John Banville Meet the Author


John Banville

Similar Content

Browse content similar to John Banville. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!

Transcript


LineFromTo

Now it's time for Meet the Author with Jim Naughtie.

:00:00.:00:00.

John Banville developed as a young writer in Dublin imbibing

:00:00.:00:09.

the literary folklore of the streets.

:00:10.:00:11.

Now, after decades as a celebrated novelist,

:00:12.:00:12.

winner of the Booker Prize, winner of the Franz Kafka Prize,

:00:13.:00:16.

he's decided to set down some of his early memories,

:00:17.:00:19.

the days when he was learning his trade in a town where there seems

:00:20.:00:23.

to be a poet living on everything street and someone in every pub

:00:24.:00:28.

who's capable of making a poetic utterance, perhaps

:00:29.:00:30.

Time Pieces is a memoir that is also a walk round one

:00:31.:00:37.

You raise a question quite early in this memoir that seems

:00:38.:01:01.

to have haunted you really through your writing life -

:01:02.:01:04.

Well, it probably is unanswerable, but it is a question that

:01:05.:01:12.

I mean, I think as a three-year-old I was nostalgic for when I was two.

:01:13.:01:18.

We think we live in the present, but the present doesn't exist.

:01:19.:01:24.

The future is, you know, a mere plausibility.

:01:25.:01:35.

The past is, it accumulates, it supports us.

:01:36.:01:40.

Everything that we've done is deposited there and we only

:01:41.:01:44.

remember some of it, we forget most of it.

:01:45.:01:47.

If you think that our lives really are made up of fragments

:01:48.:01:54.

of the past, that's how we create the people we are, you point out,

:01:55.:01:57.

in your very touching memories of life as a young man in Dublin,

:01:58.:02:01.

Simple things like the coal or wood fires in your aunt's apartment,

:02:02.:02:09.

which happened, but you can't remember how the wood got

:02:10.:02:12.

there or where it went or where the ashes went.

:02:13.:02:16.

I mean, Freud says that what is remarkable is not

:02:17.:02:24.

that we remember, but that we forget and it is extraordinary the things

:02:25.:02:27.

that fall out of our minds, out of our memory and

:02:28.:02:29.

fall completely, not leaving a trace behind.

:02:30.:02:31.

Why does whatever happens to the past, when it becomes

:02:32.:02:38.

the past, why does it confer this luminous quality on experience.

:02:39.:02:42.

It's easy to read this memoir and realise the affect

:02:43.:02:44.

A young boy from Wexford, coming to the big city,

:02:45.:02:50.

which gleamed and glittered and had all kinds of magical qualities

:02:51.:02:53.

which people from other backgrounds and in other places will recognise,

:02:54.:02:56.

that thrill of recognition, of a place of excitement.

:02:57.:03:02.

Now, it's clear why you should remember that and cherish it.

:03:03.:03:04.

For instance, we didn't have buses in Wexford town, where I was born,

:03:05.:03:13.

so the smell of diesel fuels, even still sometimes when I catch

:03:14.:03:18.

it, it gives me this sense of romance, adventure and...

:03:19.:03:20.

The noise of trains or buses, that kind of thing?

:03:21.:03:23.

It's very strange because Dublin was a grim little city,

:03:24.:03:28.

We're talking about the 50s when things were pretty

:03:29.:03:37.

Stayed is a very nice word to use, it was a bleak time.

:03:38.:03:42.

It was a poverty stricken time, in terms of, not just in terms

:03:43.:03:45.

of money, but in terms of spiritual lives.

:03:46.:03:48.

The Catholic Church had absolute power in the country.

:03:49.:03:55.

Tell me, one of the alluring aspects of the book is the sense

:03:56.:03:59.

of your own opening out as a young man, not just as a writer-to-be,

:04:00.:04:03.

but as someone having the experiences, which we can

:04:04.:04:05.

all remember, being in the back row of the cinema, seeing

:04:06.:04:08.

The great thing for you, it was happening in a village that

:04:09.:04:22.

almost had a life that was unbelievable rich,

:04:23.:04:24.

I mean in terms of its literary culture, the characters,

:04:25.:04:29.

It was, as I said a spiritually poverty stricken time,

:04:30.:04:34.

there was great gaiety, I suppose, in the same way

:04:35.:04:39.

that there was great gaiety, I'm sure, in Budapest,

:04:40.:04:48.

