Rigor Artis
John Banville, The Blue Guitar
Viking, 256pp, £14.99, ISBN 9780241004326
reviewed by James Pulford
‘The past beats inside me like a second heart.’ So says Max Morden, the narrator of John Banville’s Booker-winning novel The Sea (2005), in an aside that could have been uttered by almost any of the soul-searching narrators Banville has created in the past 45 years. Banville has, after all, been writing the same kind of literary humanism for most of his career, and The Blue Guitar is certainly no departure. Like Max Morden before him (and other narrators, such as Alexander Cleave in Shroud, Eclipse and Ancient Light, Freddie Montgomery in The Book of Evidence, and Victor Maskell in The Untouchable), Oliver Orme, the narrator of The Blue Guitar, has his eye fixed firmly on the past. Once again we are in the hands of an ageing narrator who is under the spell of Art with a capital ‘A’ as he tries to make sense of his life and all the guilt, regret and anguish bundled up inside him.
‘Storm today, the elements in a great rage. Furious gusts of wind booming against the house, shivering its ancient timbers. Why does this kind of weather always make me think of childhood?’ At the novel’s opening, Orme has returned to the unidentified and unremarkable town of his childhood. He is a lapsed painter and a petty thief, embroiled in an affair with Polly, the wife of his friend Marcus. These are the events on which the story hangs, though story isn’t the right word here. There’s much less of interest in the events told than in their telling: Orme’s voice carries everything. It is a voice dogged by uncertainty and doubt, unsure it is truthfully expressing itself from word to word – or that truth even exists.
The anxiety Orme feels over whether or not he can express himself in words is complicated by the way he casts himself as both victim and perpetrator of language’s ambiguity. ‘How treacherous language is, more slippery even than paint,’ he says, soon after admitting ‘yes, these names, I know, I’m making up as I go along.’ It’s hard to determine the extent to which Orme is leading us down the garden path, a point hammered home by the way his inability to express himself is articulated with masterly precision. Orme’s frustration that he cannot adequately articulate himself in a way he finds truthful, or at least pleasing, takes a more dramatic turn when, on several occasions, he fractures the narrative by stopping mid-sentence. Since setting aside his brushes and palette, Orme has become dependent on the written word to make sense of the world around him, but the truth, he would have us believe, is forever eluding him.
The uncertainty surrounding the narrator’s sense of self is well-trodden ground in Banville, and Orme’s narrative is no different. When he confesses ‘there is no I – I’ve definitely said that before, and so have others,’ the ‘others’ could be Max Morden – who says ‘I never had a personality’ – Freddie Montgomery or Alexander Cleave. This connects with another familiar idea in Banville’s books, that the self is made up of many selves, all of them working against each other, each one clamouring to be heard. (No doubt Banville would be amused to see the first result of a Google search for ‘John Banville’ is the website for Benjamin Black, his crime writing alter-ego). As Orme goes over his life and the mistakes he has made, this idea of selfhood becomes a useful tool for justifying any wrong turns. If he finds he has acted in a particularly reprehensible way, he can attribute it to one of the many minions who inhabit his mind. The result is that Orme’s account appears to implicitly challenge the received wisdom that narrative is a tool for ordering and understanding events: the mixed motives and many voices show the futility of self-expression, even without the doubt lingering over whether language can ever hold truth.
Orme’s inability to order the events of his life is also partly due to his painterly eye, which looks at static scenes rather than sequences. He is limited further by an almost total inability to see beyond surfaces, a shortcoming he freely admits. The first mention of Gloria, Orme’s wife, is remarkable in its failure to acknowledge any kind of interiority: ‘I think of her in terms of various metals, gold, of course, because of her hair, and silver for her skin.’ Later, he declares: ‘All we have are surfaces.’ Part of the reason he gave up painting, Orme says, was because he couldn’t penetrate the surface of his subjects to reach their essence, and the frustration he feels over finding the right words suggests this problem hasn’t gone away by moving from one medium to another. Even his initials, O. O. O., with the kind of nominative determinism Banville uses so often in his fiction, suggest a hollow inside. Orme is the literary equivalent of a Faberge egg, the gilded outside shielding a hollow core. It is the absence of interior life that keeps him from connecting with the characters he has lived alongside, a disconnect emphasised by the way they are dressed up in absurd names, such as Dodo and Buster Hogan, and ushered away to one side like so many figures in the background of a painting.
