John Banville
John Banville | |
|---|---|
| Pen name | Benjamin Black |
| Occupation | novelist and screenwriter |
| Notable works | The Book of Evidence The Untouchable The Sea |
John Banville (born December 1945) is an Irish novelist and screenwriter. His novel The Book of Evidence (1989) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award. His eighteenth novel, The Sea, won the Man Booker Prize in 2005. He sometimes writes under the open pseudonym Benjamin Black.
Banville is known for his precise and cold prose style, Nabokovian inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators. His stated ambition is to give his prose "the kind of denseness and thickness that poetry has".[1]
Biography
Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland. His father worked in a garage and died when Banville was in his early thirties; his mother was a housewife. He is the youngest of three siblings; his older brother Vincent is also a novelist and has written under the name Vincent Lawrence as well as his own. His sister Vonnie Banville-Evans[2] has written both a children's novel and a reminiscence[3] of growing up in Wexford.
Banville was educated at a Christian Brothers school and at St Peter's College, Wexford. Despite having intended to be a painter and an architect he did not attend university[4]. Banville has described this as "A great mistake. I should have gone. I regret not taking that four years of getting drunk and falling in love. But I wanted to get away from my family. I wanted to be free."[5]. After school he worked as a clerk at Aer Lingus which allowed him to travel at deeply-discounted rates. He took advantage of this to travel in Greece and Italy. He lived in the United States during 1968 and 1969. On his return to Ireland he became a sub-editor at the Irish Press, rising eventually to the position of chief sub-editor. His first book, Long Lankin, was published in 1970.
After the Irish Press collapsed in 1995,[6] he became a sub-editor at the Irish Times. He was appointed literary editor in 1998. The Irish Times, too, suffered severe financial problems, and Banville was offered the choice of taking a redundancy package or working as a features department sub-editor. He left. Banville has been a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1990. In 1984, he was elected to the Irish arts association Aosdána, but resigned in 2001,[7] so that some other artist might be allowed to receive the cnuas [annuity]. He described himself in an interview with Argentine paper La Nacíon, as a West Brit. [1] Banville also writes crime fiction under the pen name Benjamin Black, beginning with Christine Falls (2006).
Banville has two adult sons with his wife, the American textile artist Janet Dunham. They met during his visit to San Francisco in 1968 where she was a student at the University of California, Berkeley. Dunham described him during the writing process as being like "a murderer who's just come back from a particularly bloody killing".[8] Banville has two daughters from his relationship with Patricia Quinn, former head of the Arts Council of Ireland.
Banville has a strong interest in animal rights, and is often featured in Irish media speaking out against vivisection in Irish university research.[citation needed]
Style
Banville is considered by critics as a master stylist of the English language, and his writing has been described as perfectly crafted, beautiful, dazzling.[9] David Mehegan of the Boston Globe calls Banville "one of the great stylists writing in English today"; Don DeLillo described his work "dangerous and clear-running prose;" Val Nolan in The Sunday Business Post calls his style "lyrical, fastidious, and occasionally hilarious"[10]; The Observer described his 1989 work, The Book of Evidence, as "flawlessly flowing prose whose lyricism, patrician irony and aching sense of loss are reminiscent of Lolita." Banville himself has admitted that he is "trying to blend poetry and fiction into some new form"[5] Banville is known for his dark humour, and sharp, wintery wit.[11]
Banville has written two trilogies; The Revolutions Trilogy, consisting of Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, The Newton Letter and a second unnamed trilogy consisting of The Book of Evidence, Ghosts, Athena.
Banville is highly scathing of all of his work, stating of his books "I hate them all ... I loathe them. They're all a standing embarrassment."[4] Instead of dwelling on the past Banville is continually looking forward; "You have to crank yourself up every morning and think about all the awful stuff you did yesterday, and how how you can compensate for that by doing better today".[5] He writes only about a hundred words a day for his literary novels, versus several thousand words a day for his Benjamin Black crime fiction.[12] He appreciates his work as Black as a craft while as Banville he is an artist, though he does consider crime-writing, in his own words, as being "cheap fiction".
