John Banville

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I'm James Crawford and welcome to Take Four Books, the programme where an author tells us about their new novel and reveals three other works that inspired its creation. Today I'm delighted to be joined by the multi-award winning Irish author and short story writer John Banville. Nominated three times for the Booker Prize, including winning the award in 2005 with his novel The Sea, John has written over 30 books with a third of them bearing the crime fiction pen name of Benjamin Black.

John's latest novel, Venetian Vespers, takes place in the winter of 1899. A hack writer, Evelyn Dolman, marries Laura, the daughter of an American oil magnate, and the young couple travel to Venice on honeymoon, except that the trip is clouded by the death of Laura's father and the news that she has been written out of his will.

After just one day in Italy's floating city, Laura disappears, and the hapless Evelyn is drawn into a maze of intrigue and perhaps even madness. John's influences today include three classic Venetian tales. a psychological horror following a young couple grieving over the death of their child, an acerbic story of lies and literary theft, and a famous novella exploring beauty, sexuality and obsession. We'll talk about these influences as we go, but for now...

John Banville, coming to us down the line from Ireland. Welcome to Take Four Books. I'm very happy to be here. John, let's start with the basic setup for your new novel, Venetian Vespers. a young couple go on honeymoon. But from the very start, it's clear that all is not well in this marriage. Well, no, it's certainly not. Poor Evelyn, you know, he's an awful little twerp, but I've been some...

sympathy for him. He's so sure of himself and he's so, or pretended to be so sure of himself, actually he's quivering with insecurity, and he's married above himself, he's married above his station. And as we will find out at the end of the book, you know, it's all smoke and mirrors. But I always wanted to write a ghost story.

And this is sort of a ghost story. And I always wanted to write an erotic novel. And this is sort of an erotic novel. It's very much in the Henry James mode. Of course, that would probably put off thousands of... potential readers. Well, let's turn to the setting of your novel, John, The City of Venice. Given the story's set up, A Troubled Couple and Honeymoon, you could conceivably have set this novel...

Why did you choose Venice? Because I gather the city's not exactly your favourite place. Well, I love Venice in many ways. I love its beauty. I love it for its uniqueness. But I also find it... a deeply disturbing place. I was walking through one of those little laneways beside St Mark's Square on winter twilight with a friend. And a rat scuttled across and dived into a crevice where it left its tail out. It was a pink, naked, long, pale. And we both at once said, Phyllis!

There is a side of Venice that is that rat's tail, as well as the beautiful basilicas and the art and the food and the look of the lagoon. That rat is always lurking there. So it was the ideal place to write this kind of book, this kind of sinister book. I never feel quite safe in Venice, which is one of the things I like about it. But it's also a place that you've been visiting.

almost every year for years, isn't it? Because you were a judge for an Italian literary prize. Oh, yes. I mean, I've been going there probably since before your parents were born. When did you first go? Oh, I think in about 1962. which is quite a while ago. One of the nice things about Venice is that it's incapable of change. I mean, there are more tourists and those awful tourist boats come in and so on, but the city itself is essentially...

as it was when I knew it was centuries ago. It is a fascinating place, but for me, it's haunted. We'll keep talking about Venice throughout this episode, but let's just set up.

for our listeners, the mystery that drives your novel. So your narrator, Evelyn, goes out alone on his first night in Venice, meets a man who claims to have known him from school, along with his beautiful sister. And from this point on, things begin to unravel rather quickly. Yes. Again, I was asking my friend Neil Torn, I said, do you think, because he read the book, and I said, do you think...

would make a movie. So this is Neil Jordan, the film director? The film director, yeah. Neil read it and I said, Neil, do you think it would make a movie? And he said, well, nothing much happens in the middle of it. Which, again, I quite like because I like things. I like not much happening in the middle of a novel. Of course, there's a dynamo, which I hope will surprise people. But...

