Early Banville

How does a twenty-something writer turn out something like Banville’s Birchwood?  I just don’t get it.  It’s a level of raw talent that defies explanation.  The book takes place during the Great Famine, and the apocalyptic scenes remind me of Crace in The Pesthouse or The Harvest.  Banville tackles so many big issues here: the unreliable narrator, the nature of memory (bow to Proust), the meaning of family, the radical politics of the time.  But the writing, oh, the writing.

Banville declares his intent early on:

John Banville

“Listen, listen, if I know my world, which is doubtful, but if I do, I know it is chaotic, mean and vicious, with laws cast in the wrong moulds, a fair conception gone awry, in short an awful place, and yet, and yet a place capable of glory in those rare moments when a little light breaks forth, and something is not explained, not forgiven, but merely illuminated.”

A boy’s take on religious dogma:

“That day down in the crippled wood, while we sat like frogs by the fire with our ears buried in our collars, he told me about hell. It appears that if we follow the dictates of the nature god has given us, our reward will be to fry eternally in a lovingly prepared oven, whereas if we persist in denying the undeniable truth about ourselves we will be allowed to float for all time through an empty blue immensity, the adoration of the lord our only task. A most extraordinary concept, which we found screamingly funny, though we acknowledged the humour of it only by thoughtful sighs and gloomy silences, which is how children laugh at the vagaries of adults.”

A young man’s love affair draws to a close:

“Out idyll was ending. The strange fact is that we were not drawing apart, on the contrary, we were beginning to get to know one another. We had each dreamed a lover for ourselves, but dreams are brittle things, and piggish reality tramples them to bits under its trotters.”

A fever:

“The room seemed thronged until the early hours with unbearable busy nurses. Mama would lean over me in the bilious yellow lamplight, trumpeting incoherently, and then another, Aunt Martha perhaps, would fling open the door, step up to the bed and thrust her rubbery face down on mine. There was a troubling dichotomy between their frenetic activity and their voices, for all sound had slowed down to an underwater pace, an intermittent booming in my ears broken into regular beats whose rhythm, I suspect, corresponded to the fretful flutter of my pulse. I swung vertiginously in and out of sleep, and at last subsided into something which was not sleep, but rather a comatose sentry duty over my quietly pulsating body.”

It may be that the youthful Banville has crammed too much into a short novel.  It’s a gothic thriller complete with perverted family secrets fully revealed only at the end, political commentary, a travelling circus, social and political commentary, and some truly odd (sometimes mad) characters. I’m not sure why this jumble doesn’t bother me more, but it doesn’t.  It’s probably just the beauty of the writing itself, and the sentence-to-sentence coherence that holds it all together. There’s Banville in every paragraph, and that’s enough for me.