Bookplanet: Booker winner speaks out, happy to be "vilified"

From the NY Times: His Love of Words Rivals His Contempt for Critics -- by Sarah Lyall

Not everyone was thrilled by the decision last month to give the Man Booker Prize, Britain's most influential literary award, to "The Sea" by the Irish novelist John Banville. To begin with, two of the five Booker judges vehemently preferred another book, Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go."

Meanwhile, booksellers at the prize dinner grumbled that the novel was the least commercial of the six finalists (only 3,721 hardback copies had been sold before Booker night on Oct. 10; the total has since risen to just over 9,100). Mr. Banville subsequently appeared on a radio arts program with three critics, who all, he said, hated his book.

But all this is grist for the mill to the author himself, who seems to relish a good literary dust-up, or at least not to mind being at the center of one.

"Frankly, I am gratified to see myself vilified, and the jury being vilified," he said happily over lunch recently. "It cheers me up. I must have done something right to annoy so many people."

Mr. Banville, 59, writes serious, dense books. His style is sumptuous, lush with adjectives and rarefied words - "crepitant," "velutinous" - that some find show-offy, and others Joycean. ("We do have a fatal love of rich language," he said, speaking of Irish writers.) He is serious in person, too, but his relish of an amusing story and of the pleasures of a long, digressive chat, with jokes at his own expense, emerges quickly.

"The Sea," which is being published in the United States by Knopf, is Mr. Banville's 14th novel. It tells the story of Max Morden, a grief-riven Irish widower who travels to a seaside resort where he once spent a life-changing summer, hoping both to forget and to remember. It is a relatively slim book, but it carries a long emotional punch and received a string of enviable (and envious) reviews in Britain. Writing in The Spectator, Sebastian Smee said it was a "brilliant, sensuous, discombobulating novel."

But there were strong dissenting voices from those who found the book too aggressively highbrow, its author too enamored of his own voice. In "areas important for fiction - plot, character, pacing, suspense - 'The Sea' is a crashing disappointment," wrote David Grylls in The Sunday Times of London. The Independent's literary editor, Boyd Tonkin, said Mr. Banville's prose exhibited "all the chilly perfection of a waxwork model." And although Mr. Banville has in the past been called "one of the finest stylists at work in the English language" in The New York Times (by the author Patrick McGrath), the chief book critic of The Times, Michiko Kakutani, disagreed, at least when it came to this book.

"Though 'The Sea' may deal with some of the gravest issues of life - death, loss, regret," she wrote, "it remains, in the end, a chilly, desiccated and pompously written book that stands in sharp contrast to the vibrancy of many of this year's other Booker nominees."

Mr. Banville has not helped his cause very much (not that he is trying to) by remarks like the one he made on Booker night, when he proclaimed himself relieved that the award had gone this time to "a work of art" - the implication being that recent Booker winners have not been.

A few days later, he told The Guardian: "There are plenty of other rewards for middlebrow fiction. There should be one decent prize for real books."

One book that was on the longer list of nominees for the Booker but did not make the six-book shortlist was Ian McEwan's "Saturday," a hugely popular novel whose protagonist is a successful surgeon with a happy family life. There is history here. Earlier this year, Mr. Banville eviscerated "Saturday" in a withering essay in The New York Review of Books, calling it the epitome of bourgeois smugness, a "dismayingly bad book."

The magazine then printed an indignant rebuttal by the writer John Sutherland, pointing out some factual errors in the review. Mr. Banville's riposte to the complaints began: "Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the department of trivia."

In the small-world way these things work, it turned out that Mr. Sutherland was chosen to be the chairman of the Booker judges this year. "I thought, 'That's me gone from the Booker Prize,' " Mr. Banville said. But with the jury divided two to two, Mr. Sutherland ended up casting the deciding vote.

"I thought it was remarkable on his part to be so generous," Mr. Banville said.

Over a plate of fish, accompanied by white wine, Mr. Banville said he was not sorry about the review or about holding the position that "some books are works of art and some are not" - his criterion being, "Did it have to be written?"

"He's a wonderful writer, and I think he made a mistake," he said of Mr. McEwan. "I just felt he was offering a completely spurious and unbelievable version of life. His protagonist was still in love with his wife after all those years, can never have been unfaithful to her; both his children loved each other. It's just not life as we know it. Many people would say: 'Oh, well, that's just Banville. You're sick. What do you know about life?' It's possible. This is just a book review. I didn't mean it to be a grand statement."

Mr. Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, and left home after high school to work as a clerk at Aer Lingus, a post that allowed him to travel the world on a pittance. He began writing short stories as a teenager and published his first collection, "Long Lankin," when he was 24.

He worked on newspapers for more than two decades, first as a copy editor, then as the literary editor of The Irish Times. His literary output is as eclectic as his vocabulary. He has written novels using as inspiration the lives of the astronomer Copernicus, the British spy Anthony Blunt and the deconstructionist Paul de Man. An earlier novel, "The Book of Evidence," was a finalist for the 1989 Booker Prize. (It lost to Mr. Ishiguro's "Remains of the Day.")

He says he is puzzled by the thought that his books are somehow too dense or opaque.

"I'm constantly being accused of being elitist," he said. "But I write quite easy, approachable books." He has an autodidact's love of language and a writing style he describes as informed by his Irishness.

"English writers for the most part try to follow Orwell's dictum that prose should be a pane of clear glass through which you look," he said. "But Irish writers think of prose style as a distorting lens. We love that ambiguity; we love that a word can have three or four meanings at the same time."

He added: "We're a language-based society. You can get away with practically anything in this country if you give a good account of it."

He said his next book would be a mystery with a pseudonymous author, Benjamin Black. Mr. Banville was going to use "Benjamin White," the name of a character in an earlier book, but "my publishers said that was a better name, and besides it was nearer to the front of the alphabet."

He knows he is asking for it this time. "The critics will probably tear me to pieces," he said. "Here I go on about art, and now I produce this." Couldn't he just explain that he had written it for fun? "Yes," he added, "but I'm not supposed to have fun."