December 8, 1945

John Banville (December 8, 1945), the Irish writer, has been considered for a Nobel. His books include The Sea, which won the Booker Prize in 2005.

Ghosts, an earlier novel, (1993) includes this scene, self-sufficient and sinister:

'Devil-worshippers,' he said. 'They killed cats,' Licht said from the sink, and snickered. 'Oh, more than cats,' said the Sergeant, unruffled. 'More than cats.' He lifted the teapot invitingly. 'Will you join me in a cup of this tea...

John Banville, in this Spiked interview, describes his own position in 20th century literature, an interview in which he was introduced as ‘the heir to Proust’:

[Asked] What do you think the chief lesson of modernism is?, John Banville replies:

"The great problem for the novelist is that, since human beings live by illusions, how is one to write about them authentically?

"I follow the modernist trail blazed by Henry James, a trail from which avant-garde modernism sharply diverted, thanks to the likes of Gertrude Stein, Joyce and, later, Beckett...

"....I feel that Henry James was the first modernist. Obsessed, like his brother William, with the intricate processes that constitute consciousness, he devoted his life, certainly the latter half of it, to finding a mode in fictional art that would catch consciousness ‘on the wing’, so to speak. To a certain extent, he stumbled on that mode by accident, when he developed writer’s cramp and had to resort to dictation. This freed his imagination from the mundane constraints of pen on paper, or fingers on keys, and hence he developed an extraordinarily dense and subtle style that catches exactly the state of being conscious, which, when one thinks about it, is really a state of being semi-conscious.

"Joyce acknowledged that no one actually thinks in the form of stream of consciousness – incidentally, a term invented by William James. To read late Henry James, however, is to feel that one is picking one’s way through the fog of consciousness itself, encountering all the barriers, false directions and misapprehensions that we do in our daily lives. James believed himself to be a realist, but for me he is the one who turned the art of fiction into… well, into art. And, nowadays, he is the one whose challenge I am grappling with.
.....

"I tend to think of Beckett as a sort of post-Christian mystic more than anything else – not forgetting, of course, the aridities of the nouveau roman. We should keep always in mind what Auden said: Everything changes except the avant-garde.
....
"If it had to be a choice between Joyce and Beckett I would choose Beckett, of course. I admire Joyce, I admire him greatly, but I cannot love him, except in Dubliners, in certain passages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and in some chapters of Ulysses – the opening domestic scene with Bloom and Molly is surely the last great gasp of the 19th-century realist tradition. Finnegans Wake I consider a great disaster.

"Beckett’s work is transcendent, and, I think, unique, so I don’t know where I could follow him to. But I do bow down before him in humility, reverence and – if it’s not too strong a word – love."

Love.