{"id":42359,"date":"2025-09-28T04:59:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-28T04:59:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/42359\/"},"modified":"2025-09-28T04:59:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-28T04:59:08","slug":"you-cannot-censor-me-they-would-try-it-now-with-all-this-wokeist-nonsense-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/42359\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018You cannot censor me. They would try it now with all this wokeist nonsense\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like a gondolier on the Canale Grande, John Banville<\/a> seems right at home in Venice, the setting for his new novel, although, like his odious protagonist Evelyn Dolman, he has a love-hate relationship with La Serenissima, \u201cthat pestilential city squatting in the mudflats of its befouled lagoon\u201d. <\/p>\n

\u201cI hate the place,\u201d says the author, ever the provocateur. He visits every year because he is on the jury of the Nonino literary prize, in Friuli, and drops by to renew hostilities. \u201cIt smells, it\u2019s crawled over by tourists like an anthill and Venetians are impossibly avaricious. I was walking down one of those alleyways with a friend at twilight, and a rat ran across and sank down a drain but left its big, pink, naked tail out. We both said: Venice! <\/p>\n

\u201cOf course, it\u2019s charming. I understand the beauty and uniqueness of the place. It\u2019s an extraordinary city, like nowhere else in the world, and I\u2019ve had some wonderful times there, but I find it a very sinister place.\u201d He had an eerie experience in a Venetian club only to discover that Giordano Bruno, a philosopher burned at the stake in Rome for heresy, who features in his fiction, had sheltered there for months. <\/p>\n

\u201cVenice has this darkness that the Dublin of my imagination from the 1950s had,\u201d which inspired the Quirke & Stafford series under his pen name Benjamin Black. \u201cI do love it. I have a great fondness for the grotesque. I love grotesque conjunctions. I love talking to people who hate me and being really nice to them.\u201d <\/p>\n

Deception and mask-wearing are at the dark heart of Venetian Vespers \u2013 \u201cOscar Wilde said, give a man a mask and he\u2019ll tell you the truth\u201d \u2013 which is published next week, just over two months ahead of Banville\u2019s 80th birthday, but it feels so wickedly entertaining that the author must have had fun writing it, too. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t keep doing it if there weren\u2019t rewards,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s hard work, but anything easy is not worth doing. I enjoyed doing this book, though.\u201d <\/p>\n

It is 1899, and Dolman, an arrogant English hack writer, is honeymooning with his bride, Laura Rensselaer, estranged daughter of an American millionaire. Exhausted by travel, feverish, an impotently mute monoglot abroad, he falls in with twins he meets on his first night in a bar, the louche Freddie, who claims to have been at school with him, and the enchanting Cesca. After a shocking incident, his world turns upside-down. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s a ripping yarn filled with dark desire, melodrama and suspense, blackguards and women wronged, suspicious deaths and chance encounters, scheming and mystery, an arch entertainment elevated by a master stylist\u2019s elegant prose \u2013 gondolas are described as sinister craft, \u201crearing and plunging their haughty, gilded prows, like so many glossy-flanked racehorses crowding at the starting-rope\u201d. <\/p>\n

Venetian Vespers takes its name from the piece of music by Monteverdi that is playing in St Mark\u2019s when Dolman is accosted there by a prostitute. \u201cIt\u2019s a beautiful piece of music, but that\u2019s a very eerie place. It doesn\u2019t look like anything in the western world. It\u2019s a Byzantine cathedral. The floors are uneven. I don\u2019t see it as Christian, I see it as a pagan temple. It scares me.\u201d Was he ever accosted? \u201cIn St Mark\u2019s Basilica? Are you joking? Happy thought.\u201d <\/p>\n

The book has an erotic charge, a sense of obsession. \u201cI remember obsession, years ago. I have always wanted to write a ghost story. I have always wanted to write an erotic novel, and in this I almost get there. It\u2019s a bit of both. <\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to write an erotic novel because I think Story of O, by Pauline R\u00e9age, is a masterly book. Certainly when you read it a second time you realise it\u2019s not about sex at all, it\u2019s about power. O, the woman who is being abused, is the one with power. That fascinated me. And this is in a way a book about power. Dolman thinks he has power, but he is at the mercy of these people.\u201d <\/p>\n