Banville is highly influenced by Heinrich von Kleist, having written adaptations of three of his plays (including Amphitrion) and having again used Amphitrion as a basis for his novel The Infinities. One of Banvilles earlier influences was 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"[5]
Awards
| Year | Prize | Work |
|---|---|---|
| 1976 | James Tait Black Memorial Prize | Doctor Copernicus |
| 1981 | Guardian Fiction Prize | Kepler |
| Allied Irish Bank Fiction Prize | Kepler | |
| American-Irish Foundation Award | Birchwood | |
| 1989 | Guinness Peat Aviation Award | The Book of Evidence |
| Booker Prize (shortlisted) | The Book of Evidence | |
| 2005 | Booker Prize | The Sea |
| 2006 | Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year | The Sea |
| 2007 | Royal Society of Literature Fellowship | |
| Prix Madeleine Zepter | ||
| 2009 | Honorary Patronage of the University Philosophical Society |
Bibliography
Short story collection
- Long Lankin (1970; revised ed.1984)
Novels
- Nightspawn (1971)
- Birchwood (1973)
- The Revolutions Trilogy :
- Doctor Copernicus: A Novel (1976)
- Kepler, a Novel (1981)
- The Newton Letter: An Interlude (1982)
- Mefisto (1986)
- The Book of Evidence (1989)
- Ghosts (1993)
- Athena: A Novel (1995)
- The Ark (1996) (only 260 copies published)
- The Untouchable (1997)
- Eclipse (2000)
- Shroud (2002)
- Prague Pictures: Portrait Of A City (2003)
- The Sea (2005)
- The Infinities (2009)
Plays
- The Broken Jug: After Heinrich von Kleist (1994)
- Seachange (performed 1994 in the Focus Theatre, Dublin; unpublished)
- Dublin 1742 (performed 2002 in The Ark, Dublin; a play for 9–14 year olds; unpublished)
- God's Gift: A Version of Amphitryon by Heinrich von Kleist (2000)
- Love In The Wars (adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist's Penthesilea, 2005)
- Conversation In The Mountains (radio play, forthcoming 2008)
As "Benjamin Black"
- Christine Falls (2006)
- The Silver Swan (2007)
- The Lemur (2008, previously serialised in The New York Times)
- Elegy for April (2010)
Book Reviews
- "The Family Pinfold" The New York Review of Books 54/11 (28 June 2007) : 20–21 [reviews Alexander Waugh, Fathers and Sons : the Autobiography of a Family]
- "Trump Cards" Bookforum (Dec/Jan 2010) : John Banville on The Original of Laura, Nabokov's final, unfinished novel.
Notes
- ^ Steinberg, Sybil."Who Is John Banville?". Publishers Weekly, July, 1995. Retrieved on 21 January 2007.
- ^ VOnnie Banville Evans Homepage
- ^ Evans, Vonnie Banville (1994). The House in the Faythe. Dublin: Code Green. ISBN 9781907215124.
- ^ a b http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/the_john_banville_interview/
- ^ a b c d Irish Examiner; 5 September 2009
- ^ "The day the Press stopped rolling". Western People, 25 May 2005. Retrieved on 27 October 2007.
- ^ "Former Members of Aosdána". Aosdána. Retrieved on 27 October 2007.
- ^ Emma Brockes "14th time lucky". The Guardian, 12 October 2005. Retrieved on 27 October 2007.
- ^ "Shroud". Random House, 2004. Retrieved on 27 October 2007.
- ^ ""Banville shines with profound rendering of a parallel universe " by Val Nolan". The Sunday Business Post. 6 September 2009. Retrieved 30 October 2009.
- ^ "John Banville (1945–)". The Guardian. Retrieved on 19 October 2007.
- ^ http://bookbrunch.co.uk/index.php?option=com_myblog&blogger=Nicholas+Clee&Itemid=71
Further reading
- John Banville by John Kenny; Irish Academic Press (2009); ISBN 0-7165-2909-1
- John Banville, a critical study by Joseph McMinn; Gill and MacMillan; ISBN 0-7171-1803-7
- The Supreme Fictions of John Banville by Joseph McMinn; (October 1999); Manchester University Press; ISBN 0-7190-5397-8
- John Banville: A Critical Introduction by Rüdiger Imhoff (October 1998) Irish American Book Co; ISBN 0-86327-582-6
- John Banville: Exploring Fictions by Derek Hand; (June 2002); Liffey Press; ISBN 1-904148-04-2
- Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies: Special Issue John Banville Edited by Derek Hand; (June 2006)
- Irish Writers on Writing featuring John Banville. Edited by Eavan Boland (Trinity University Press, 2007).
External links
- Benjamin Black's Official Website
- Benjamin Black's Books on Macmillan.com
- Aosdána biographical note
- "As clear as mirror glass. John Banville in interview" with Three Monkeys Online Magazine
- Template:Contemporary writers
- John Banville at the Internet Book List
- John Banville interview with the Village Voice about Benjamin Black
- Chapter 1 of The Sinking City
- Banville author page and article archive from The New York Review of Books
- John Banville interview at The Elegant Variation literary blog.
- "Banville scored an own goal even before our crime fiction spat" (9 August 2009)—editorial by Ruth Dudley Edwards in the Irish Independent commenting on Banville's appearance at the 2009 Harrogate Crime Writing Festival
- John Banville's BBC radio plays