I think that Venice is a character in the book, and in a way Venice is almost a stronger character than the narrator. He's constantly being surprised by and betrayed by Venice. And this couple that he meets who are so plausible, his former school friend and his, as you say, his beautiful sister, you know. What more lovely chance encounter could you have in Venice over the evening? But any Wystopp reader and all readers of Wystopp will know this is not going to end well.

I mean, it feels like you're playing with power dynamics here, John. Evelyn is the narrator, so he has the power to tell the story. And he often thinks of the women in his account as powerless and passive, yet really is this novel about his own. powerlessness in the face of the strong women and the events that come to engulf him? Well, I know the question you're asking, but I'm always very, you know, a work of art is never about anything. It's the thing itself.

There has to be a story because Ian Forster said, you know, oh dear, yes, no one has to have a plot. And I like playing with plots, but the plot is always secondary. I always think of Raymond Chandler. Somebody challenged me about one of his plots. He said, I happen not to care who killed Professor Plum with a lead pipe in the wall. And I don't either. The plot is the least of it.

I remember I was doing one of my crime books and I finished it on Friday evening and I was in a place that I had to leave next day. And I thought, oh, I don't really like this ending. The next day, I had to leave at lunchtime. Next morning, I sat down and wrote 3,000 words. I wrote a new ending because I thought of a character further back in the book who could be the killer. And it works quite well. You know, so the plot...

The plot is enjoyment. The plot is play. But it's not essential. But crucially, we're being told the story by your protagonist, Evelyn Dolman, a writer with failed... literary aspirations, who describes himself as a grub street hat. Yes, he had high pretensions, I suppose. You know, he's so awful, it occurred to me when I finished the book, oh my God, people would think this is a self-portrait.

So you're telling us it's not then. I hope it's not. I hope it's not. Yeah, he is. He had high hopes and they failed. But he's quite pleased with himself. And we have to remember that all this is being told in retrospect. So what he doesn't seem to realise is that he's writing quite a good novel. And how long did it take you to find the voice of Evelyn? Because it's a very distinctive and a very particular style. Oh, goodness, that's a good question. I don't know. Straight away, I think.

You see, the problem with asking me about origins is that I can never remember the start of a book. For me, a book is always underway. Even though I can look at my notebooks and I can see the date that I started writing it, it would have been in my mind for much longer than that. Why I set it in 1900, in 1899, 1900, I'm really not quite sure.

But I suppose that seemed to me a good millenarian apocalyptic moment. You know, people always imagine at the end of the century, at the beginning of the year or something. Terrible is going to happen. Remember when everybody thought that our computers would all die? That's right. Y2K and the millennium bug. A lot of people made a lot of money out of that one. I mean, the reason I ask you about...

finding the voice is because it feels like tuning into Evelyn's sensibilities was absolutely central to the way that you wanted your story to unfold. Well, my head is full of voices when I was a little boy. I used to take my dog and walk through the fields, and I would tell myself stories aloud. And then later on, when I was an adolescent and I was starting to write, I would do interviews with myself.

And the interviewer's questions are all really, really very shallow. But my answer is absolutely brilliant. And I think writers... do have voices ringing in their heads all the time. If you look at Joyce in Ulysses, I mean, there are so many voices clashing in that book. And yet I always find them strange. I wrote years ago a really sequel to Henry James' The Portable Lady. And I was in Chicago at the time and I was living on campus in the University of Chicago.

And there was nothing to do except write all day. But in some curious way, I wasn't there. I would sometimes sit back and watch my hand writing. And the same is somewhat true of this book. I have the feeling that someone else wrote it. I'm not at all mystical. I wrote it, I know. But the tone strikes me as strange. I don't quite recognise it when I look back at it.

These are the mysteries of fiction. I mean, is there something equally strange then to write as a successful writer yourself, John, from the pain of a kind of failed writer? You know, Evelyn says that he set out to be a lord of language who'd be placed among the immortals. And yet already he's looking back on his career as he puts it like he's grieving for a marvelously talented brother who died too young.

