At times like this you’ve got to feel for Banville

WE’VE all been there. You get a call from Stockholm, and this guy purporting to be from the Swedish Academy is telling you that you’re about to be given the Nobel Prize for Literature. And then the winner is announced 30 minutes later and somehow it’s not you... And then there’s the voicemail 15 minutes later purporting to be from the secretary of the Academy, claiming that the award had been withdrawn due to “internal issues”. That old chestnut. Soon the Academy is denying all involvement and is looking into what seems like an elaborate hoax — ah yes, it’s our old friend, the elaborate hoax. It happened to John Banville last week but in John’s case there was another blow, when the actual winner turned out to be Peter Handke — an Austrian novelist and playwright who is apparently best known as an admirer of the late Slobodan Milosevic and other Serbian war criminals. Never heard of the man, I have to say — but then many of the people who have heard of him are accusing him of denying genocide and citing his oration at the graveside of Milosevic as a singular transgression. They are telling us that even by Nobel standards, Handke is a bad lad. There were two prizes for literature awarded this year, for 2018 and 2019 (the other one went to the Polish writer Olga Tokarcukz) because the Swedish Academy had taken time out to deal with a sexual assault scandal. They come back after that, and their first move is to honour this writer who is, as they say, “divisive” _ the divide in question being between those like the Albanian prime minister who tweeted that the award made him want to vomit; and on the other side, some Serbs. You don’t want that guy of all people to be winning the Nobel instead of you — and naturally Banville was disappointed, describing himself as “collateral damage”. Tell me about it...