Like a gondolier on the Canale Grande, John Banville seems right at home in Venice, the setting for his new novel, although, like his odious protagonist Evelyn Dolman, he has a love-hate relationship with La Serenissima, “that pestilential city squatting in the mudflats of its befouled lagoon”.
“I hate the place,” says the author, ever the provocateur. He visits every year because he is on the jury of the Nonino literary prize, in Friuli, and drops by to renew hostilities. “It smells, it’s crawled over by tourists like an anthill and Venetians are impossibly avaricious. I was walking down one of those alleyways with a friend at twilight, and a rat ran across and sank down a drain but left its big, pink, naked tail out. We both said: Venice!
“Of course, it’s charming. I understand the beauty and uniqueness of the place. It’s an extraordinary city, like nowhere else in the world, and I’ve had some wonderful times there, but I find it a very sinister place.” He had an eerie experience in a Venetian club only to discover that Giordano Bruno, a philosopher burned at the stake in Rome for heresy, who features in his fiction, had sheltered there for months.
“Venice has this darkness that the Dublin of my imagination from the 1950s had,” which inspired the Quirke & Stafford series under his pen name Benjamin Black. “I do love it. I have a great fondness for the grotesque. I love grotesque conjunctions. I love talking to people who hate me and being really nice to them.”
Deception and mask-wearing are at the dark heart of Venetian Vespers – “Oscar Wilde said, give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth” – which is published next week, just over two months ahead of Banville’s 80th birthday, but it feels so wickedly entertaining that the author must have had fun writing it, too. “I wouldn’t keep doing it if there weren’t rewards,” he says. “It’s hard work, but anything easy is not worth doing. I enjoyed doing this book, though.”
It is 1899, and Dolman, an arrogant English hack writer, is honeymooning with his bride, Laura Rensselaer, estranged daughter of an American millionaire. Exhausted by travel, feverish, an impotently mute monoglot abroad, he falls in with twins he meets on his first night in a bar, the louche Freddie, who claims to have been at school with him, and the enchanting Cesca. After a shocking incident, his world turns upside-down.
It’s a ripping yarn filled with dark desire, melodrama and suspense, blackguards and women wronged, suspicious deaths and chance encounters, scheming and mystery, an arch entertainment elevated by a master stylist’s elegant prose – gondolas are described as sinister craft, “rearing and plunging their haughty, gilded prows, like so many glossy-flanked racehorses crowding at the starting-rope”.
Venetian Vespers takes its name from the piece of music by Monteverdi that is playing in St Mark’s when Dolman is accosted there by a prostitute. “It’s a beautiful piece of music, but that’s a very eerie place. It doesn’t look like anything in the western world. It’s a Byzantine cathedral. The floors are uneven. I don’t see it as Christian, I see it as a pagan temple. It scares me.” Was he ever accosted? “In St Mark’s Basilica? Are you joking? Happy thought.”
The book has an erotic charge, a sense of obsession. “I remember obsession, years ago. I have always wanted to write a ghost story. I have always wanted to write an erotic novel, and in this I almost get there. It’s a bit of both.
“I wanted to write an erotic novel because I think Story of O, by Pauline Réage, is a masterly book. Certainly when you read it a second time you realise it’s not about sex at all, it’s about power. O, the woman who is being abused, is the one with power. That fascinated me. And this is in a way a book about power. Dolman thinks he has power, but he is at the mercy of these people.”
This fascination is present too in Banville’s Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir, in which he recalls the girls of his youth and the prostitutes who plied their trade near his home – “oh, well-named Mount Street”. Likewise, his soft spot for a canal, Dublin’s though, not Venice’s – “that stretch of placid water, rustling reeds and dark-umber towpath from Baggot Street down to Lower Mount Street is the loveliest aquascape I know of, trumping even that other Canale Grande, the one with the warbling gondoliers.”
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Venice, though, is a city rich in cultural resonances. Vespers “is very much influenced by Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Don’t Look Now, which I saw again recently. It’s a masterpiece. [Daphne du Maurier’s] story is not terribly good, but Nicholas Roeg’s film is wonderful, the way he uses colour.” When he first saw it, the film was significantly shorter, courtesy of the Irish censor, but Banville thought it was better without the sex scenes. “I never believe actors doing sex, and Julie Christie looks like a boy.”
The epigraph is from The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, whose The Aspern Papers is also set in Venice. Is this novel an homage?
