NEARING the end of a long life spent living several lies, double agent and betrayer Victor Maskell, the Irish-born narrator of The Untouchable, John Banville's new novel - his 10th, which is published by Picador next week - finally experiences public exposure. Calmly this scholar, snob, self-invented honorary Englishman and friend of the king, asks with mock irony and amused disgust: "What have I done, to be so reviled in a nation of traitors, who daily betray friends, wives, children, tax inspectors? I am being disingenuous, I know. I think what they find so shocking is that someone - one of their own, that is - should actually have held to an ideal. And I did hold to it, even in the face of my own, innate, all corroding scepticism." Maskell is a typical Banville narrator; mathematician turned art critic, expectedly cold, witty, remote, intellectual, dauntingly articulate; an individual who clearly belongs nowhere and wallows, even revels, in the shadowy half-life of the mind.
"What a mind I have, stuffed with lofty trivia", remarks the narrator of Ghosts (1993). Earlier, in Doctor Copernicus (1975), Nicolas, bracing himself for a life in which he will be brow-beaten and bullied, mutters: "I believe in mathematics, nothing more." The more personable if equally haunted and eventually more damaged Gabriel Swan concedes in Mefisto (1986): "About numbers I had known everything, and understood nothing."
Yet for all the, at times, mannered intellectual austerity, detachment, vicious black comedy, soaring linguistic flourishes and high artifice, Banville's psychological vision is more closely staked to the heart of touchingly vulnerable human hopes, physical sensation, anxiety and lost desires than readers may suspect. Faced with what appears to be chilling authorial control and abstract ideas balancing notions of art and reality the imagination as explored by him becomes a baroque mad-house, albeit one constructed within a scrupulously elegant ambience. More philosopher than storyteller, Banville uses narrative as a way of settling questions far deeper than "what happened?". He is more interested in the why the reasons.
All of his work to date could be read as a form of odyssey, the quest-novel at its most sophisticatedly European, in which the intellect flounders through a wodge of information, vainly searching for self-knowledge.
The trait most commonly shared by his narrators, as well as most of his central characters, is a marked lack of interest in humankind. As Victor remarks with hindsight of the young Querell, who later becomes a successful writer, "he was genuinely curious about people - the sure mark of the second-rate novelist." Although, having spent seven years on the project, the narrator of The Newton Letter (1982) admits 19 being unable to complete his book: "Real people keep getting in the way now, objects, landscapes even. His failure is, in fact, evidence of a moral regeneration and causes him to seek self-exile. What can be said of Kepler, though, his son having just died? In passing, he notes his wife's grief, before thinking, "my work will be interrupted."
There are some voyeurs, most famously Felix, the con man who memorably swaggers through Mefisto (1986) later resurfacing in Ghosts, jauntiness intact.
Banville's characters, however, particularly his narrators from The Newton Letter, to The Book of Evidence (1989), to Ghosts, and increasingly with Athena (1995) tend to be preoccupied, if not in fact, sustained by self-disgust. But none are more so than Victor Maskell.
Banville's version of the chaotic universe is curiously off-beat, grotesquely comic and often violent. Disconnected, hyper-logical little words in which lost souls - more usually fey, often silent girl-women and an assortment of shady low life caricatures wander in and out. His narrators favour the heightened, formal prose of diplomats and scholars, leaving other characters free to adopt Irish colloquial speech. As early in his career as the brilliantly parodic, political picaresque Birch wood (1973), an almost traditional quest-novel which also shrewdly revisits Irish history and its social concerns with rank, as represented by the Big House, Banville appears to be saying that for him characters are of secondary interest. And he has, until now with The Untouchable (Picador, £15.99), tended to call upon a stock population of tragic-comic misfits to inhabit situations, rather than stories.
THESE plots are vehicles, devised to examine sensations such as pity, fear, self-disgust, failure, complex emotional neutrality and the elusiveness of genuine emotion, which have become this themes along with thematic devices such as duality, the tensions between science and art, fact and fiction - or more accurately, truth and lies. Banville's narrators often resort to doubletake, they are not too sure of anything.
Reality frequently seems to overpower his characters, preferring as they do invention. In The Newton Letter the narrator, while living in a lodge, observes his hosts and busily creates his version, "a horrid drama", of the lives of the impoverished gentry he has come to live among, "and fails to see the commonplace tragedy that is playing itself out in real life." His refusal to see the family as they are results in his having an empty relationship with one woman, in which he makes love by proxy to another, whose dreamy, enigmatic allure is due to her being perpetually doped as a way of survival. Added to this, they are not even Protestant, but are Catholic like himself. Much of the narrator's romantic torment in Athena lies in the stark fact that the girl he is having an intense sexual relationship with only appears to exist in his mind. The narrator of Ghosts feels his interest in a girl dissolve when he discovers the facts of her life are utterly alien to the fantasy-situation he has created for her. The earlier Freddie of The Book Evidence, when asked how much of his colourful account is true, responds of the testament he has carefully shaped as if it were a work of art, "All of it. None of it."
