Simenon and evil

Off to the London Review Bookshop yet again, (by way of a Starbucks where the bacon and egg panini seemed to consist mostly of mushrooms) to see John Banville in action once more. This could get to feel like stalking. This time he and John Gray are talking about Georges Simenon, whose books I’ve found unreadable though I’ve enjoyed the Maigret dramatisations on the radio.

Flaws in the Matrix

Anyone who has driven along the dispiriting stretch of holiday homes overshadowed by the grim sea wall at Dymchurch will understand well enough why the fairies chose to flit from there. But as Rudyard Kipling wrote it, the fairies left because Britain changed from being Catholic believers to Protestant sceptics.

I’m only omniscient some of the time

A photograph never quite tells the whole story. I recognised John Banville the moment he walked into the London Review Bookshop, he was exactly like his photographs. Yet there was still something different: he was shorter and heavier than I had anticipated. His face seemed the result of high gravity, the flesh had descended loosely around cheek and jaw but was tight across the brow. He had that mournful, Clement Freud look, offset by an attractively self-deprecating sense of humour.

o thalassa

There are, to my mind, two forms of novel by John Banville. In the one he appropriates a real life as the skeleton around which to hang his story, as in the historical novels which first attracted me to his work, Kepler and Doctor Copernicus, or more recently Anthony Blunt in The Untouchable or Paul De Man in Shroud. In the second, what we might call his more attenuated works, he goes into the febrile mind of a man (usually called Max Morden, an appropriately death-fixated name, though I am never entirely sure if we are meant to believe they are all the same Max Morden) who is addicted to remembering, so that all, past and present, acquire an etiolated quality. I enjoy both types, but the latter, though slimmer, are usually much slower to read, and The Sea (Picador 2005) is definitely of the second sort.