“Oh, I never do homages to anyone except myself,” he says with a chuckle. Surely Mrs Osmond, though, is his bow to Henry James. He concedes the point. “I thought doing a sequel to The Portrait of a Lady would be like a jackal feeding on the body of a lion, but then I thought, what the hell. I must have thought I needed a new direction.”
He wrote it while living on campus in Chicago. “There wasn’t even a bar. I did nothing but write. It was like an out-of-body experience. I would lean back and look at my hand moving. I felt I could go for a cup of coffee and come back and have another page written. I would use words that I didn’t know the meaning of” – a common sensation for his many readers, I suspect – “the ebullient cauldron. I didn’t know ebullient meant boiling, until I looked it up. Where did that come from?”
A huge number get my writing. Many don’t, but if you appealed to everyone you would be a mere bestselling author
Perhaps from another language, I suggest, but he admits only to “a bit of German, some French and a smattering of English”. His versions of Kleist plays, he says, were really reworkings of existing translations. “The glory of English is that it is such an impure, ambiguous language. One of my characters is called Cleave, which can mean its complete opposite. I love that.”
Banville’s fiction is peppered with words, such as contemnor, which the humble reader must look up. What does it mean, I ask. “I can’t remember,” he says. However, “I found a wonderful word the other day, a new one on me, invaginate. It doesn’t mean what you think it means. It simply means to form a sheath.” Where did he find it, dare I ask? “In the dictionary.” He leafs through them? “Of course. The dictionary is one of the great inventions of humankind.”
Dolman declares, “I set out to be a lord of language who in time would be placed among the immortals.” Is he channelling Banville? “Well yes, but then there is a second half of it, too, where he becomes a hack.” Is that him too? “Of course, part of me is. I love writing reviews. When you’ve written it, it’s gone, whereas a book is like a reserved sin, one you have to go to a bishop to get absolution for.
“Perfection is an idea. Humans are imperfect, so every work of art is a failure. [John] McGahern used to say: there’s verse and there’s prose and then there’s poetry, and poetry can happen in either and it happens more often in prose.”
His books are often spin-offs from the original idea, he has said, satellites sent into orbit while the mother ship is jettisoned.
“You never write the book that you think you’ll write. Inevitably it changes along the way,” he says. “When I was in my 20s it would take me three to five years to write a book. By the time I finished it I was a different person to the one who started it, and even still to some extent that is true, although I am now an ancient of days.
“Doctor Copernicus [about the Polish scientist] started out as a novel about the Norman invasion of Ireland. The Newton Letter came closest to achieving what I set out to achieve, but it’s only about 80 pages. All novels should be about 80 pages. Why people expect them to be about 240 pages I don’t know.” Venetian Vespers is 316 pages.
Banville started out writing short stories but wouldn’t be able to write one now.
“I need the breadth of a novel. It starts out like a doddle, but then six months later I am wading through mud up to my armpits, ready to cut my throat. I have to finish this damn thing and it can take years, and when I finish it I think it’s just another damn book. Iris Murdoch was once asked why she wrote so many books. She said, I always hope the next one will exonerate me for the ones that went before. That’s how I feel as well.”
I wonder if the stakes were lower with this one, akin to one of what Graham Greene called his entertainments. “His novels are far funnier than his entertainments, unintentionally so,” says Banville waspishly. “He treated me very badly with that GPA prize back in 1989. He tried to take it away from me. Tony Ryan very generously gave two prizes.” Banville created an unflattering caricature based on Greene in The Untouchable, from 1997. “I had my revenge.” Was he still alive? “No, he was dead unfortunately.”
[ John Banville: ‘I’m as baffled by the world now as I was when I was five’Opens in new window ]
As well as signalling the Jamesian connection to Venice, the epigraph captures his protagonist Evelyn Dolman’s predicament. “He doesn’t know what he is doing, he thinks he knows everything, but he’s a complete idiot.” An innocent abroad, except he is far from innocent. “He is a despicable little twerp who deserves everything he gets. He’s called Dolman” – doll man – “you know, and he has an androgynous name.
“A book-editor friend likened Dolman to Victor Maskell in The Untouchable and said, ‘You’re really good at conjuring horrible men.’ I said, ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’” The implication being that he is horrible too? “I think all human beings are horrible,” says Banville.
