned everyone he had spoken to in the intervening period to tell them: "Don’t buy the champagne, stop throwing your hats in the air".

After the announcement, a voicemail to Banville from the man posing as Malm claimed the Swedish Academy had withdrawn his prize due to a disagreement. Banville felt sorry for the man purporting to be Malm: "He certainly sounded upset, he was a very good actor". But he then compared the speaker with a YouTube recording of the real Malm, at which point he realised that the speaker's voice was deeper than Malm's, and Malm had a better grasp of English.

Banville called upon the Swedish Academy to investigate the incident "because I don't think the hoax was aimed at me, I think it was aimed at damaging the Academy or one or two members of the Academy". He called himself "collateral damage". When informed of the incident, Malm said: "It sounds like a bad joke". Academy member Per Wästberg also thought it sounded like a joke. Banville later said of the experience: "I have the distinct impression that I wasn't the target of this really. I think he assumed that I would believe him and that I would make a big fuss in the newspapers and say this is another dispute within the jury. I think that's what he expected me to do, because that would embarrass the Academy. Specifically, he was talking about some woman on it who was deeply into gender studies. So I suspect it was her that was the target. It wasn't done for fun. It has the hallmarks of a man with a grudge. Not a grudge against me." Banville gave the Swedish Academy the recording to aid its investigation.

The Sunday Independent called Banville "as dignified and eloquent as ever in the face of a disappointment that made headlines around the world". He told The Observer: "There is some comedy in it and potential material: 'The man who nearly won the Nobel prize'". Irish media called the trick played on Banville "cruel" while English media called it "deceitful". He received numerous sympathetic emails and telephone calls and support from fellow writers.