While Orme may have given up trying to follow the great painters who inspired him, from Dürer to Cezanne and El Greco to Fuseli, they still loom large in his narrative and the way he makes sense of the world through fine art. When in the company of his wife, Gloria, and his lover, Polly, he likens the three of them to a scene from Manet, while the post-coital sprawl of him and Polly on the sofa in his studio is ‘a genre piece, a pencil study by Daumier, say, or even an oil sketch by Courbet, illustrative of the splendours and miseries of the vie de boheme.’ Polly’s husband Marcus is, comically, ‘one of Grünewald’s suffering Christs.’ Orme even uses painting to describe the trajectory he took to becoming a painter, invoking Caspar David Freidrich’s famous Wanderer above the Sea of Fog to illustrate the journey. It’s the kind of playful idiom Banville’s narrators can’t help indulge in, and the multiple frames of reference cement the idea that there is no singular Oliver Orme, that he is composed of myriad conflicting voices and influences. This goes some way in explaining why Orme is unable to order or understand his narrative: he cannot see it on its own terms. ‘You see how for me everything is always like something else?’ he says, revealing a way of looking that closes off the possibility of understanding or resolve.
As with other Banville books, the prose is polished and flawless. Recalling a moment when he witnessed a man struck and killed by the wing mirror of a passing lorry, Orme says: ‘I used to wonder if there had been time for him, in the last instant, to catch a glimpse of himself, startled and incredulous, as self and reflection met and annihilated each other in the glass.’ (Here we are again in the realm of multiple competing selves.) As summer turns to autumn, Orme observes ‘the days smeared all over with sunlight dense and shiny as apricot jam, heady fragrances of smoke and rich rot in the air and everything tawny or bluely agleam.’ Moments of this kind are what reading Banville is all about, the prose reaching for some kind of aesthetic perfection. As Orme himself says, ‘what concerns me is not things as they are, but as they offer themselves up to being expressed. The expressing is all.’ In another passage, Orme tries to explain what lies at the heart of his interest in being a painter: ‘My effort wasn’t to reproduce the world, or even to represent it. The pictures I painted were intended as autonomous things.’ This so happens to best describe what Banville does in his fiction: he is a world-builder, indifferent to the idea the novel as a form should interact with a specific moment or movement. Banville’s books are reactionary and conservative to the last, insofar as they are always concerned with the past – and The Blue Guitar is no different from its predecessors – but they imagine vivid, immersive and magical worlds, populated by shysters and fops, and they are quite unlike anything else out there.
‘Storm today, the elements in a great rage. Furious gusts of wind booming against the house, shivering its ancient timbers. Why does this kind of weather always make me think of childhood?’ At the novel’s opening, Orme has returned to the unidentified and unremarkable town of his childhood. He is a lapsed painter and a petty thief, embroiled in an affair with Polly, the wife of his friend Marcus. These are the events on which the story hangs, though story isn’t the right word here. There’s much less of interest in the events told than in their telling: Orme’s voice carries everything. It is a voice dogged by uncertainty and doubt, unsure it is truthfully expressing itself from word to word – or that truth even exists.
The anxiety Orme feels over whether or not he can express himself in words is complicated by the way he casts himself as both victim and perpetrator of language’s ambiguity. ‘How treacherous language is, more slippery even than paint,’ he says, soon after admitting ‘yes, these names, I know, I’m making up as I go along.’ It’s hard to determine the extent to which Orme is leading us down the garden path, a point hammered home by the way his inability to express himself is articulated with masterly precision. Orme’s frustration that he cannot adequately articulate himself in a way he finds truthful, or at least pleasing, takes a more dramatic turn when, on several occasions, he fractures the narrative by stopping mid-sentence. Since setting aside his brushes and palette, Orme has become dependent on the written word to make sense of the world around him, but the truth, he would have us believe, is forever eluding him.
