Black face of John Banville

If John Banville had his way, his collected works would vanish. “I have this fantasy,'' the Irish novelist says.

“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.''

He spends years writing and rewriting the things but the misery doesn't stop there.

For example, when he finished The Sea — now his best-known book by far because 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 is 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. And Black, unlike Banville, is the kind of writer who can pound out a novel in a few months and never look back.

“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're a standing affront to me.''

How did a cheerful crime novelist come to inhabit the writing mind of one of the most angst-ridden perfectionists on the planet?

The answer says a good deal about the Jekyll-and-Hyde relationship of so-called literary fiction and genre fiction.

But it also makes you wonder: Are Dr Banville and Mr Black really as different as they seem?

Beyond imagination

A grey-haired man of 62, Banville is diminutive enough to often joke about his stature.

It is no accident that Quirke, the amateur detective at the centre of the first two Black books, is 6-foot-6: His creator found it amusing and “technically interesting'' to imagine how the world would look to someone “so much bigger than I am''.
“What I like about Quirke is that he's kind of dumb — like the rest of us,'' Banville says.

“He cannot figure out what's going on. He misses the clues. People tell him the truth, he thinks it's lies; people tell him lies, he thinks it's the truth.''

Banville also likes the fact that, because his doctor-detective is working half a century ago, “I don't have to do all that science they do nowadays''.

His research consisted of “a half-hour drink with a pathologist friend'', who later told him: “You got everything wrong.''

He grew up in southeast Ireland. When he was 12, James Joyce's Dubliners astonished him with its portraits of lives “squalid'' and “illuminated''.

Bad imitations ensued.

One began: “The white May blossom swooped slowly into the open mouth of the grave.''

Banville's experience includes forgoing a university education for the chance to see the world.

He got a job with Aer Lingus, flew all over the globe and met the woman he would marry in Berkeley in 1968. A year later he was back in Ireland, working as a sub-editor — “what you call a copy editor'' — at the Irish Press.

“I loved that tinkering with language,'' he says. Then he quotes, with relish, a boss's definition of copy editors as “people who change other people's words and go home in the dark''.

Lured by Hollywood, Banville tried to quit once but discovered that “films 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 — and kept writing.
It wasn't until his Booker win that Banville actually started to sell. Meanwhile, Benjamin Black's career was starting to take shape.

The Sea was finished in September 2004. 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''.

Literary split personality

The difference begins with the act of writing itself.
Banville writes with a fountain pen.

“I have to have that resistance of the paper because the computer is much too fast,'' he says. As Black, he types his stuff straight on to the screen.

Banville takes three to five years to finish a book. Black can do it in that many months. That is because “what you get with John Banville is an extreme of concentration.

“What you get with Benjamin Black is, I hope, spontaneity.'' He is writing “very quickly, very fluently and not thinking about it''.

“Benjamin Black is like a schoolboy who's been given an extra week's Christmas holiday,'' Banville says.

“This, of course, is worrying. To enjoy writing is deeply worrying. I must be doing something wrong.''

The schoolboy on holiday is grinning. He knows he is not doing anything wrong.