This fascination is present too in Banville\u2019s Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir<\/a>, in which he recalls the girls of his youth and the prostitutes who plied their trade near his home \u2013 \u201coh, well-named Mount Street\u201d. Likewise, his soft spot for a canal, Dublin\u2019s though, not Venice\u2019s \u2013 \u201cthat stretch of placid water, rustling reeds and dark-umber towpath from Baggot Street down to Lower Mount Street is the loveliest aquascape I know of, trumping even that other Canale Grande, the one with the warbling gondoliers.\u201d <\/p>\n

[\u00a0John Banville: \u2018I expected to be dead, or at least gaga, by now\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Venice, though, is a city rich in cultural resonances. Vespers \u201cis very much influenced by Thomas Mann\u2019s Death in Venice and Don\u2019t Look Now, which I saw again recently. It\u2019s a masterpiece. [Daphne du Maurier\u2019s] story is not terribly good, but Nicholas Roeg\u2019s film is wonderful, the way he uses colour.\u201d When he first saw it, the film was significantly shorter, courtesy of the Irish censor, but Banville thought it was better without the sex scenes. \u201cI never believe actors doing sex, and Julie Christie looks like a boy.\u201d <\/p>\n

The epigraph is from The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, whose The Aspern Papers is also set in Venice. Is this novel an homage? <\/p>\n

\u201cOh, I never do homages to anyone except myself,\u201d he says with a chuckle. Surely Mrs Osmond, though, is his bow to Henry James. He concedes the point. \u201cI thought doing a sequel to The Portrait of a Lady would be like a jackal feeding on the body of a lion, but then I thought, what the hell. I must have thought I needed a new direction.\u201d <\/p>\n

He wrote it while living on campus in Chicago. \u201cThere wasn\u2019t even a bar. I did nothing but write. It was like an out-of-body experience. I would lean back and look at my hand moving. I felt I could go for a cup of coffee and come back and have another page written. I would use words that I didn\u2019t know the meaning of\u201d \u2013 a common sensation for his many readers, I suspect \u2013 \u201cthe ebullient cauldron. I didn\u2019t know ebullient meant boiling, until I looked it up. Where did that come from?\u201d <\/p>\n

A huge number get my writing. Many don\u2019t, but if you appealed to everyone you would be a mere bestselling author<\/p>\n

Perhaps from another language, I suggest, but he admits only to \u201ca bit of German, some French and a smattering of English\u201d. His versions of Kleist plays, he says, were really reworkings of existing translations. \u201cThe glory of English is that it is such an impure, ambiguous language. One of my characters is called Cleave, which can mean its complete opposite. I love that.\u201d <\/p>\n

Banville\u2019s fiction is peppered with words, such as contemnor, which the humble reader must look up. What does it mean, I ask. \u201cI can\u2019t remember,\u201d he says. However, \u201cI found a wonderful word the other day, a new one on me, invaginate. It doesn\u2019t mean what you think it means. It simply means to form a sheath.\u201d Where did he find it, dare I ask? \u201cIn the dictionary.\u201d He leafs through them? \u201cOf course. The dictionary is one of the great inventions of humankind.\u201d <\/p>\n

Dolman declares, \u201cI set out to be a lord of language who in time would be placed among the immortals.\u201d Is he channelling Banville? \u201cWell yes, but then there is a second half of it, too, where he becomes a hack.\u201d Is that him too? \u201cOf course, part of me is. I love writing reviews. When you\u2019ve written it, it\u2019s gone, whereas a book is like a reserved sin, one you have to go to a bishop to get absolution for. <\/p>\n

\u201cPerfection is an idea. Humans are imperfect, so every work of art is a failure. [John] McGahern<\/a> used to say: there\u2019s verse and there\u2019s prose and then there\u2019s poetry, and poetry can happen in either and it happens more often in prose.\u201d <\/p>\n

His books are often spin-offs from the original idea, he has said, satellites sent into orbit while the mother ship is jettisoned. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou never write the book that you think you\u2019ll write. Inevitably it changes along the way,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen I was in my 20s it would take me three to five years to write a book. By the time I finished it I was a different person to the one who started it, and even still to some extent that is true, although I am now an ancient of days. <\/p>\n

\u201cDoctor Copernicus [about the Polish scientist] started out as a novel about the Norman invasion of Ireland. The Newton Letter came closest to achieving what I set out to achieve, but it\u2019s only about 80 pages. All novels should be about 80 pages. Why people expect them to be about 240 pages I don\u2019t know.\u201d Venetian Vespers is 316 pages. <\/p>\n

