When asked about his position in the world of letters, Nabokov said, “Jolly good view up here.” John Banville, a novelist whose magnificently honed prose has earned comparisons with the Russian master, seems to feel likewise about his own position in contemporary literature. Though surprised that his novel The Sea won the 2005 Booker Prize, Banville told us he was even more surprised that a couple of his previous books—The Book of Evidence and The Untouchable—were overlooked for the honor.
In some, such confidence would seem like arrogance, but Banville’s notions about his own work come from the other side of his writer’s life. Besides publishing fourteen novels, Banville has worked as a fervent book reviewer, including nearly a decade as literary editor of the Irish Times. It is through this lens that he views his work and for which he has encountered much recent controversy. Last year in the New York Review of Books, he wrote that Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday is “hinged together with the subtlety of a child’s erector set” and that “no immensity of labor will bring to successful birth a novel that was misconceived in the first place.” “Saturday,” Banville concluded, “is a dismayingly bad book.”
Born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945, Banville bypassed university for a job with Aer Lingus that enabled him to travel inexpensively around the world. He published his first work, Long Lankin, in 1970. Two novels, Nightspawn and Birchwood, quickly followed, as did the first awards. Banville then began work on a cycle of novels about scientists: Dr. Copernicus, Kepler, and The Newton Letter. Not long after, he started another trilogy—The Book of Evidence, Ghosts, and Athena—each centered around the character Freddie Montgomery, who, in the first novel, murders a cleaning woman after she interrupts his theft of a painting.
Banville, who has a reputation as one of the great stylists working in English, has also begun writing a series of crime novels, the first of which, Christine Falls, appeared under the pseudonym Benjamin Black earlier
this year. We interviewed Banville in Melbourne in June 2006.

Jennifer Levasseur & Kevin Rabalais:
Notions of art and the artist recur throughout your work, as well as in reviews you have written of other writers and in comments about your own writing. When you received the Booker Prize, you said, “It is good to see a work of art being recognized.” What makes a novel a work of art?

John Banville: In a work of art, the technique and the form are far more important than the content. Content, to a large extent, is merely an aspect of form for the artist.

JL/KR: Do you see yourself as less of a novelist than an artist?

JB: Whether I succeed or not is a different matter, but I set out to make works of art.

JL/KR: You’ve said that some bad novelists can still be artists.

JB: I think the perfect example is Dostoyevsky, who was a terrible novelist but a supreme artist. Insofar as one can judge, reading his work in English, he seems entirely chaotic and formless. Yet his vision was so extraordinary that he made that chaos and formlessness seem almost irrelevant. As Nabokov said, in Dostoyevsky people are always dropping into drama to talk about the great Russian soul. But the talk is always good, even if it’s completely unconvincing in its setting. Everybody in Dostoyevsky talks like Dostoyevsky.

JL/KR: How important is plot, then, if it’s not the essence of what you’re trying to do?

JB: It’s not important to me at all. But as E. M. Forster says in Aspects of the Novel, there must be a story; there must be a plot. The novel can’t function without it. Even the art novel has to measure up to the human scale. This is a reason that I think Finnegans Wake is a great disaster, but I would go to equal lengths to say it’s also a great work.