Banville Despite Himself

I'm a longtime Banville fan. I admit it. I've read and enjoyed almost all of his books, take pleasure in their play of language, their allusive links. I loved the Nabokovian trilogy that begins with The Book of Evidence. I thought The Untouchable was a stunning transformation of the Anthony Blunt story. I liked the ironic traces of DeMan and Althusser in Shroud. I thought fondly of Murdoch when I read The Sea. With each new volume, I was prepared for a surprise. Yet I was taken aback when I learned that Banville had written his next book under a pseudonym, albeit a peculiarly transparent one. Why? Did he intend to adopt another style? Was he creating a different kind of book? Did he want to address a different audience? Was he looking for a larger readership? I was curious, but decided to put those questions aside and to read Christine Falls as if it were written by an unknown writer-- some obscure Irish debutant named Benjamin Black.

At first reading, I was (as I suppose the author hoped) duly ensnared by the novel's plot, a willing victim of page-turneritis. This new book did indeed seem to be different. A sport of a novel-- an entertainment, a "thriller." The noir story, with its nefarious baby-smuggling ring and the ghoulish doings of the trans-Atlantic Dublin/Boston Irish mafioso, was compelling enough and did catch me up. So yes, I thought. This is a departure-- a trip into another novelistic species.

Recently, I decided to reread the book-- and to read it as if written by Banville. This time the juicy character details jumped off the page rather than the now-known plot. Quirke's, of course, primarily. His ambivalent familial entanglements, his deceptions, his half-in-love-with-death pose, his uneasy morality, his great clumsy size but tiny feet (nicely noticed by his niece/daughter Phoebe), his flashy silver cigarette case, his incessant drinking, his crooked smile, his artist's mannequin, his turkey carpet, his lack of a first name, his extraordinary sensitivity to smell, his expensive clothes, too elegant for the low places in which he finds himself, and probably too good for his dark job as a pathologist in the morgue of the Holy Family Hospital. I was also more amused this time by Q's amorous encounters. Odd that this bearish, morose, self-absorbed, sardonic, easily bored, often soused or, when not, then hung over, guy is so (inexplicably?) attractive to all shapes and ages of women-- his sister-in-law, especially, but also various young nurses, aging widows, nuns both young and old, shopgirls...

Then there's the Banvillesque (almost cinematic) habit of vision-- the offbeat way characters are positioned in a scene. They can be watching others from unexpected angles, i.e., looking down on someone below, or observing another across lines of moving traffic, or glancing up at a figure seen in a half-lit window. Occasionally a character will stand sideways, perhaps at an acute angle to the wall, and only then peer through a doorway into a room. Never direct, never straight on, even when there's no one to see-- Quirke, for instance, is caught looking upward, eyeing "the tall windows, thinking of all those shadowed rooms with people in them, waking, yawning, getting up to make their breakfasts, or turning over to enjoy another half hour in the damp, warm stew of their beds," but not seeing a soul.

Benjamin Black is Banville-brilliant about much else in the novel-- about weather, about a world of smells, about the changing feel of the air. The dank, gloomy atmosphere of Dublin, the sinister texture of the city's bars, the freezing wind and biting sleet of wintry Boston-- all seem as central to Christine Falls as Quirke et al. and the noir plot. So why, I ask you, bother with the pseudonym?