Dolman is a dupe but also behaves abominably. Did Banville feel he had to tread carefully writing certain scenes? “If I were to tread carefully I would be lying,” he replies. “Granta published an extract from The Untouchable. In the first paragraph Victor Maskell is almost run down by a bus, which he says was being ‘driven by a grinning blackamoor’. The proofs had been changed. I said, the point is you cannot censor me. They would try it now with all this wokeist nonsense. Thank God it’s coming to an end.
“In The Untouchable there is anti-Semitism throughout. I’m a philo-Semite. I still defend the Israelis. I was shaped by the death camps. My view of the savagery of human beings was shaped by my childhood memories of what was coming out of Germany. I once tripped on blue twine that was used to bind bundles of The Irish Times. Six people helped me up. I remember thinking in different circumstances these same people would be pushing me into a cattle truck.
“I think all right-thinking people have a dark view of human beings. We are not a very nice species. All this stuff about Gaza, which is terrible, of course, but nobody gave a damn when Assad was killing 350,000 of his own people. No one cared about Rwanda. It’s nascent anti-Semitism. Someone sent me a statement. I wrote back saying I will not sign this, there is no mention of Hamas. Of course, they gave Netanyahu and his horrible gang the excuse to commit atrocities. But they started it.”
There are two one-sided takes to every story. The conflict did not start on October 7th, 2023, I say, but the author diverts to an anecdote about the Jewish literary editor Louis Marcus. “When he was a little boy in Cork in 1945 or 1946, there was a knock at the door one Easter. A huge priest was standing there who said, ‘I’m here for the dues.’”
Banville spent many years as a subeditor on the Irish Press and The Irish Times. This had no bearing on his writing, he says, except perhaps a certain economy of language. Working night shifts did mean, however, that he wrote in the morning and afternoon. “I’ve always been a creature of the night. Tim Pat Coogan” – a former editor of the Press – “hated subs. He defined us as ‘people who change other people’s words and go home in the dark’. I loved subbing.”
He also loved being literary editor of The Irish Times. “I loved that job; 10 marvellous years. My iron rule was, when you send out a book for review, when the review comes in, you have to accept it. I’m sure there were writers who were annoyed [by a bad review]. But literature, art, book reviewing, these are areas of truth.
“In a world that has given up the notion of truth having any value, this is going to be one area that will help us through. You can’t make untruthful art. If you do it is not art, it’s kitsch. An artist may be a total liar in life, like myself, but when you sit down to write, I can’t lie.
“When I was doing Copernicus, halfway through I realised historians will shout at me about this. A friend said, ‘Don’t be mesmerised by fact. Fact is not truth. What you are doing is truth.’”
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He was desperate to win the Booker Prize in 1989, when he was shortlisted for The Book of Evidence, not for the validation but because if he had won he could have left journalism to write full time.
“I didn’t realise the Booker only lasts for a year and then you’re a nobody again. If you were to regard the prize as some judgment of your work, you’d be in trouble. As Roddy Doyle said when he won, if it had been five different judges someone else would have won – and it’s true: it’s a lottery. I came across a wonderful saying by Philip Larkin the other day: ‘I don’t think I write particularly well, just better than everyone else.’”
He chuckles. Would he go so far? “Of course. God, I’ll get into such trouble for this. But I have lots of friends with a sense of humour. Everything I write is second- or third-rate, by my standards, but my standards are impossibly high.”
He doesn’t get edited, he says, then corrects himself. “The crime books get edited, because I fall asleep now and then. One editor said to me, ‘Do you realise you’ve actually demoted Strafford from one book to the next?’”
He recalls finishing The Lock-Up at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, the artists’ retreat in Annaghmakerrig, in Co Monaghan, on a Friday night but felt it was a bit banal. He suddenly realised another character could be the killer, so on Saturday morning he wrote another 3,000 words, a new ending. “That’s the essence of that kind of writing: it has to be spontaneous.”
He was in a self-catering chalet and so avoided the evening meals with other writers. Hell is other writers, I suggest, paraphrasing Sartre, and he laughs but later lists several writer friends.
“McGahern told me, the only reason we get on is we are so unalike. He was wonderful company. In the old days my wife and I used to visit him in the house above the lake. We used to drink so much, laugh so much. He was one of the best storytellers.”
Is The Book of Evidence his best work? “I can’t be asked to judge my own work, because I bring all the baggage of the years of writing, all the mistakes, all the failures, compromises, so I can’t read them with an innocent eye.”
