The imbrications of John Banville

Not only is there “an imbricated array of banana sandwiches” in John Banville’s Ancient Light, the book itself is imbrication upon imbrication: from  Nabokov,  Dostoevsky,Yeats, Shelley, Leopardi, Paul de Man, the characters and narrative of preceding books Shroud and Eclipse and The Infinities (via the reference to Kleist’s Amphitryon) to Banville’s long-standing preoccupation with the mirror-to-mirror unreliability of memory, even to Banville himself in the person of the biographer JB, the “somewhat shifty and self-effacing fellow” who writes “like Walter Pater in a delirium.”

All this in the strangely stagey Banville style in which characters and even Nature herself seem to be kept in the wings waiting to be called forth to strut and fret their hour upon the stage. It’s no accident that Banville is attracted to stories of gods, as in The Infinities, based on Amphitryon; there are few authors who play the deus ex machina more overtly.

Many readers will respond to the relationship between the young Alex and Mrs Gray, and to the unresolveable sorrow of Alex and Lydia’s loss of their daughter Cass. It’s harder to be interested in the Alex Vander narrative, and the outcome of the Mrs Gray story is verging on the banal. There is an uncharacteristic impatience, a loss of the control of tone, in the way Banville bundles her off by way of a condensed explanation from her daughter.

The end of the book suggests there’s more to come of the tale of Alex Cleave, his lost daughter, and Alex Vander. I wonder how long Banville can go on mining this particular seam.

Lorenzo, all is forgiven

Four chapters in, Sons & Lovers is triumphantly passing the iPod test. The tenderness, observation and psychological insight with which Lawrence creates the Morels' world are matchless.  There's real vitality here, the deep vitality that Lawrence worshipped in human relations, not the puffed-up, strained-for vitality that Women in Love bangs on about so tiresomely. So what went wrong? Is it another case of an author seduced by his own publicity (see our earlier post on Hilary Mantel on this subject), of an author writing more books than he has in him, of an author who knows he has death within him flailing about desperately to hold on to life?

The iPod test

In the course of her travels recently Gert has taken to listening to novels downloaded from the free site LibriVox (LibriVox.org) and has discovered that writer's tics and foibles leap out at her as they don't when she is reading, particularly if the book is one she's read more than once, as is the case with Women in Love.  She was reminded at every turn  of How not to write a novel (Mittelmark & Newman).  DHL needs a stern editor to remove all adverbs, restrict adjectives to one per noun, allow only "said" as a dialogue marker and come down heavily on all scenes involving horses or cattle. The scene in which Gudrun performs Dalcroze movements to a herd of surprised cattle made Gert laugh and laugh, as did Hermione's standing-up orgasm as she bashes Birkin on the head with a lapis lazuli paperweight.
Results of a scientific word-count:
1) loins - the runaway winner, followed by
2) queer ( as part of an adjective chain describing facial expressions or tones of voice)
3) swoon, -ed, -ing
4) inchoate

Loins, queer, swoon, inchoate - there you have the DHL project. A friend has also pointed out his fascination with women's stockings, sashes and hats, while the males are all loins.

Gert does, though, remember Sons & Lovers being rather better, and may subject it to the iPod test.

But how would her own work stand up to the test?

Hilary Mantel, you little ripper

It's hard to say she just gets better and better, because what could be better,  each of its kind, than Eight months on Ghazzah Street, Beyond Black, Fludd, Giving up the ghost? No, the fascinating thing about Hilary Mantel is that she shows no signs of falling for her own publicity. Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, gifted writers derailed by their ego. John Banville,  entranced by his reputation for beautiful prose. Even the trucker Ian McEwan wobbles from time to time (Saturday). But good old Hilary's ego is swallowed up in her subject.  She looves it! as an Irish relative of ours would say. Bring on the third volume of the Wolf Hall trilogy.

Gert comes to the end

On Sunday 15th July we achieved the completion of our sixth joint work. We commenced on Monday 18th June and wrote our 1,000+ words a day until now we have 61,391.
But are they good words? Are they elegant and artful? Do they tell a tale like no other? Does the pathos wring our hearts and the humour cause us to fall backwards drunk with laughter? We think not, at this stage.
We have made a start, something has begun. Unlike our previous works which have leapt fully formed from our busy fingers, the as-yet-unnamed work is partial. We see the seeds of something more, the town needs to grow, the planet which guides the destinies of our characters is yet to be chosen. But we are excited. Something new has taken place. For the first time we truly know the meaning of 'first draft,' and see the path leading to 'second draft,' even 'third draft.'
Who can tell what turns we will take. For the moment we lie fallow and wait.

Some serious questions

Some disagreements have arisen as Gert struggles to extricate herself from the tangled web she has created with what has turned out to be a kind of murder mystery. We have had to consider:
does Pourgues want a sex-change operation?
is Gandharva a fraud?
why did Harry lend Alex the black Golf?
would you take a heavily-laden backpack on a romantic stroll in the moonlight?
is the headless body in the Walwa state forest just a red herring?
why, oh why, is Alex so mean?
and, crucially,
can you keep on loving someone who has called you a fat fool?
As we approach the finishing-line we have solved some, but not all, of these dilemmas.
We power on to a conclusion that has at least become vaguely clear with the motto, 'We can fix that up later' .

Gert flounders about

Nearly three weeks in and we are still at sea. The problem is the task we set ourselves of writing more naturalistically than usual. In previous books where everything is slightly (or a lot) larger than life we can indulge our taste for caricature and the bizarre knowing that our readers understand that's what they're going to get, and they'll happily go along with the unlikely logic of the book's world. But this time our setting is the unadorned everyday and our characters, though we're fond of some of them, not particularly memorable. We are about to murder our nasty woman but we're still not sure who did it - many have motives. We're beginning to have great respect for those sturdy writers who construct plots and work to them, rather than just seeing what comes along. Ah well, we're keeping up our 1000-wd-a-day-each regime, the story is moving, here, there and everywhere - and in the end, who knows?