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| John Banville Illustration by Charles Burns |
October 1st, 2003
An Interview with John Banville
There is a long-dead painter who pops up in more than a few of John Banville’s thirteen books, a Nabokovian wink of a character whose name, Jean Vaublin, is roughly anagrammatic with the author’s own, and whose work inspires Banville’s cast of unfortunates to frequent reverie and occasional murder. “He is the master of darkness, as others are of light,” Banville wrote of Vaublin in 1993’s Ghosts. “Even his brightest sunlight seems shadowed, tinged with umber from these thick trees, this ochred ground, these unfathomable spaces leading into night.” It’s hard not to read this as jokey self-portraiture, so apt a description is it of the gloomful world of Banville’s novels, with their less-than-heroically doomed protagonists wriggling desperately about for a glimpse at something that might resemble rest. They sometimes catch it for a moment or two, but more usually the only light to be found is the stuff gleaming through the wit and polish of Banville’s nearly perfect prose. That’s plenty light enough.