I quote the wonderful lapidary line from his Booker Prize-winning The Sea, from 2005, which seems to capture a recurring theme in his work: “The past beats inside me like a second heart.” Banville says, “It’s strange. Everyone remembers that line. I didn’t think it was special, but everyone remembers it. There are lots of others.
“In The Infinities there is a line where the god Hermes speaks, complaining that the gods are being coerced by humans: ‘Fine gods we are that we must muster to a mortal must.’ When I wrote it I thought, My poor translators.
“There are few things more pleasurable than writing a well-made sentence. That’s a great privilege. Our greatest invention as a species is the sentence. This is what made us civilised. And I’ve spent my life working with this marvellous invention. What a privileged life. I know I write beautiful sentences, but they are to other people, not to me. It would be fatal if I loved my own work.”
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Did he take satisfaction in seeing Dolman’s arrogance, typical of the Englishman abroad, crushed? “No, I am one of those rare creatures: I have no trace of nationalism. I like Ireland because of the climate and the sense of humour. We are so adept at mocking ourselves. Even at our most serious we don’t take ourselves seriously. I love that.”
He is disappointed that some don’t recognise the humour in his work. “The good readers do.” The connoisseurs? “No, I don’t want connoisseurs. My wife was in M&S, and a woman at the checkout saw the credit card and asked if she was related to me. ‘Tell him The Sea is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read.’
“That to me is worth 500 rave reviews. They are the people I write for, not fellow writers, academics, critics or book reviewers. I write for the woman at the checkout in M&S. A huge number get it. Many don’t, but if you appealed to everyone you would be a mere bestselling author.”
Unlike Dolman, Banville appreciates classical music and seeks to emulate it in his prose. “It’s paramount. I’ve always had huge admiration for Nabokov’s prose, but I read an interview where he said he was tone deaf. I thought, That’s what it is: there is no music in his prose, it’s all pictorial, visual.
“I regard music as a kind of magic. It’s extraordinary that these little black marks on a white page turn into this storm of sound. I listen to music all the time: Bach, Beethoven, Benjamin Britten. I don’t like pop music. My partner, Patricia Quinn, plays the viol.”
He speaks his work aloud when he is revising. “I used to have this strange Oxbridge-accented voice I would hear myself reading a sentence in. I said to myself, Where did that come from? Copernicus is music from start to finish. At the end of it is written DC. It could be Doctor Copernicus, but I meant it as da capo: start again. People imagine when they have read a book, they have read the book. No, start again. You would never listen to a piece of music and think, Oh, I now know that.”
There is a sense of playfulness at times in Venetian Vespers, highlighting the artifice of storytelling. “Art is transcendent play,” Banville says. “I’m playing. At least three times a week I’ll look up from my desk and say, ‘I’m supposed to be a grown-up human being. What am I doing, telling these stories?’”
Like a play pen, I suggest. “I’ll steal that,” he says. “TS Eliot says inexperienced writers borrow, experienced writers steal. It’s stolen.”
He is halfway through another Quirke crime caper; his autobiography, Out of True, is progressing slowly. Will it be a tell-all or a tell-some? “It’s a novel,” he says, laughing. “I could never keep a diary. I have no interest in myself as a person to write about. I love my life, the people around me. It will be full of banalities. Life is banal; that is part of its glory.”
He used to write eight hours a day, but now, on the cusp of his ninth decade, he can’t do more than three. “The writing life requires physical strength. When I started, houses didn’t have central heating. Your legs would be frozen. But I write 24 hours a day, even when I am dreaming.”
A novel, he has said, is a vehicle to convey the weight and power of a dream. Venetian Vespers begins and ends with an image from Dolman’s dream that turns out to be a premonition.
Banville allies himself with Beckett and Kafka over Joyce. “I’m not a Joycean. I regard the world as a very strange place. I’ve been alienated since I reached the age of reason, I’ll die alienated, but there is a wonderful quote from the astronaut Jim Lovell. ‘People often say: I hope to go to heaven when I die. In reality, you go to heaven when you’re born.’
“Earth is beautiful. It’s terrible, too – but, my God, look at clouds. We ignore them only because we are used to them. I was on a flight to Oslo, flying above the fjords, but there were clouds above the plane reflected in the fjords. Pure magic.”
Venetian Vespers is published by Faber