\"HighHigh bar: John Banville at Mulligans pub in Dublin. Photograph: Bryan O\u2019Brien <\/p>\n

Banville started out writing short stories but wouldn\u2019t be able to write one now. <\/p>\n

\u201cI need the breadth of a novel. It starts out like a doddle, but then six months later I am wading through mud up to my armpits, ready to cut my throat. I have to finish this damn thing and it can take years, and when I finish it I think it\u2019s just another damn book. Iris Murdoch was once asked why she wrote so many books. She said, I always hope the next one will exonerate me for the ones that went before. That\u2019s how I feel as well.\u201d <\/p>\n

I wonder if the stakes were lower with this one, akin to one of what Graham Greene called his entertainments. \u201cHis novels are far funnier than his entertainments, unintentionally so,\u201d says Banville waspishly. \u201cHe treated me very badly with that GPA prize back in 1989. He tried to take it away from me. Tony Ryan very generously gave two prizes.\u201d Banville created an unflattering caricature based on Greene in The Untouchable<\/a>, from 1997. \u201cI had my revenge.\u201d Was he still alive? \u201cNo, he was dead unfortunately.\u201d <\/p>\n

[\u00a0John Banville: \u2018I\u2019m as baffled by the world now as I was when I was five\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

As well as signalling the Jamesian connection to Venice, the epigraph captures his protagonist Evelyn Dolman\u2019s predicament. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t know what he is doing, he thinks he knows everything, but he\u2019s a complete idiot.\u201d An innocent abroad, except he is far from innocent. \u201cHe is a despicable little twerp who deserves everything he gets. He\u2019s called Dolman\u201d \u2013 doll man \u2013 \u201cyou know, and he has an androgynous name. <\/p>\n

\u201cA book-editor friend likened Dolman to Victor Maskell in The Untouchable and said, \u2018You\u2019re really good at conjuring horrible men.\u2019 I said, \u2018Why wouldn\u2019t I be?\u2019\u201d The implication being that he is horrible too? \u201cI think all human beings are horrible,\u201d says Banville. <\/p>\n

Dolman is a dupe but also behaves abominably. Did Banville feel he had to tread carefully writing certain scenes? \u201cIf I were to tread carefully I would be lying,\u201d he replies. \u201cGranta published an extract from The Untouchable. In the first paragraph Victor Maskell is almost run down by a bus, which he says was being \u2018driven by a grinning blackamoor\u2019. The proofs had been changed. I said, the point is you cannot censor me. They would try it now with all this wokeist nonsense. Thank God it\u2019s coming to an end. <\/p>\n

\u201cIn The Untouchable there is anti-Semitism throughout. I\u2019m a philo-Semite. I still defend the Israelis. I was shaped by the death camps. My view of the savagery of human beings was shaped by my childhood memories of what was coming out of Germany. I once tripped on blue twine that was used to bind bundles of The Irish Times. Six people helped me up. I remember thinking in different circumstances these same people would be pushing me into a cattle truck. <\/p>\n

\u201cI think all right-thinking people have a dark view of human beings. We are not a very nice species. All this stuff about Gaza<\/a>, which is terrible, of course, but nobody gave a damn when Assad was killing 350,000 of his own people. No one cared about Rwanda. It\u2019s nascent anti-Semitism. Someone sent me a statement. I wrote back saying I will not sign this, there is no mention of Hamas. Of course, they gave Netanyahu and his horrible gang the excuse to commit atrocities. But they started it.\u201d <\/p>\n

There are two one-sided takes to every story. The conflict did not start on October 7th, 2023, I say, but the author diverts to an anecdote about the Jewish literary editor Louis Marcus. \u201cWhen he was a little boy in Cork in 1945 or 1946, there was a knock at the door one Easter. A huge priest was standing there who said, \u2018I\u2019m here for the dues.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

Banville spent many years as a subeditor on the Irish Press and The Irish Times. This had no bearing on his writing, he says, except perhaps a certain economy of language. Working night shifts did mean, however, that he wrote in the morning and afternoon. \u201cI\u2019ve always been a creature of the night. Tim Pat Coogan\u201d \u2013 a former editor of the Press \u2013 \u201chated subs. He defined us as \u2018people who change other people\u2019s words and go home in the dark\u2019. I loved subbing.\u201d <\/p>\n

