John Banville on His Benjamin Black Novels

Ireland long ago: "an impossible time, a dark time"

"Looking back on Ireland is like looking back on the Middle Ages," says John Banville, about his new Benjamin Black novel, "Elegy for April" which is set in Ireland of the mid-1950s.

"It was like a Brueghel painting. Ireland then was a strange, controlled and narrow world," Banville says. "We all thought we were free, and that Eastern European countries were under the jackboot of atheist communism. But we were the prisoners of an ideology every bit as strong as that, the ideology of the church. The church ran things in this country." Banville, who was born in 1945, recalls less the specific incidents of his childhood during the 1950s than its overall atmosphere: "Those buried secrets. It was a very strange time, an impossible time."

"Elegy For April" is the latest in an acclaimed series of novels that Banville has written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black.

One of the lead characters in "Elegy for April" is Phoebe Griffin, daughter of the Dublin-based alcoholic pathologist Garret Quirke, who is the series protagonist. Phoebe takes it on herself to find her missing friend, enlisting her reluctant father's help, and uncovering along the way a variety of troubled families and disturbing revelations about them. In "Elegy for April" the author also probes the tenuous ties between Quirke, who only recently admitted he was Phoebe's father, and his strong-willed daughter.
"I find her absolutely fascinating," Banville says. "She's so damaged, and so dark, and yet she's so forward, so brave. One of the reasons I wanted to write about the 1950s was to write about women and the state of relations between men and women, and fathers and daughters, especially in Ireland."
The novel has other strong women characters beyond Phoebe, including an actress, Isabel, who has a great deal of self-possession.

"I suppose in a way, though I'm not conscious of it, that I may be making up for something in the past. John Banville has always been accused of treating women dreadfully," the author says. In the Benjamin Black novels, "Maybe I'm atoning for this."

Banville writes his Black novels at a faster clip than his more consciously literary works, though anyone who has read the Black novels knows that the author is a master setter of moods and spinner of words. And while Banville says "the last thing I want in crime fiction is beautiful writing," he can't seem to help himself from producing muscular, evocative prose under his pseudonym, as in this passage at the beginning of "Elegy for April:

"For days a February fog had been down and showed no sign of lifting. In the muffled silence the city seemed bewildered, like a man whose sight has suddenly failed."

"I write very fluently as Benjamin Black, which surprises me," Banville said. "I never quite know how it's done." Each book takes a matter of months, all told, to write. But Black is also John Banville, and he writes two different kinds of novels. "We can't make ourselves into two people. One simply writes as the same person, but at a different level," he says. What you get from Banville is deep concentration; from Black you get fluency and spontaneity."

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