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Journalism of Courage
John Banville alternates between being a Booker-winning perfectionist and his crime-novelist alter ego
If John Banville had his way, his entire collected works would disappear. “I have this fantasy,” says the much-lauded Irish novelist. “I’m walking past a bookshop and I click my fingers and all my books go blank. So I can start again and get it right.” When he finished The Sea—it won the Man Booker Prize in 2005—he anticipated an embarrassing scene in which his publishers would stare at their hands and say, “John, we think we’d like your next one. This really isn’t very good.”
All of which explains why he’s so fond of Benjamin Black. Black is Banville’s thriller-writing alter ego. His name graces the covers of Christine Falls, The Silver Swan and The Lemur, though the pseudonym has always been an open secret. “I’m proud of the Benjamin Black books in the way that a craftsman would be proud of a nicely finished table,” Banville says. “John Banville books I loathe and despise and hate. They are a standing affront to me.”
Are Dr. Banville and Mr. Black really as different as they seem? A gray-haired, neatly suited man of 62, Banville is in Manhattan as part of a brief tour to promote The Silver Swan. Set in 1950s Dublin, its plot has Quirke, a pathologist, looking into the mysterious death of an acquaintance’s beautiful wife.
Banville grew up in Wexford, in southeast Ireland, and decided to forgo a university education for the chance to see the world. He got a job with Aer Lingus, flew all over the globe, met the woman he would marry in Berkeley in 1968. A year later he was back in Ireland, working as a sub-editor at the Irish Press. “I loved that tinkering with language,” he says, quoting a boss’s definition of copy editors as “people who change other people’s words and go home in the dark”. Lured by Hollywood, he tried to quit once. “I wrote a little book called The Newton Letter,” he says. “I remember being paid 500 pounds for it; it took me two years to write. I did the script for it in three days and I was paid 15,000 pounds.” He soon discovered that “the movies are a much harder business to get into than one imagines”. So he went back to his day job—eventually, he became literary editor of the Irish Times.
John Banville novels, of which there have been more than a dozen so far, weren’t exactly mass-market fare until his Booker win. Meanwhile, Benjamin Black’s career was starting to take shape. In March 2005, Banville began writing the first Quirke novel. Six months later, on the same day the Booker shortlist was announced, his agent presented his British publisher with the manuscript of Christine Falls. Banville asked that it be published under a pseudonym, simply to signal that “this was something different”.
The difference begins with the act of writing itself. Banville writes with a fountain pen. As Black, he types his stuff straight onto the screen. Banville takes three to five years to finish a book. Black can do it in that many months. As Banville, plot matters less than the ideas he’s grappling with. He’s interested in how “the past becomes our legend”, something “we think we remember” but manufacture instead.
It’s hard to imagine Benjamin Black talking this way. Something else that’s hard to imagine is the author of The Sea writing serial fiction for an American newspaper. As Black, however, Banville cranked out a 15-part mystery called The Lemur for The New York Times Magazine this year. “Benjamin Black is like a schoolboy who’s been given an extra week’s Christmas holiday,” Banville says. “This is worrying. To enjoy writing is deeply worrying. I must be doing something wrong.”
The schoolboy on holiday is grinning. He knows he’s not doing anything wrong.
-Bob Thompson (LATWP)
