Man Booker winner John Banville is the toast of Ireland

Author’s ‘ little book’ rises up against literary giants

DUBLIN • Ireland hailed its latest literary champion, John Banville, yesterday after he beat the odds to win Britain’s £50,000 Man Booker prize for fiction for his novel The Sea.

Bertie Ahern, the Prime Minister, said it was international recognition for a life of literary achievement.

“He has dedicated all his adult life to his art, and this award is a fitting recognition for an outstanding book,” Ahern said.

The judges said they had been torn between Banville’s book and Never Let Me Go, the latest work by Japanese-born British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, with chairman of the judging panel John Sutherland having to cast a deciding vote.

Banville’s novel is “a masterly study of grief, memory and love recollected,” the judges said on Monday.

In 1989, Banville, 59, missed out on winning the award when his novel Book of Evidence reached the Booker short list. Then, it was Ishiguro who came out on top with The Remains of the Day.

At the awards ceremony 16 years ago, Banville said he had been so drunk he would have been unable even to say thank you if he had won the prize.

This year, “I drank a lot of water and I took a walk and generally was a good boy. Maybe that is why they gave me the prize,” he told Ireland’s RTE state radio.

This year’s favourite had been British author Julian Barnes for his period novel Arthur and George.

In The Sea, the narrator is an art historian mourning the recent death of his wife from cancer. He escapes to a coastal town where he spent a holiday in his youth.

The Irish Times, where Banville used to work as literary editor, said he had always regarded the novel as art and the novelist as an artist rather than a storyteller.

The newspaper noted that he had to some extent paid for his refusal to compromise the role of the artist.

“He is an Irish writer who has tended to look beyond Ireland,” it said.

“ The themes of art and truth have preoccupied him, while he also explored the beauty of science with a quartet of books based on the lives of early European scientists.”

The bookmakers had only given Banville a 7- 1 chance of winning this year, and even the man himself had regarded himself as an outsider.

“I thought it was a little book that would not survive against the great beasts that had been stalking the literary jungle this year,” he said.

“It seemed to me — I hate to use the word — too poetic a book to win and I’m pleased that it did.”

The Sea

is Banville’s 14th novel. Born in County Wexford in the southeast of Ireland and now living in Dublin, he joined the now defunct Irish Press newspaper group as a sub-editor in the early 1970s, becoming chief subeditor there before leaving in the 1980s to join The Irish Times.

Banville is only the second Irish winner of the Booker prize. In 1993, Roddy Doyle won with Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.