John Banville interview: ‘Even the bleakest works of art offer consolation’

Twenty years after winning the Booker, the author reflects on his outsider victory with The Sea, explains why he hates the notion of ‘genre’, and discusses the inevitability of failure in the pursuit of art

Published January 29, 2025

Your novel The Sea won the Booker Prize in 2005. How did it feel to win, and what impact did the win have on your career, both immediately and over the years that followed?

I was astonished to win the prize, as was everyone else, except a slim majority of the jury. A friend, out of loyalty, put a bet on me at 14/1, and was as surprised by the result as was the dismayed bookie. Mind you, on the afternoon before the Booker dinner, I was walking by the Serpentine and saw five exquisite, pure-white seabirds fighting with a duck over a crust of bread. The duck won. Since I was one of six shortlisted authors, I took it as an omen. The prize had no impact on me as a writer, but it sold a lot of books, and perhaps even found me some new readers.

Were there any memorable moments during the Booker Prize ceremony or in the run-up to it? How did you celebrate your win?

Well, obviously, after my editor and I and the others at our table had sat through four hours of grim suspense in the Guildhall, the announcement that I had won was a memorable moment. I celebrated by having a glass of wine at the Groucho Club afterwards, and going off to my lonely bed in the Athenaeum Club.

It was reported that, a few hours before winning the Booker, you confided to an American journalist that The Sea was a ‘bad book’. Did you mean it at the time, did winning the Booker change your view, and how do you feel about the book now?

That’s American journalists for you. Probably what I said was that I regarded all my novels as failures, which they are – as all works of art fail, inevitably – but that doesn’t mean they are bad. We pursue perfection, without hope of achieving it, but pick up some precious bits and pieces along the way.

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When I was 12 or so, my sister recommended that I read James Joyce’s Dubliners. When I did, I was astonished to discover that fiction could be written out of the world as I knew it

The Sea is a novel about memory and trauma, and you have described the book as being ‘a direct return’ to your childhood and its traumas. How difficult was it to revisit your childhood? Did it open old wounds or lay them to rest?

Baudelaire said, as I roughly recall, that genius – with a lowercase ‘g’ – consists in the ability to summon up childhood at will, by way of the imagination. I had no difficulty whatever in revisiting the far past. For the artist, childhood is a recent antiquity, where the treasure is buried.

Chair of judges, Professor John Sutherland described The Sea as ‘a kind of slit-your-throat novel’ that requires readers to tune into its wavelength for it to work. How do you feel about this characterisation, and what do you think it says about the novel’s tone and impact?

I don’t remember Professor Sutherland saying that. The novel has sadness in it, certainly – the narrator is in mourning for a recently lost wife, and a couple of children die – but I was never tempted to slit my throat, and I doubt any reader was either. Even the bleakest works of art offer consolation.

More recently, you’ve focused your writing on crime fiction. You began writing detective novels as Benjamin Black in 2006, though this wasn’t your first exploration of the genre – The Book of Evidence delved into the mind of a killer and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989. You’ve also mentioned wanting to ‘gentrify the crime novel’. How has your approach to crime writing evolved over the years, and is it still your aim is ‘to turn crime fiction into a literary form’?

I hate the notion of ‘genre’ in writing. Georges Simenon, the unwitting father of Benjamin Black, is one of the great writers of the 20th century, whose novels in their breadth and casual poetry far surpass the fiction of, for example, Sartre or Camus. It was Claire Armistead at the Guardian who teased me by suggesting that my aim was to gentrify crime fiction, and she was right. Most crime novels – yes, I know, I have fallen into the ‘genre’ trap – seem to have been written with the blunt end of a burnt stick; I try to do better.

We go to the darkest works of art for their glow – and an intensified sense of what it is to be alive on this exquisite and appalling planet

Tell us about a book that made you want to become a writer.

It’s very trite, I’m afraid. When I was 12 or so my older sister recommended that I read James Joyce’s Dubliners. When I did, I was astonished to discover that fiction could be written out of the world as I knew it – Dubliners was not a detective story or a Wild West yarn, nor was it about English public schoolboys getting up to jolly japes – this was life itself, the real thing. At once I set about writing imitations of Joyce’s stories which were hideously bad – but I was on my way.

Was there a book that defined your early or teenage years, or that made you fall in love with reading? In what ways did it shape you, or your worldview?

Books do not ‘shape’ us or ‘define our early teenage years’. They offer delight – we go to the darkest works of art for their glow – and an intensified sense of what it is to be alive on this exquisite and appalling planet.

Which book you are currently reading, and what made you pick it up?

I’m reading a volume of Basho’s haikus, and to be honest, I’m not getting anywhere with them. My loss, of course.

What would you consider your all-time favourite book? How has it left a lasting impression on you?

I’m sorry, this is an impossible question. I have no doubt there are countless marvellous things I haven’t read. For instance, I came lateish to Henry James, and only found him in the 1970s – given how old I am, this was late – when I picked up an ancient copy of The Portrait of Lady and was immediately wafted into his world. I was in Florence at the time, staying just round the corner, as it happened, from the room where Henry James began writing the novel, a century before. Today, as I write this, I am on my way to Florence again – who knows what new wonder I might discover there?

Is there a hidden gem in the Booker Library that you would recommend to others, and if so why?

I’ve glanced through the lists – so many books! – and was reminded of Caroline Blackwood’s Great Granny Webster, which was shortlisted in 1977. It is a wonderful little novel, dark and funny and purring with feline malice. I wonder if it’s in print? Attention, publishers.