Banville on Amis

In December, I used the occasion of Daniel Soar's extremely negative review of Martin Amis' new novel, House of Meetings, to write a little about how and why I've drifted away from Amis in recent years. On balance, Soar's review appears to be the exception to the rule. The new issue of The New York Review of Books features another positive review, this one from John Banville (just to be gratuitous, here again is his famous pan of Ian McEwan's Saturday, which I've linked to more than once). I still don't expect to read the novel any time soon, but Banville is one of my favorite writers, and his review is very interesting and has definitely increased the likelihood that I'll read it at all (link by way of Jenny Davidson). Banville's conclusion:

House of Meetings is a rich mixture, all the richer for being so determinedly compressed. In fewer than 250 taut but wonderfully allusive, powerful pages Amis has painted an impressively broad canvas, and achieved a telling depth of perspective. The first-person voice here possesses an authority that is new in Amis's work. It is as if in all of his books he has been preparing for this one. In his depiction of a nation stumbling, terrified and terrifying, through rivers of its own, self-spilt blood, he delivers a judgment upon a time—our time— the spectacle of which, if it had been but glimpsed by the great figures of the Enlightenment on whose reasonings and hopes the modern world is founded, would have struck them silent with horror. Stalin and Stalin's Russia have provided Martin Amis with a subject worthy of his vision of a world which, as Joseph de Maistre has it, is "nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be immolated without end, without restraint, without respite, until the consummation of the world, until the extinction of evil, until the death of death," and in which, in the cruelest of Wildean ironies, the victims of tyranny survive to become tyrants in their turn, destroying even those whom they love most dearly. It is a bleak vision, assuredly, yet as always in the case of a true work of art, our encounter with Amis's dystopia is ultimately invigorating.

The Sea, and 1000 Other Books

Ellis Sharp has gotten around to reading John Banville's Booker-winning novel, The Sea, and admits that he must agree with Tim Sterne that it "remains a listless, lifeless exercise in aesthetic pretension" and that "[t]hematically, the novel is tired and unoriginal". When Banville's novel won the Booker Prize, there was much ado in the British press about it about how it was a horribly snooty selection, proof that the Literary Establishment is out of touch with regular readers, or some such nonsense. But, comparing it to Ian McEwan's Saturday, Sharp observes that The Sea is basically plot-driven: "It lures the reader on to the end, to find out how everything resolved itself. And finally the pieces all click together, like a jigsaw. There is nothing, at the end, to furrow the reader’s brow. Both novels aspire to be serious literature but supply the sweet-tasting delights of a certain type of genre fiction."

I enjoy reading Banville's prose, and I enjoyed reading The Sea, at the surface level. However, it definitely felt slight in comparison to his other work, and the writing itself, unusually for him, I thought, was occasionally awkward. I've now read the six novels published immediately prior to The Sea, and I must conclude that it's by far the weakest of the bunch. I think Eclipse and the loose trilogy comprising The Book of Evidence, Ghosts, and Athena are all excellent novels (all "engaging the mind", too).

This is as good a reason as any to mention that ridiculous 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die business several others have noted. Both The Sea and Saturday are on it, which perhaps tells you all you need to know, but I'll bore you some more about it. Steve Mitchelmore expressed annoyance about the list because it resists "randomness; as if all one has to do is read the 1001 and you're done." He also noted its typical wrongheadness, where this book places over that one, etc, which is inevitable in any such large list. Of course, I agree with him about the random appeal of learning about books via blogs and the like, yet I like to look at lists; there's usually something interesting on them, something random, in its way, that I hadn't come across before. But this one is so huge it defies that kind of effect. And its particular wrongheadness is worth noting. It's almost as if the compilers couldn't be bothered to make decisions on what to include on their own list. Nearly half of it is taken up by books since 1960. It's actually kind of nice to see contemporary fiction get shown such regard, but this is pretty silly. And it's pretty heavily weighted towards British Commonwealth writers (generally Booker-eligible). I haven't read the vast majority of books on it, but I remain skeptical that many of them are truly "essential", that I simply MUST read them before I die. It's as if the compilers simply raked in a whole bunch of award-winning and/or generally well-reviewed novels and left it at that (and maybe they claim no different, and maybe the introduction to the book says just this). And yet they still managed to leave off Richard Powers and William H. Gass, just to name two very highly regarded writers. Meanwhile, there are ten (ten!) J.M. Coetzee books on the list, seven Philip Roth, eight Ian McEwan... Coetzee, Roth, and McEwan are all writers I have enjoyed, but their books that appear on the list are damn good indications that the criteria for what might constitute "essential" are rather lax, if not missing altogether. Once again: Roth has written some books I would call essential, but The Plot Against America and The Human Stain are not among them (Sabbath's Theater is). And Ian McEwan has written some very fine novels (I'm partial to Atonement, Enduring Love, and The Child In Time, though even among these three I don't know that all of them are quite essential), but Saturday and Amsterdam are bullshit. With Coetzee, it's like they couldn't decide at all, threw up their hands, and listed nearly his entire published works. Etc.

I find I've pretty run out of interest on this one. Glad I could share!

Brief notes on starting a Banville novel

John Banville is one of my favorite writers, and I've just started reading his novel, Shroud. He's one of the few authors that I felt like I discovered for myself--I picked up Eclipse in a bookshop, drawn to it, I guess, by the title, or the cover picture of a blindfolded man, I don't know. The front cover blurb comparing him to Nabokov certainly didn't hurt. I read the first page; liked what I saw; took it home. Upon reading the novel, I thoroughly enjoyed it. In short order I also read The Book of Evidence and The Untouchable (the latter of which I read under the influence of a great, sleepy fog, effectively dampening the book's effect; it deserves a re-read). In anticipation of the American publication of The Sea (anticipation stoked, in part, by enthusiasm from another admirer), I went back and re-read The Book of Evidence (converting my wife in the process; she enjoyed this book quite a bit--perhaps the only book blurbed by both Don Delillo and Ruth Rendell? Rendell is her favorite mystery writer) and acquired and read both Ghosts and Athena, its sort-of-sequels, both of which were excellent.

The beginning of Shroud finds us in similar territory as his other books: the unreliable narrator who tells us he is a liar; chewy, vivid language (as ever, I am impressed by his prose style); moving back and forth in the story's timeline. And common concerns recur: the problems of memory, of consciousness, of what constitutes the real. Similar images appear throughout the books; for example, there is often a body of water (or a sky) the color of lead, and there's the recurring idea of the real self struggling to get out, to spread its "sticky wings" as one novel has it, or as in Shroud, from p.27:

...what made me flinch, surely, was an over-consciousness of self, the sudden, ghastly awareness of being trapped inside this armature of flesh and bone like a pupa wedged in the hardened-over mastic of its cocoon. Immediately, again, came the demand: What self? What sticky imago did I imagine was within me, do I imagine is within me, even still, aching to burst forth and spread its gorgeous, eyed wings?