John Banville

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.

Since 1990, Banville has been a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. In a July 2008 interview with Juan José Delaney in the Argentine newspaper La Nación, Banville was asked if his books had been translated into Irish. He replied that nobody would do so, and that he was often referred to — pejoratively — as a West Brit. He advises against young writers approaching him for advice: "I remind them as gently as I can, that they are on their own, with no help available anywhere".

Banville is highly scathing of each of his books: "I hate them all ... I loathe them. They're all a standing embarrassment." Instead of dwelling on the past he prefers to continually look forward, "You have to crank yourself up every morning and think about all the awful stuff you did yesterday, and how you can compensate for that by doing better today." He does not read reviews of his work as he already knows—"better than any reviewer"—the places in which its faults lie.

He wrote fondly of John McGahern, who lost his job amid condemnation by his workplace and the Catholic Church for becoming intimately involved with a foreign woman. While on a book tour of the United States in March 2006, Banville received a telephone call: "I have bad news, I'm afraid. John Banville is dead." However, Banville was aware that McGahern had been unwell and, having performed the necessary checks to ensure that he was still alive, concluded that it was McGahern who was dead instead. And it was. Banville wrote an account of Caravaggio's 1602 painting The Taking of Christ for the book Lines of Vision, released in 2014 to mark the 150th anniversary of the National Gallery of Ireland.

He contributed to Sons+Fathers, a book published in 2015 to provide funds for the Irish Hospice Foundation's efforts to give care to terminally ill patients within their own homes.

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 Dubliners, and was struck at the way Joyce wrote about real life, I immediately started writing bad imitations of The 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".

Views

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.

This for Banville was a rare intervention of its kind, revealing to the public a different side—as he acknowledged when the presenter asked him if he had a history of objecting to activities such as blood sport:

I don't use my public voice to make protests. It was just on this one occasion it seemed that something could be done. The only effect it has had, as far as I can see, is that the following year there were about twice as many experiments. So much for the intellectual raising his voice in protest.