John Banville: ‘I’m 76 now, and I’m as baffled by the world as I was when I was five’

“I can’t see myself doing that again.” John Banville, talking to me via Zoom from his home in Howth, tells me how his new novel The Singularities “feels like a last book, certainly the last book of its kind.”

It took him six years to write, and “every day — every day — I would sit down at my desk and think, I don’t know how to do this. Because it’s not a natural activity, sitting in a room on your own in silence, writing out these” — he pauses — “transcendent dreams. Twice a week I would stop and say to myself, I’m supposed to be a grown man!”

But perhaps the idea of this being Banville’s last book wouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has read it. It opens ( “He has come to the end of his sentence, but does that mean he has nothing more to say?”) and closes — no spoilers — with hints toward this purpose.

The Singularities is, I should point out, not one of Banville’s crime books. They do not take six years, but about four months. “I hate summer. So I kill it by writing a crime novel.” The crime novels “have to be interested in what people do. In the other books I’m interested in what people are.”

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This fascinates him. “I write to explain the world to myself, or to account to the world to myself — there’s no explaining it. Because it’s such a strange place. I’m 76 now, and I’m as baffled by the world as I was when I was five years old.”

And The Singularities is full of mystery. To begin with, it seems like a successor to the trilogy that began with The Book of Evidence, Banville’s 1989 novel, as the puckish murderer Freddie Montgomery is released from prison. But the world he’s in, and the characters he meets, come from 2009′s The Infinities: gods, physicists, families and fantastical elements like cars than run on seawater.

In The Singularities, the world is winding down, but that’s just me winding down as a novelist, coming to the end, and having fun with that

So the book feels like a gathering together of elements from earlier work — another indicator that it is the last one. But does he, half a century into his career, still look forward to a new book coming out?

“Oh, no,” he says. “I never did. I’ve always dreaded it.” He likens it to childbirth, laughing: “It’s going to be painful and not worth it.” Still, when he finishes a book there are, at least, “two hours of euphoria, which is mostly based on relief. The thing is finally strangled, it’s stopped kicking, it’s dead”.

As for what happens after that: “I gave up reading reviews 35 years ago. And it’s great because on publication it’s like being in a hot air balloon, drifting up. Silence. But you can always depend on your best friend to phone you up and tell you about the really bad [reviews].”

[ Half a century of John Banville’s universes ]

In this way Banville switches between jokes and seriousness throughout our conversation, just as The Singularities has, he hopes, “a lighter touch. [It’s] full of jokes and squibs. It’s a serious book, but God forbid it should be solemn”. Similarly, the writing process, despite his protests, “has to be fun, otherwise I wouldn’t do it”.

There’s certainly plenty of playful stuff in there, such as the character of William Jaybey (named, clearly, after William John Banville), a vengeful biographer, and indeed the whole parallel world setting, which develops the ideas in The Infinities. Here, the world is decaying, suffering “degradation” because of those very technological developments described in the earlier book. Has Banville ever considered writing a more fully science fictional work, as he has with crime?

“No,” he says quickly. “In The Singularities, the world is winding down, but that’s just me winding down as a novelist, coming to the end, and having fun with that.”

My name is tainted because of the hoax. Anyway, I’m old, I’m white, I’m male ... Let’s not go there

Banville’s life in writing is part of a wider life in books. From 1988 to 1999 he was the literary editor of this paper, a time he recalls with great affection. “It was wonderful, just wonderful. I loved it. All those new books coming, bundles and bundles of them. My secretary, Yvonne Drysdale, in the first week, said to me, ‘I’ll give you a piece of advice. You see the ones that are wrapped up in thick cardboard, with impenetrable binding that you have to cut with a Stanley knife? That will be Golfing for Cats. If you get some dirty Jiffy bag that’s been used 10 times before — that’s where the real work will be’. And she was absolutely right.”

Books, he thinks, are less important in the culture now. “The intensity is not there. In 2005 the Booker Prize increased sales of my novel The Sea by ten-fold, maybe twenty-fold.” He laughs: “At the Booker dinners, you’d see these writers looking at each other, like moles brought up into the light.”

He doesn’t keep up much with contemporary fiction, though he still loves the novels of Georges Simenon. He is “one of the great writers of the 20th century, though the snobs wouldn’t acknowledge it. And every year, in October, he’d say, ‘Those f**kers in Sweden! Another year gone’.”

Speaking of those f**kers in Sweden — the Nobel prize committee, to give them their formal title — there are a few sly references in The Singularities to Banville’s own near-miss with the Academy, when he was hoaxed into believing he’d won in 2019. Does he still get a frisson every October, I wonder?

[ John Banville: It ‘makes me physically ill’ to read my own work ]

“Oh no, no. I won’t get it now,” he says firmly. “My name is tainted because of the hoax. Anyway, I’m old, I’m white, I’m male ... Let’s not go there,” he continues, before adding quickly, “I was glad to see Annie [Ernaux] getting it. She’s a good writer.” Still, he thinks, reflecting, “I’d like the money. I’ve often thought of writing to them and saying, Can I have the money now and give me the prize just when you get round to it? You can make it posthumous if you like.”

Look at this thing. The weight of it! I’m thinking of using it to kill somebody

Never mind the Nobel: Banville has won pretty much all the other prizes: the Booker, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Austrian State Prize. Speaking of which, I ask him about what looks like a metallic trophy of some sort behind him. The curse of low-resolution screens: it turns out to be a bunch of dried flowers. “Now John,” he says, “would I keep an award on my desk?”

“One of the problems with winning a prize abroad,” he says, “is they give you this incredibly heavy thing to carry.” He runs off to fetch an example: the trophy for the Princess of Asturias award, given in Spain in 2014. It’s a tall, bulky metal frame with dangerous-looking points on top. “Look at this thing. The weight of it! I’m thinking of using it to kill somebody.”

Awards or not, the lure of writing still tugs at him, clearly. Even now he’s having second thoughts about The Singularities being his last novel: now that he doesn’t have a novel on the go, he’s “at a loss”. “I’ll call my next book Sinatra’s Last Tour.”

And then? “I always tell that lovely anecdote about Henry James on his deathbed, and he was in a coma, and he was completely still — except his hand was still moving over the sheet. He was still writing.” He continues: “I like to think that could be me. I would get that perfect sentence. Nobody would know about it. It would go to the grave with me — but I’d have got that perfect sentence.”

The Singularities is published by Knopf on October 25th