He also loved being literary editor of The Irish Times. \u201cI loved that job; 10 marvellous years. My iron rule was, when you send out a book for review, when the review comes in, you have to accept it. I\u2019m sure there were writers who were annoyed [by a bad review]. But literature, art, book reviewing, these are areas of truth.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn a world that has given up the notion of truth having any value, this is going to be one area that will help us through. You can\u2019t make untruthful art. If you do it is not art, it\u2019s kitsch. An artist may be a total liar in life, like myself, but when you sit down to write, I can\u2019t lie.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was doing Copernicus, halfway through I realised historians will shout at me about this. A friend said, \u2018Don\u2019t be mesmerised by fact. Fact is not truth. What you are doing is truth.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

[\u00a0John Banville: \u2018I have not been a good father. No writer is\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

He was desperate to win the Booker Prize in 1989, when he was shortlisted for The Book of Evidence, not for the validation but because if he had won he could have left journalism to write full time. <\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t realise the Booker only lasts for a year and then you\u2019re a nobody again. If you were to regard the prize as some judgment of your work, you\u2019d be in trouble. As Roddy Doyle said when he won, if it had been five different judges someone else would have won \u2013 and it\u2019s true: it\u2019s a lottery. I came across a wonderful saying by Philip Larkin the other day: \u2018I don\u2019t think I write particularly well, just better than everyone else.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

He chuckles. Would he go so far? \u201cOf course. God, I\u2019ll get into such trouble for this. But I have\u202flots of friends with a sense of humour. Everything I write is second- or third-rate, by my standards, but my standards are impossibly high.\u201d <\/p>\n

He doesn\u2019t get edited, he says, then corrects himself. \u201cThe crime books get edited, because I fall asleep now and then. One editor said to me, \u2018Do you realise you\u2019ve actually demoted Strafford from one book to the next?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

He recalls finishing The Lock-Up at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, the artists\u2019 retreat in Annaghmakerrig, in Co Monaghan, on a Friday night but felt it was a bit banal. He suddenly realised another character could be the killer, so on Saturday morning he wrote another 3,000 words, a new ending. \u201cThat\u2019s the essence of that kind of writing: it has to be spontaneous.\u201d <\/p>\n

He was in a self-catering chalet and so avoided the evening meals with other writers. Hell is other writers, I suggest, paraphrasing Sartre, and he laughs but later lists several writer friends. <\/p>\n

\u201cMcGahern told me, the only reason we get on is we are so unalike. He was wonderful company. In the old days my wife and I used to visit him in the house above the lake. We used to drink so much, laugh so much. He was one of the best storytellers.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"JohnJohn McGahern on his farm. Photograph courtesy of the John McGahern archive, University of Galway <\/p>\n

Is The Book of Evidence his best work? \u201cI can\u2019t be asked to judge my own work, because I bring all the baggage of the years of writing, all the mistakes, all the failures, compromises, so I can\u2019t read them with an innocent eye.\u201d <\/p>\n

I quote the wonderful lapidary line from his Booker Prize-winning The Sea, from 2005, which seems to capture a recurring theme in his work: \u201cThe past beats inside me like a second heart.\u201d Banville says, \u201cIt\u2019s strange. Everyone remembers that line. I didn\u2019t think it was special, but everyone remembers it. There are lots of others. <\/p>\n

\u201cIn The Infinities there is a line where the god Hermes speaks, complaining that the gods are being coerced by humans: \u2018Fine\u202fgods we are that we must muster to a mortal must.\u2019 When I wrote it I thought, My poor translators. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere are few things more pleasurable than writing a well-made sentence. That\u2019s a great privilege. Our greatest invention as a species is the sentence. This is what made us civilised. And I\u2019ve spent my life working with this marvellous invention. What a privileged life. I know I write beautiful sentences, but they are to other people, not to me. It would be fatal if I loved my own work.\u201d <\/p>\n

[\u00a0John Banville: It \u2018makes me physically ill\u2019 to read my own workOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Did he take satisfaction in seeing Dolman\u2019s arrogance, typical of the Englishman abroad, crushed? \u201cNo, I am one of those rare creatures: I have no trace of nationalism. I like Ireland because of the climate and the sense of humour. We are so adept at mocking ourselves. Even at our most serious we don\u2019t take ourselves seriously. I love that.\u201d <\/p>\n