Banville's vivid, poetic, precise language floats somewhere between Yeats, Beckett and Nabokov; the magisterial precision may be traced to Yeats, while its despairingly absurdist tragic comedy defers to Beckett. Nabokov's influence is a constant, most palpably felt in Athena with its echoes of Lolita in the evocation of a ghost-girl whose emotional indifference challenges the exasperated narrator, who may or may not but most probably Freddie Montgomery. Banville also shares Nabokov's liking for coincidences which are not coincidences at all. Chance, chaos, true or false, sleight of hand, or more accurately word, feature in Banville's stylistic repertoire. Paintings, invariably Dutch masters, tease. Are they real, or merely good fakes? Are they harmless copies or criminal forgeries? Art and the desire to possess it is most brutally evident in The Book of Evidence particularly, as Freddie doesn't really want to steal the painting, he doesn't really want to murder the girl, he simply does so because, as he discovers when being interrogated: "I killed her because I could." Also, interestingly, it is this Freddie, poseur, wastrel, bad son, dog-hater, snob and murderer, who says that the only aspect of his narrative which is true, is "the shame." Elsewhere in his fiction, the mystery women painted by long-dead masters, emerge as the closest his characters come to love objects.
A virtuoso ability to caress language with a miser's single-mindedness elevates his work to high art. Or, as some of his critics claim, an art so elitist and mannered as to exclude all emotion? Is it mere artifice? Beautifully crafted, at times grotesque, sexual fantasy devoid of emotion? No. Central to Banville's calculated, relentless and unrelenting work is the dogged pursuit of the essence of physical sensation and the nature, failure, limitations and elusiveness of emotion. Concerned with the confusions and doubts surrounding feeling, his is a physical as well as metaphysical cosmos. The profound becomes the banal, because banality stands at the centre of life.
By the end of Birch wood, Gabriel Godkin, older, wiser and disillusioned, decides: "Some secrets are not to be disclosed under pain of who knows what retribution, and whereof I cannot speak, therefore I must be silent." His comment could also apply to Banville's enigmatic approach to the business of narrative, which for him has come to revolve almost exclusively on a distinctive first person voice supported by a mall, elite chosen group of images; swimmers. twin selves, mad kings, demented children, travelling players, dogs named Patch, prison, exile, "heartbreaking responses to bruised flesh and so on.
In Nighspawn, his first novel and second book (the short story collection Long Lankin was published in 1970, and each of its nine stories was told through the third person), Banville introduced the first of his narrators, Ben White, whose self-conscious, nervy account of shady dealings in Greece is aggressively shrill, even crude. It is a young man's book, angry rather than stylishly exasperated. Nightspawn highlights the quick maturity of Birch wood, and Godkin's thoughtful, often melancholic narrative. Although Dr Copernicus and Kepler are third person narratives, the dark, descriptive language with its strong sense of place contains many of the burlesque images and devices of the later work, which are also evident in the sheer pace.
A SERIES of exacting labyrinths of wild comedy and pity, dominated by a narrative voice favouring laconic asides, has led John Banville to The Untouchable, a novel in which multi-layered flashback and hilarious set pieces featuring various dreamers, losers and random manics, achieves a new depth of narrative and characterisation. There are far fewer caricatures this time. In Vivienne, the wry, witty, languid sister of a man Maskell remains besotted with throughout his life, Banville has created his most convincing female character. Maskell, man of masks - do not overlook the name - marries Vivienne, as an act of love or revenge, or possibly both.
Victor, failed husband, failed father, is no less witty than the Freddie of The Book of Evidence. But whereas Freddie's garish, extremely intelligent and often insane monologue, in which the exuberant rhetoric counters his bizarre antics, carries a relatively simple plot centring on an unnecessary theft and an even more unnecessary murder, Victor's story is far more complex, as are his deceptions. He is as fluent a talker, and a more astute observer, capable of looking beyond his immediate self. Victor's crime is also far more elaborate than Freddie's brutal killing of a house servant.
A vivid sense of medieval Europe emerges from Dr Copernicus and Kepler. Ghosts, with its echoes of Shakespeare's The Tempest has an almost dream-like atmosphere, while echoes of the previous works provide its insistent coherence. The Newton Letter with its intense compression, and Athena, are deliberately claustrophobic, while the dazzling Mefisto returns to the picaresque of Birchwood. The Untouchable, based loosely on the Cambridge spy circle of the 1930s, captures a sense of Britain's wartime confusion which was further complicated by the conflicting ideologies then rife among intellectuals and bright young men. Dominated by the motif of loss; lost youth, lost love and a lost world, The Untouchable is an elegy, the lament of a disappointed romantic exploring the heart of loneliness.
