Banville’s distinctive voice dominates The Blue Guitar

The Blue Guitar extends John Banville’s ongoing inquiry into the nature of representation.

Author John Banville’s latest novel beats with a philosophical heart. Picture: Mark Calleja

Novelists live in fear of having only one story to tell. As a breed we are caught between two irreconcilable expectations: that every new book will deliver something fresh and surprising, and that this same book will remind the reader of the novels that came before. One wants a novel to be the same, but different. Repetition is commonly regarded as a sign of disorder: a compulsion to be worked through and banished from the psyche.

But if this applies to the novelist, and if the cure were successful, what would become of a writer’s style, of their theme, of their idiosyncratic and instinctive investigation into a pre-given world? These consistent elements are the things a reader, too, returns for, with each new book extending the private conversation between a reader and the writers they love.

John Banville’s new novel, The Blue Guitar, is the latest incarnation of a Banvillean universe. This is Banville’s 16th novel, and perhaps by this point a writer is entitled to claim ownership of an archetype. We have, again, the tortured, imprisoned man, fallen from grace and running from trauma; there is the drama of creative failure, mixed with the lure of an unwholesome ­affair. Then there is Banville’s taste for pensive, embellished prose, with signature words (‘‘lissom’’, ‘‘crapulous’’ ‘‘micturition’’), again hoarded by Banville’s narrator and brought out to decorate the story.

The narrator is Oliver Orme (or just Orme, as he prefers): a sulking, middle-aged man who waddles about on ‘‘furry little legs’’. Like many of Banville’s narrators, Orme is a bawdy self-deprecator, wallowing in his own failures. A disillusioned painter, he has taken to thieving. This new hobby has come about as a result of his inability to paint.

In more productive times, he painted things to get at their ‘‘essence’’, but the more he pursued this ambition, the more he came to see that ‘‘there was no such thing as the thing itself, only effects of things, the generative swirl of relation’’. Orme is crippled by this knowledge: how to capture relations without returning to the representation of objects? Abstraction is thought to be mere trickery, and so he takes to petty crime.

In both the act of painting and the act of stealing Orme has the chance to possess and ingest the world, ‘‘the pilfered object becomes not only mine, it becomes me’’. These stolen objects, like objects in a painting, undergo a transformation: unlike ordinary possessions that soon ‘‘lose their patina’’, thieved and painted items take on, once more, ‘‘the sheen of uniqueness’’.

Wives too, can be stolen, and at the centre of the book is an affair. In the fear of discovery, Orme escapes to his childhood home where he bunkers down and narrates his sad tale. Memories force their way back in, and the narrative shifts around, moving between childhood, the recent affair, and the formative loss of Orme’s infant daughter. Orme is married, although we know little about his wife, Gloria, and the woman he took up with, Polly, is also something of a mystery. For a man intent on capturing the relations between things, he seems oddly oblivious to the relations governing his own life. For the most part, Orme is too preoccupied with being Orme to pay much attention to other people. His wife accuses him of exactly this — ‘‘You never notice anything that’s not yourself’’ — and Orme spends much time moaning about his own fallen state:

What’s to become of me, of my dry, my desiccated heart? Why do I ask, you ask? Don’t you understand … that I don’t understand anything? See how I grope my way along, like a blind man in a house where all the lights are blazing.

As an artist, Orme was preoccupied by the appearance of surfaces and wished only to get beneath them, to bridge the gap between the domestic crust and the dramatic interior. Such a crossing might yet be made, if only he could get out of his own way. Instead, the novel skates about, while we wait for something to break or crack. Orme, too, craves revolution. Gloria describes him as being on ‘‘sabbatical from life’’, when what he really wants is to feel ‘‘vividly alive’’ and is afraid that the opportunity for such living has passed.

As with earlier Banville novels, in The Blue Guitar we encounter a voice more than we experience a story. It is a voice that is, by now, familiar, but one that retains its ambiguous status; we are often talked at by Orme, at other times we overhear him thinking. The aim is confession, and although the reader is addressed directly and expected to be a faithful companion, Orme’s real audience is himself as he tries to weather his interior storm.

While he waits for the bad weather to pass, he watches the world closely, and as a result the novel is full of masterly descriptions. Banville’s eye tends towards elements of water and light and the effect of this is often stunning: rain ‘‘swarmed and slithered on the windscreen like blown spit’’, while ‘‘a flock of small dark birds, struggling into the wind, seemed to be flying strenuously backwards against a sky of smudged pewter’’. It is this language for which one goes back to Banville. For this, and for the chance to accompany the author as he ponders the nature of artistic transformation — a theme present from the very opening, with the title of the novel borrowed from a Wallace Stevens poem, The Man with the Blue Guitar.

In this poem, a man is told “You have a blue guitar, / you do not play things as they are.” The guitarist replies, “Things as they are / are changed upon the blue guitar.” Stevens has long been noted as a touchstone for Banville. This book, like others, develops themes inherent to the poems: nothing is as it appears, imagination rules supreme, life is re-formed through the fictions we tell ourselves.

In many ways The Blue Guitar delivers formula Banville, and because of this it’s not a novel that delivers a surprise. It is a book, however, that extends Banville’s ongoing inquiry into the nature of representation and beats, throughout, with a philosophical heart.

Stephanie Bishop’s new novel is The Other Side of the World.

The Blue Guitar

By John Banville

Viking, 256pp, $32.95