Yes, but you see, I don't see myself as a successful writer. I see myself as somebody who's still trying to learn how to write. I have the awful feeling that I'll be found out any day now. Someone once asked Iris Murdoch, why did she write so many books? And she said, I always think the new one will exonerate me for all the ones who've gone before. I know exactly what she means.

Do you think that Venetian Vespers exonerates you for everything that's gone before? No, the next one will. You see, when you do a book, you know, you start off in, well... I start off in a state of blissful optimism. I think, goodness, I write three or four pages, maybe a couple of chapters. Goodness, this is much easier than I thought. And then...

When I'm halfway through, I'm wading through mud up to my armpits. And I want nothing, want to do nothing better than duck my head under the mud and drown myself. But I know I have to finish it. Having started, I have to finish it. And I have to go on doggedly. At the end, there's a moment of euphoria. It lasts about half an hour. And then a voice says in my head, just another bloody book.

And then another boy says, all right, all right. But the next one, the next one will be a masterpiece. It will ring through the ages. It will live forever. Now, rationally, I know. Because when I do the next one, it'll just be another bloody book. But, you know, left brain, right brain. But this does sound a little like your character, Evelyn Dolman. Yes, of course. I mean, look, they're all me.

I'm the only material I have. Other people I can only see from outside. I can't know the inside of their minds. I can't even be sure that they exist. I may have invented the whole thing. Bishop Barclay would tell me I'm on the right track there. So I'm the only one that I have any knowledge of.

however poor that knowledge is. So they're all invented out to be in the same way that all the people in our dreams are us. We think there are other people, but they're not. We're dreaming about ourselves all the time.

Well, both Venice and a man who's psychologically unravelling are also at the heart of your first pick of influences, John. famous short story from the 1970s that would go on to be adapted into an even more famous film written by one of Britain's most successful ever novelists, Daphne du Maurier. I suspect many listeners may have guessed already, but tell us what the short story is.

Well, it's called Don't Look Now. It's a very fine short story. I have great admiration for Daphne du Maurier. You know, highbrow critics look down on her very much, but I think she's a wonderful writer in many ways. And this is a very polished, very eerie story. Now, it would seem a betrayal of Daphne for me to say that I find Nick Rogge's movie, Don't Look Now.

because it is so frightening and it is so beautiful. I've seen it, I don't know, dozens of times. But I watched it again recently and I noticed how the... how he uses colour in it. There are two or three emblematic colours throughout. There's the bright red of the little girl's raincoat, there's the blue of his own raincoat, there are various other colours. It's beautifully done, beautifully designed, beautifully...

And it catches, for me, absolutely, the eeriness of Venice. Just give us the gist of the Daphne du Maurier story, which actually begins... with the words, don't look now. As this couple are having dinner at a restaurant in Venice. A couple are in Venice and they see a pair of women looking at them, strangely. And as it proceeds... One of the sisters, who is blind, but she has second sight, and she tells the wife that their daughter, who drowned recently, is not dead at all, that she's with them.

that she, even though she's blind, she can see the little girl sitting with him. And it goes on from there and it ends very badly indeed for the husband. Although in the short story, the daughter... dies of meningitis and it's the film where they change it to a drowning see i get mixed up Let's listen to a short clip of Daphne du Maurier talking to the BBC in 1971 about this tendency for her to be described simply and reductively as a romance novelist.

And you also have to picture Daphne in your mind here, at this point in her mid-60s, puffing away furiously on a cigarette throughout. It's one of the things, as I say, it's constantly said about it, that you are a romantic novelist, but this doesn't really cover the... the area of work i mean there's your short stories for instance which are all them romantic which are horrific well they are other yes that's another nasty side of me tell me about those what what brings those about

I'm thinking right back to the collection. Well, something triggers it off. It's generally if I've been away somewhere and seen some incident or something and I think, oh, this would make a story or character and it would make a story and then it begins to... to come to one's mind. You grew about it and so it started. I mean, as this clip suggests, John, Daphne du Maurier's skill and craft were often overlooked at the time. But for me, Don't Look Now is...

perfect showcase for the sophistication of her writing. It is. It's a very good place to start. I love listening to her. I love those lady novelists of the mid-20th century and their perms and their flowered frocks with murder in their heart. There were so many of them, you know? This is a very skillful story, very frightening, and it leaves a residue in the mind.

