Bookplanet: Banville wins Booker

From the good old Guardian: Irish stylist springs Booker surprise: John Banville's novel The Sea takes £50,000 prize (Casting vote of chairman seals win for outsider) -- by John Ezard

The veteran Irish stylist John Banville brought off one of the biggest literary coups last night when he took the £50,000 Booker Prize from under the noses of the bookies and the literary insiders.

A 7-1 outsider in the betting odds and untipped by virtually any critic, his novel The Sea was declared victorious in a contest which the judges' chairman, John Sutherland, said had been "painful" in its closeness.

Banville triumphed when Professor Sutherland cast his chairman's vote in his favour. Until then, the judges were tied, with two backing Banville and two, it is understood, supporting the runner-up, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.

Banville's vindication at the age of 59 with his 14th novel is a victory of style over a melancholy content which makes his book one of the least commercial on the six-strong shortlist.

His protagonist, a querulous, hypersensitive, elderly art historian, loses his wife to cancer and feels compelled to revisit the seaside villa where he spent childhood holidays being alternately cosseted and bullied by a wealthier boy and girl.

His ambiguous relations with the children lead to sexual awakening but also to dire tragedy. The Guardian said of the author: "Banville writes novels of complex patterning, with grace, precision and timing, and there are wonderful digressive meditations."

Many critics hailed The Sea when it was published. Peter J Conradi, writing in the Independent, praised Banville as "a writer's writer, a new Henry Green, who can conjure with the poetry of people and places. He relishes language and wants it to work for him anew".

Finn Fordham, reviewing the book for the Guardian, decided that although Banville was often described as a stylist, "he is really more of a ventriloquist. A stylist produces a variety of voices and forms. Banville works within a narrower spectrum, bringing to life a series of monologues for inter-related and cadaverously fleshed-out dummies".

While several others queued up to proclaim Banville the natural heir to Nabokov, the novelist Tibor Fischer stood aloof: "You can sense the volumes of Joyce, Beckett and Nabokov on Banville's shelves," he wrote in the Sunday Telegraph. "There's a lot of lovely language but not much novel."

The limelight cast on last night's verdict should, as in previous years, trigger a rush on bookshops which by Christmas will have added at least £600,000 and up to £1.8m to the revenue of the six shortlisted titles. The frontrunner, Ishiguro's sixth novel, had already achieved hardback sales of almost 24,000, worth £300,000, according to sales figures up to last Tuesday. By contrast, The Sea had sold only 3,318 copies.

By the beginning of this month, the six shortlisted books had between them put on 17,000 extra copies - dramatically better than last year's figure of 6,500 for the same period. Yet despite the widely publicised high quality of this year's crop of finalists, it has so far still fallen short of the gains in the two best years so far this century, 25,000 in 2001 - when the shortlist included Ian McEwan's Atonement - and 22,000 in 2003, when it included the comic novel Vernon God Little and Monica Ali's bestselling Brick Lane.

But to some booksellers the class of 2005 has provided the most golden year. Roy Menear, Waterstone's Newcastle manager,said: "There isn't a book on the whole list that doesn't excite or interest me."

Also on the shortlist this year were: Arthur & George, by Julian Barnes; A Long Long Way, by Sebastian Barry; The Accidental, by Ali Smith; and On Beauty, by Zadie Smith.

The judges were Professor John Sutherland (chairman); Lindsay Duguid, fiction editor of the Times Literary Supplement; the writer and antiquarian book dealer Rick Gekoski; the novelist Josephine Hart; and the literary editor of the London Evening Standard, David Sexton.

Extract:
Chloe and I turned our heads simultaneously and, devout as holy drinkers, dipped our faces toward each other until our mouths met. We could see nothing, which intensified all sensations. I felt as if we were flying, without effort, dream-slowly, through the dense, powdery darkness. The clamour around us was immensely far off now, the mere rumour of a distant uproar. Chloe's lips were cool and dry. I tasted her urgent breath. When at last with a strange little whistling sigh she drew her face away from mine a shimmer passed along my spine, as if something hot inside it had suddenly liquefied and run down its hollow length ... Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self ...

As I walked behind her amid the trudging crowd, I touched a fingertip to my lips, the lips that had kissed hers, half expecting to find them changed in some infinitely subtle but momentous way ... like the day itself, that had been sombre and wet and hung with big-bellied clouds when we were going into the picture-house and now at evening was all tawny sunlight and raked shadows.