Prague and Moscow in those terrible years.

:04:49.:04:50.

Gaiety against, you know, the people who were

:04:51.:04:53.

I sort of missed it, I fell between generations.

:04:54.:04:59.

The generation of Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan and so on,

:05:00.:05:03.

that had largely died out by the time I...

:05:04.:05:05.

I mean it was going on when I was there,

:05:06.:05:07.

Also, I was disdained from it because I wanted to be a great

:05:08.:05:14.

European novelist of ideas and these were mere local artists.

:05:15.:05:18.

Well, trying to be a great European novelist of ideas in Dublin brings

:05:19.:05:21.

you up against a huge problem in the persons

:05:22.:05:28.

of Joyce and Yeats and, I suppose, going right

:05:29.:05:30.

What is it about the literary tradition of Dublin that has allowed

:05:31.:05:34.

it to reproduce so regularly and so spectacularly

:05:35.:05:36.

Well, I think it's the tension between the English language,

:05:37.:05:46.

which was imposed on Ireland in the 19th Century,

:05:47.:05:48.

tension between that and, if you like, the deep grammar

:05:49.:05:50.

that is built into us in the Irish language.

:05:51.:05:52.

Because the Irish language and the English language

:05:53.:05:54.

The Irish language is very oblique, very poetic.

:05:55.:05:59.

It's almost a motivation rather than communication.

:06:00.:06:04.

Whereas basic English, that we gained in the 19th Century,

:06:05.:06:06.

was rather like the Latin of the Roman Empire.

:06:07.:06:09.

The tension between those two produced a new literary language.

:06:10.:06:13.

It's interesting that you elude to poetic, almost a kind of bardic

:06:14.:06:17.

culture there which throbs away underneath and brings something

:06:18.:06:21.

completely different to the experience of

:06:22.:06:22.

Do you think that's really, in the end, been the engine

:06:23.:06:30.

of so much literary creativity in Ireland?

:06:31.:06:32.

We love telling the story of ourselves, we love telling it

:06:33.:06:40.

I always feel that you can get away with anything in Ireland

:06:41.:06:48.

You know, politicians and churchmen, we don't so much care

:06:49.:07:00.

about the egregious outrages that they committed,

:07:01.:07:02.

what we want to hear is how they're going to explain

:07:03.:07:04.

You talk a lot about human failure and the human

:07:05.:07:08.

It's often said of you that you don't like re-reading your books

:07:09.:07:12.

I'm sure there's a twinkle in your eye when you say

:07:13.:07:17.

I distrust any writer who says that he or she re-reads

:07:18.:07:28.

I couldn't, I just read it with embarrassment and horror

:07:29.:07:31.

When you start again, do you always think -

:07:32.:07:35.

it's going to be different this time?

:07:36.:07:37.

One part of me thinks - this is going to be

:07:38.:07:41.

But you know you're telling yourself a lie?

:07:42.:07:45.

Oh, I know, but there you have it, we love telling ourselves lies.

:07:46.:07:48.

Which means, I have to ask you, what's next?

:07:49.:07:51.

You've written a memoir, what comes next?

:07:52.:07:54.

Ah, well, I'm writing the sequel to Henry James'

:07:55.:07:58.

Now, here is the young man who wanted to be a great

:07:59.:08:08.

European novelist of ideas and you've now decided,

:08:09.:08:09.

at a fairly ripe old age, not a very ripe, but ripish old age,

:08:10.:08:13.

after a very, very distinguished career as a novelist,

:08:14.:08:15.

you know, crime novels, literary novels, the works,

:08:16.:08:18.

to take on Henry James, do you do it with trepidation?

:08:19.:08:20.

I don't have to struggle with myself.

:08:21.:08:33.

Novel for novel, if you look at the masterpieces

:08:34.:08:42.

Equally, you know that, in the end, you'll be glad

:08:43.:08:45.

I suspect I will like this book because it won't be mine.

:08:46.:08:54.

James himself was going to write the sequel, but never got round to

:08:55.:08:59.

With that arrogance and foolhardiness

:09:00.:09:02.

Good evening, we will lose the chilly easterly wind into the

:09:03.:09:25.

weekend, but the weather charts looked distinctly

:09:26.:09:27.

Download Subtitles

SRT

ASS