How much were you conscious of Don't Look Now, both the story and the film, as you were writing Venetian Vespers? When I'm writing the book, I'm not conscious of anything except what I'm writing. It always comes before and after. You know, you speak of influence, but one isn't influenced. When one is writing, one is simply writing. The process is taking place. But before I write, I probably thought a lot about that story.

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of Influences, John, another piece of Venice fiction by another very famous writer, the great American British novelist, Henry James. Although I confess this is a story of his that I wasn't. familiar with at all, a novella from 1888 called The Aspern Papers. Outline the basic premise for us, John. An unnamed narrator. goes to Venice because he wants to get hold of the papers of a very famous writer called Geoffrey Asperin. The papers are held and held onto very tightly by Asperin's mistress.

And the narrator, who is... He's as cunning and as sly as even a dolman thinks he is anyway. He... tries to worm his way into the affections of this elderly woman. And one of the ways he does it is that he gives her niece the idea that he's going to propose to her. And of course he doesn't. And again, it all ends very badly. But it's a beautiful story, beautiful invocations of Venice. James loved, loved Venice.

And how were you drawing on Henry James here in your own novel, Venetian Vespers? Tone of voice, I think. James was a master of the tone, striking the right tone. He worked at it very hard. I do as well. I'm not comparing myself to Henry James. Moment, wouldn't for a moment. But I love that. ponderous, slightly self-mocking tone that Henry James has when he's at his best. And when he's at his best, he's at his most mischievous. We think we're getting this rather crusty

Anglo-American gentleman, fussy and pernickety. But really, James, his sense of humour is very broad and very acute. It's just that it's well hidden. And frequently, the sense of humour is at the reader's expense. We don't realise that we're being tricked and we're being mocked. His most famous story, The Turn of the Screw, which he was rather ashamed of because it made a lot of money for him.

A young friend of his asked him, he said, how much evil should I read into this story? And Henry James said, as much as you can, dear boy, as much as you can. And again, James had a very acute, very highly developed sense of... Well, let's use the word evil. The Turn of the Screw is one of the most terrible stories ever written. A ghost story, obviously. A ghost story. A small boy and his sister in a big house in the country being looked after by her.

the governess, and the governess sees the ghost of the former footman and the former governess, her predecessor. She's the only one who sees them. And you have to read the story twice until you realise she's the only one this season. And James described the story as a trap for the unwary. You can read it at many levels.

It's a wonderful story. I recommend it. Do you see Venetian Vespers as a trap for the unwary? Oh, yes. Yes. I hope the reader won't know what's going on until the end. Well, moving on to your final.

pick of influences john this is one of the most famous even infamous novellas of the early 20th century, a story of a celebrated writer on holiday who becomes fatally obsessed with the beauty of a young boy. It also has one of those classic unbeatable titles. Death in Venice by the German author Thomas Mann. I mean, let's start with that title, John. It's incredibly simple, but also endlessly evocative. Yes, we know from the start there is going to be a death. We're not sure who is going to die.

I think this novella catches the, let's say, the degeneracy of Venice, that awful sense one has in Venice that the world is sinking. who is modelled on Thomas Mann himself. Mann, you know, is again supposedly humorous, but he's a wonderful way of mocking himself in his characters. So Aschenbach is very much...

You know, he's obviously won the Nobel Prize. He's obviously a great figure in the world. He takes himself very seriously indeed. And Venice is going to undo him. And I love the gradual way in which... Ashimba is undone. We know from the start that his health is not good. And we sort of intuit that Venice is going to kill him. And of course it does.