He is disappointed that some don\u2019t recognise the humour in his work. \u201cThe good readers do.\u201d The connoisseurs? \u201cNo, I don\u2019t want connoisseurs. My wife was in M&S, and a woman at the checkout saw the credit card and asked if she was related to me. \u2018Tell him The Sea is the most beautiful thing I\u2019ve ever read.\u2019 <\/p>\n

\u201cThat to me is worth 500 rave reviews. They are the people I write for, not fellow writers, academics, critics or book reviewers. I write for the woman at the checkout in M&S. A huge number get it. Many don\u2019t, but if you appealed to everyone you would be a mere bestselling author.\u201d <\/p>\n

Unlike Dolman, Banville appreciates classical music and seeks to emulate it in his prose. \u201cIt\u2019s paramount. I\u2019ve always had huge admiration for Nabokov\u2019s prose, but I read an interview where he said he was tone deaf. I thought, That\u2019s what it is: there is no music in his prose, it\u2019s all pictorial, visual. <\/p>\n

\u201cI regard music as a kind of magic. It\u2019s extraordinary that these little black marks on a white page turn into this storm of sound. I listen to music all the time: Bach, Beethoven, Benjamin Britten. I don\u2019t like pop music. My partner, Patricia Quinn, plays the viol.\u201d <\/p>\n

He speaks his work aloud when he is revising. \u201cI used to have this strange Oxbridge-accented voice I would hear myself reading a sentence in. I said to myself, Where did that come from? Copernicus is music from start to finish. At the end of it is written DC. It could be Doctor Copernicus, but I meant it as da capo: start again. People imagine when they have read a book, they have read the book. No, start again. You would never listen to a piece of music and think, Oh, I now know that.\u201d <\/p>\n

There is a sense of playfulness at times in Venetian Vespers, highlighting the artifice of storytelling. \u201cArt is transcendent play,\u201d Banville says. \u201cI\u2019m playing. At least three times a week I\u2019ll look up from my desk and say, \u2018I\u2019m supposed to be a grown-up human being. What am I doing, telling these stories?\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

Like a play pen, I suggest. \u201cI\u2019ll steal that,\u201d he says. \u201cTS Eliot says inexperienced writers borrow, experienced writers steal. It\u2019s stolen.\u201d <\/p>\n

He is halfway through another Quirke crime caper; his autobiography, Out of True, is progressing slowly. Will it be a tell-all or a tell-some? \u201cIt\u2019s a novel,\u201d he says, laughing. \u201cI could never keep a diary. I have no interest in myself as a person to write about. I love my life, the people around me. It will be full of banalities. Life is banal; that is part of its glory.\u201d <\/p>\n

He used to write eight hours a day, but now, on the cusp of his ninth decade, he can\u2019t do more than three. \u201cThe writing life requires physical strength. When I started, houses didn\u2019t have central heating. Your legs would be frozen. But I write 24 hours a day, even when I am dreaming.\u201d <\/p>\n

A novel, he has said, is a vehicle to convey the weight and power of a dream. Venetian Vespers begins and ends with an image from Dolman\u2019s dream that turns out to be a premonition. <\/p>\n

Banville allies himself with Beckett and Kafka over Joyce. \u201cI\u2019m not a Joycean. I regard the world as a very strange place. I\u2019ve been alienated since I reached the age of reason, I\u2019ll die alienated, but there is a wonderful quote from the astronaut Jim Lovell. \u2018People often say: I hope to go to heaven when I die. In reality, you go to heaven when you\u2019re born.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cEarth is beautiful. It\u2019s terrible, too \u2013 but, my God, look at clouds. We ignore them only because we are used to them. I was on a flight to Oslo, flying above the fjords, but there were clouds above the plane reflected in the fjords. Pure magic.\u201d <\/p>\n

Venetian Vespers is published by Faber<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Like a gondolier on the Canale Grande, John Banville seems right at home in Venice, the setting for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42360,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[33779,412,146,85,46,33778,33777,33780,11652],"class_list":{"0":"post-42359","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-binyamin-netanyahu","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-israel-hamas-conflict","14":"tag-john-banville","15":"tag-john-mcgahern","16":"tag-venice"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42359\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}