John Banville, 76, is the author of 26 books, including seven crime novels under the name Benjamin Black. His new novel, The Singularities, which takes place in a parallel reality overseen by a Greek god, is a sequel to The Infinities (2009) and involves a cast of characters from his previous books, not least Freddie Montgomery, the murderer who narrated 1989’s The Book of Evidence. When Banville, born and raised in Wexford, won the Booker prize for The Sea in 2005, a year considered one of the strongest in the history of the award, he said it was “nice to see a work of art win”. Speaking to me over Zoom from his home in Howth, just outside Dublin, he explained that he was “just enjoying myself and trying to annoy people – and I succeeded”.
What led you to revisit your previous novels in The Singularities?
As the book went on I was more and more aware it was a summing up. I’m pretty sure it’ll be the last book of its kind that I’ll write. Practically all my novels are referred to in there; many writers I’ve loved over the years are [referenced] in there as well. It ends with the words “full stop” and I can’t see myself embarking on another project like it. I mean, it took me five or six years and I’m old now. I’ll keep writing my crime capers – they take four or five months – but I won’t do another book with this denseness and allusiveness, or elusiveness, I suppose.
What makes your non-crime novels harder to write?
One has lots of props with crime fiction: the crime itself, the characters, the motivations, the dialogue, the plot. These are things that don’t interest me in my non-crime books, all of which could probably be put together into one enormous volume – I suspect they’re really just the one book, which I’ve been trying to get right all these years. I’m trying to give a sense of what the surface of the world looks like, what it feels like, tastes like, smells like. I’m not interested in writing about things; I’m trying to write the thing itself. Each novel has a few insights or moments of musicality where I think: yeah, the project was worthwhile for this. But generally all I see are faults. Revisiting my books makes me almost physically sick; I hate it.
Yet in The Singularities you do just that.
Yes, but I didn’t read any of them! I remember when I was doing a sequel to one of my crime books, I had to go back to the first one and couldn’t bear it, until I hit on the idea of listening to it as an audiobook. Because I’m an insomniac, I’d listen late at night in the dark, this voice speaking to me. That allowed me to take an objective stance and that was why I killed off Benjamin Black. I thought: This book’s not too bad at all. Why am I hiding behind a pseudonym?
What attracts you to words such as “matutinal” and “haecceity”?
The English language is beautiful. It’s immensely rich and untidy with so many influences from other cultures, and I glory in it. People say to me that they have to go to the dictionary. Is that a great trouble? The dictionary is one of the most precious things you have in your house. You should be thanking me for the excuse to go to it. I say to them: “I bet when you went to look up whatever word, you came across four or five new ones. So you gained! I did you a favour!”
How has literary culture changed since you started out in the 1970s?
Old codgers always say this, but it seems there’s been a creeping retreat into infantilism. When I was middle-aged, you had a comparatively large group of people for whom a new novel by Iris Murdoch or a new book of poems by Robert Lowell was an event eagerly looked forward to. We don’t want difficult books now. A friend said to me: “You see supposedly grownup people on the train unashamedly reading Harry Potter books; they should be reading grownup books, not children’s books!” When I started reading as a little boy, of course I wanted an escape from the small town where I was living. But what I discovered was that the escape you get from art isn’t away from the world but into an infinitely wider one – into life.
How do you view the younger generation of Irish novelists?
When I was young I remember arguing with George Steiner about an essay in which he said old men don’t read fiction. Well, I’m an old man and I don’t read much fiction; whatever fiction gives you, I don’t seem to need it any more. Fiction writers in Ireland now seem just to be writing about their immediate lives and the lives of their friends. That wasn’t the point at all for my generation; we were interested in what people are, not what they do. In my non-crime books I don’t care who does what; I’m investigating the poetic possibilities of language and trying to address the question of being.
You know, someone said to me recently: “John, I suppose you’ll be writing your Covid novel?” I said: “I certainly will not, and I hope nobody else does either.” The art of fiction isn’t for commenting on events of the time. It may do that, but that’s not its object, which is to imagine the world; it isn’t meant to be a factual record. A friend asked me the other day: “In The Singularities there’s this guy who gets out of jail, but in your previous books was he not already out of jail?” I said: “It’s fiction! I can do what I like!”
What have you been reading lately?
The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club by Christopher de Hamel; a beautiful book about manuscripts. He’s a very serious scholar but he writes wonderfully lightly, with great immediacy.
What book first inspired you to write?
My sister gave me James Joyce’s Dubliners when I was about 13. Suddenly I discovered that fiction could be about the essence of life: it wasn’t a wild west yarn, it wasn’t a detective story, it wasn’t about English schoolboys getting up to japes. I wrote hideous imitations of its stories all through my adolescence. I think it’s Joyce’s best book: for a young man to write with such poise, clarity, elegance and wisdom is extraordinary. There’s a great anecdote of an old Dublin pal visiting him in Paris towards the end of his life and saying, you know Jimmy, I tried Ulysses and that Finnegans Wake thing, but your best book is Dubliners, and Joyce says: “I agree.” Whether that happened or not, I like it.
• The Singularities is published by Knopf (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