The uncertainty surrounding the narrator’s sense of self is well-trodden ground in Banville, and Orme’s narrative is no different. When he confesses ‘there is no I – I’ve definitely said that before, and so have others,’ the ‘others’ could be Max Morden – who says ‘I never had a personality’ – Freddie Montgomery or Alexander Cleave. This connects with another familiar idea in Banville’s books, that the self is made up of many selves, all of them working against each other, each one clamouring to be heard. (No doubt Banville would be amused to see the first result of a Google search for ‘John Banville’ is the website for Benjamin Black, his crime writing alter-ego). As Orme goes over his life and the mistakes he has made, this idea of selfhood becomes a useful tool for justifying any wrong turns. If he finds he has acted in a particularly reprehensible way, he can attribute it to one of the many minions who inhabit his mind. The result is that Orme’s account appears to implicitly challenge the received wisdom that narrative is a tool for ordering and understanding events: the mixed motives and many voices show the futility of self-expression, even without the doubt lingering over whether language can ever hold truth.
Orme’s inability to order the events of his life is also partly due to his painterly eye, which looks at static scenes rather than sequences. He is limited further by an almost total inability to see beyond surfaces, a shortcoming he freely admits. The first mention of Gloria, Orme’s wife, is remarkable in its failure to acknowledge any kind of interiority: ‘I think of her in terms of various metals, gold, of course, because of her hair, and silver for her skin.’ Later, he declares: ‘All we have are surfaces.’ Part of the reason he gave up painting, Orme says, was because he couldn’t penetrate the surface of his subjects to reach their essence, and the frustration he feels over finding the right words suggests this problem hasn’t gone away by moving from one medium to another. Even his initials, O. O. O., with the kind of nominative determinism Banville uses so often in his fiction, suggest a hollow inside. Orme is the literary equivalent of a Faberge egg, the gilded outside shielding a hollow core. It is the absence of interior life that keeps him from connecting with the characters he has lived alongside, a disconnect emphasised by the way they are dressed up in absurd names, such as Dodo and Buster Hogan, and ushered away to one side like so many figures in the background of a painting.
While Orme may have given up trying to follow the great painters who inspired him, from Dürer to Cezanne and El Greco to Fuseli, they still loom large in his narrative and the way he makes sense of the world through fine art. When in the company of his wife, Gloria, and his lover, Polly, he likens the three of them to a scene from Manet, while the post-coital sprawl of him and Polly on the sofa in his studio is ‘a genre piece, a pencil study by Daumier, say, or even an oil sketch by Courbet, illustrative of the splendours and miseries of the vie de boheme.’ Polly’s husband Marcus is, comically, ‘one of Grünewald’s suffering Christs.’ Orme even uses painting to describe the trajectory he took to becoming a painter, invoking Caspar David Freidrich’s famous Wanderer above the Sea of Fog to illustrate the journey. It’s the kind of playful idiom Banville’s narrators can’t help indulge in, and the multiple frames of reference cement the idea that there is no singular Oliver Orme, that he is composed of myriad conflicting voices and influences. This goes some way in explaining why Orme is unable to order or understand his narrative: he cannot see it on its own terms. ‘You see how for me everything is always like something else?’ he says, revealing a way of looking that closes off the possibility of understanding or resolve.
As with other Banville books, the prose is polished and flawless. Recalling a moment when he witnessed a man struck and killed by the wing mirror of a passing lorry, Orme says: ‘I used to wonder if there had been time for him, in the last instant, to catch a glimpse of himself, startled and incredulous, as self and reflection met and annihilated each other in the glass.’ (Here we are again in the realm of multiple competing selves.) As summer turns to autumn, Orme observes ‘the days smeared all over with sunlight dense and shiny as apricot jam, heady fragrances of smoke and rich rot in the air and everything tawny or bluely agleam.’ Moments of this kind are what reading Banville is all about, the prose reaching for some kind of aesthetic perfection. As Orme himself says, ‘what concerns me is not things as they are, but as they offer themselves up to being expressed. The expressing is all.’ In another passage, Orme tries to explain what lies at the heart of his interest in being a painter: ‘My effort wasn’t to reproduce the world, or even to represent it. The pictures I painted were intended as autonomous things.’ This so happens to best describe what Banville does in his fiction: he is a world-builder, indifferent to the idea the novel as a form should interact with a specific moment or movement. Banville’s books are reactionary and conservative to the last, insofar as they are always concerned with the past – and The Blue Guitar is no different from its predecessors – but they imagine vivid, immersive and magical worlds, populated by shysters and fops, and they are quite unlike anything else out there.