posted on 16 Oct 2015

The Blue Guitar by John Banville

I always find that reading a book whose main characters are almost all hateful a slightly alienating experience – and that was true for me in this new novel by John Banville. As is the case with all of his writing, the prose is carefully measured and impeccable. It’s simply impossible to read a book like this quickly because every word is weighted, considered and full of import – but that doesn’t mean that it’s always possible to grow into the book and become truly involved with the characters. I would have happily seen pretty much everyone in this book locked away and barred from public discourse after about fifty pages and it was only Banville’s qualities as a writer that kept me with it.

Not a lot happens in terms of plot – the story is a pretty straight-forward one of adultery and deception. Here, however, the poisonous love triangle turns out to be more of a poisonous love parallelogram. The novel is structured as a narrative from the point-of-view of Oliver Orme, a self-regarding, self-deceiving, hollowed-out and dried-up Irish artist who gives meaning to his life by stealing small objects from family, friends and casual acquaintances. The novel is almost a confession or reminiscence that looks back over the period covering Oliver’s ‘theft’ of his best friends wife, Polly, and the betrayal of his own wife, Gloria. Spooked by the implications of being unveiled as an adulterer and by the potential ramifications of the affair, Orme runs off to a childhood haunt to try and escape the consequences of his actions. He knows, however, that the escape is an illusion and that he will have to confront the two women who are now openly scornful of him as a human being.

However, nothing in the way Banville writes about relationships is quite as simple as that because both Polly and Gloria are also driven by circumstances that, in his self-obsession Orme has made himself blind to.

The novel deals with story telling, self justification and self-obsession – the essential qualities of art; hence Banville’s very self-conscious reference to the Wallace Stevens poem The Man With The Blue Guitar which itself deals with the nature and essence of the artistic experience. Ultimately, Orme is so blinded by his own monocular view of the world, where everything has to be filtered through him, he is unable to see that everyone else is busily doing pretty much the same thing.

Orme is full of self-loathing, Polly of righteous indignation and judgement and Gloria is filled with a sort of passive hypocrisy. Humanity only ever seems to break through in this world when children become part of the landscape – Polly’s child Pip, Gloria and Orme’s dead daughter and Gloria’s unborn child, fathered by the cuckolded Marcus.

I found this book a hard thing to love but an easy thing to admire. Spending time in Orme’s head was not a pleasant experience on the whole but it wasn’t meant to be (or at least I hope it wasn’t meant to be!). The effect was claustrophobic and suffocating and there was very little relief to be got from any of the other characters who, seen through Orme’s perverse world view, are little monsters in their own right.

There was some talk this year of Banville being an outside contender for the Nobel Prize for literature and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if his name doesn’t edge further up the favourites list in coming years.

 

Terry Potter

October 2015