John Banville claims to be writing a memoir. It would be a change of pace for the many fans of Banville’s fiction who are only now starting his latest novel, The Drowned, which came out just last month. Then again, it’s not clear if Banville is having a laugh at our expense. “It’s a pack of lies,” he told a reporter from The Guardian last week.
Adding a second memoir to his oeuvre, after 2018’s Time Pieces, would fit with Banville’s habit in recent years of switching literary personae. His writing has long been marked by a curious bifurcation: He is known for his serious fiction, novels that garner critical acclaim and literary awards but not a huge audience.“He is more respected than read, a writer’s writer, whom even admirers admit can be difficult,” wrote Tom Deignan of Banville in America in 2010. But since 2006, Banville (at first under the pseudonym Benjamin Black) has also been publishing crime novels, writing these crowd-pleasers at a much faster pace than his more recherché literary efforts. “It is as if Banville, a notorious esthete, became tired of pretending the worlds of literary and popular fiction were not strictly segregated,” Deignan wrote.
It’s not unheard of in literature, of course: Graham Greene loved a good whodunit, and John Le Carré turned spy novels into an art form. But Banville is surely the only crime novelist in recent memory who has also won the Booker Prize (for his 2005 novel The Sea) and is regularly rumored to be in the running for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was in fact the victim a few years ago of a hoax in which a caller pretending to be from the Swedish Academy told him he had won the award.
Banville has been compared over the years to everyone from Vladimir Nabokov to Henry James to Fyodor Dostoevsky—and, of course, to Agatha Christie. He himself is more self-deprecating—when asked recently which of his books he is most proud of, he replied “You mean which ones disgust me least?”
Born in Wexford in 1945, Banville grew up in a literary family (both of his siblings are also published authors) but didn’t go to college. “I don’t think I would have learned much more, and I don’t think I would have had the nerve to tackle some of the things I tackled as a young writer if I had been to university,” he told an interviewer in 2009. “I would have been beaten into submission by my lecturers.” Instead, he worked as a clerk for Aer Lingus, a job that allowed him access to cheap flights and journeys around Europe.
Various jobs in journalism paid the bills for Banville for many years, and he remains a reviewer for The New York Review of Books and other journals. He published a short story collection, Long Lankin, in 1970, and a novel, Nightspawn, a year later (“absurdly pretentious,” Banville called it in hindsight). More than 20 novels followed, including three trilogies (one on scientists!) and the aforementioned winner of the Booker Prize, The Sea. His 1989 novel The Book of Evidence was also shortlisted for that year’s Booker Prize. Over the years, Banville has also been honored with the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1976), the Franz Kafka Prize (2011), the Irish PEN Award (2013) and more.
Banville has noted that the main character in many of his crime novels, Quirke (who has no first name), is based on his own experiences living in Dublin in the 1960s. The “Quirke novels” often explore the religious tensions between Catholics and Protestants in Dublin at the time—as well as corruption in the church. Raised Catholic, Banville left the church at an early age and has little positive to say about it—which is an understatement. “Don’t get me started on the Catholic Church. I think it’s an evil institution. It should be abolished,” he told a reporter in 2023. “It’s not just the child abuse, but the suppression of women, the hatred of the flesh.”
Banville has also been dismissive of attempts to classify him as an Irish writer. “I’m not going to do the Irish thing,” he told a reporter in 1997. As Tom Deignan noted in a 2021 essay on Banville in America, the author later said that “I’ve never cared enough about Ireland to feel I had to flee from it, or leave it.”
“And so, in his best-known literary efforts, Banville was uninterested in priests or informants or turf fires,” Deignan wrote. “From earlier novels about Copernicus, Kepler and Newton, up through more recent works like The Untouchable, Shroud and the Booker Prize-winning The Sea, Banville has exhibited a relentless fascination with the form and narrative of history, rather than the events themselves; the artifice and inadequacy, rather than grandiosity, of storytelling; the tragi-comic futility of trying to separate the dancer from the dance, the actor from the act, the writer from the written words.”
What is next for Banville—after this supposed memoir? In 2022, he announced that he would write no more “serious books,” concentrating instead on his crime fiction. Though he claims in interviews to have slowed down—no longer writing for eight to 10 hours a day—his output remains prolific. He has published six novels in the past four years.
America deputy editor in chief Tim Reidy reviewed Time Pieces in 2018, noting that Banville’s powers of observation and droll sense of humor both remain intact: “‘We do not grow up,’ he writes, ‘all we do is grow dull.’ Banville is 72 now, but he has not lost his switchblade-sharp eye for seeing.”
A postscript: I have some happy personal news. Tomorrow is the release date for Reading Culture Through Catholic Eyes, a revised collection of 50 of these weekly Catholic Book Club columns for America. If you’re interested in owning a copy for yourself, it can be purchased from Orbis Books at this link. Thank you!
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Behold the Handmaid,” by Joe Hoover, S.J. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