That's not spoiling. That's not spoiling. That's not spoiling it. But it's beautifully, beautifully wrought. And the way in which he little touches of, you know, Aschenbach buys strawberries from a street vendor. And they're rotten. You know, they look perfect, but they're past their sell-by date, way past their sell-by date. Little touches like that throughout the sickness.

underneath Venice. And then, of course, the plague arrives. And he, I mean, in Benjamin Britten's opera, based on death in Venice, the first act ends, marvellous, marvellous. Aschenbach has fallen in love with this beautiful boy and he sings, if all else were dead and only he and I were here.

Just Aschenbach and the boy in Venice. It's his dream. And it's as sick as you can possibly get. There's a particular... passage you picked out from death in venice john where venetian gondolas are described as having a peculiar blackness which is found elsewhere only in coffins It suggests silent criminal adventures in the rippling night. It suggests even more strongly death itself, the buyer and the mournful funeral, and the last silent journey.

Was it this kind of foreshadowing that you were channeling from death in Venice into your novel, Venetian Vespers? Yes, one of the strangest things in Venice is the strange quiet because there's no traffic, there's no cars.

Lots of tourists, of course, but there are places in Venice where the tourists don't go at all. My daughter was there a couple of weeks ago. She sent me a couple of little videos of completely empty streets. One street with nothing, a long street, nothing in it but a cat. And... Of course the Godzilla is one of the strangest conveyances in the world. Do you know, I've never been in one, and I won't go in one. Is that because of Thomas Mann? No, I just, well, partly I suppose.

I fear those things. They look as if they would take me off to the eye of the dead. I mean, across all the stories today, your own Venetian Vespers, Don't Look Now, the Aspirin Papers, Death in Venice. The city itself is clearly a distinct character. You know, it's not uncommon for novelists to treat cities as characters, but are there few cities better suited to the role than Venice? Well, there may be, but I can't think of them. I haven't been to them.

Unless it's Dublin. Of course, Dublin. Ulysses and James Joyce, yeah. The Dublin when I was young. No, there's a kind of hush in Venice that I only find... In one other place, which is in breakfast rooms in hotels. I never have breakfast in hotels when I'm travelling because it's exactly like a wake. Everybody's so quiet.

Everybody's so polite. All you hear is the clink of the cutlery and cups being lifted. I'm always convinced that there's a corpse in the next room that we don't have to go in and look at eventually.

I mean, some see Thomas Mann's Death in Venice as a comedy, albeit a very, very dark comedy. I mean, do you share that view? And does some of that dark comedy bleed into your own Venetian Vespers? Well, I hope so. I mean, I would hate to write a book that didn't have comedy at the heart of it. I mean, I would regard the novel as a comic form. That doesn't mean that it's funny ha-ha throughout, but...

It is essentially, I think, a comic form. I mean, if not for Thomas Mann taking the title Death in Venice, could Venetian Vespers have been called Death in Venice? I should have called it that. I should have called it Venice in Venice or Death in Venice. Well, I'm sorry to say that we've reached the end of the road or rather the end of the canal for today's programme. There's just time to say a huge thank you to my guest, John Banville.

And to remind you that John's new novel, Venetian Vespers, is out now, and his three influences were Don't Look Now by Daphne du Maurier from 1971. The Aspirin Papers by Henry James from 1888 and Death in Venice by Thomas Mann from 1912. I'm James Crawford and this has been Take Four Books for BBC Radio 4. As part of Limelight from BBC Radio 4, this is The Betrayed. The story of a family torn apart by a political extremism sweeping across Europe.

You see this guy in the red t-shirt? I'd allowed myself to believe that this moment would never come. Do you remember the looters outside the sports shop last year? The one guy who'd let a scar slip? I think that's him. My brother Frank, standing with a group of angry men. shouting abuse at the police. Is it the same guy? I now knew that Frank was an anti-immigrant activist. Listen to the whole series right now. First on BBC Sounds.

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