In The Blue Guitar, Banville continues the elegiac, tender note that informed his last novel, Ancient Light as the Wexford-born novelist delves through his season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.
One baulks at the word 'mature', but suffice to say that the fey playfulness of The Infinities, for instance, is not apparent. Likewise, the summer-suffused boyhood excitements of The Sea - which won the Man Booker prize in 2005 - are not replicated in the often chilly, mostly adult scenarios of The Blue Guitar. The title draws on a celebrated poem by the American poet Wallace Stevens.
This is not to say that the sun in all its glory and sensual languor do not make brief, pointed appearances, as in this sentence where the South appears for the first time. "She noticed how tanned my insteps were, and straight away she pictured the resplendent south, a bay like a bowl of broken amethysts strewn with flecks of molten silver..."
Thus, the South – specifically the Camargue area of the South of France - is posited as relief from a wet and lonely Ireland that has been re-imagined, a mysterious country where cars run on salt and Zeppellin-style airships sail through the skies. The narrator of the piece, the washed-up artist Olly Orme explores his profound sense of loss. He has lost things, dear things, such as mercurial, fleeting love, innocence, his only daughter, and perhaps, first and foremost, his ability to paint.
The story is in the main a rueful, wintry exploration of infidelity and its consequences and Banville’s assiduous attempts to get it absolutely vivid and alive in elegant, precise prose are as ever to the fore. All his life, Olly Orme has been a selective, if compulsive thief. Married to the shadowy Gloria, he yet managed to steal Polly, the wife of his best friend Marcus. However, Olly might argue that she made the first move during a night-time journey in the car in which both couples were travelling.
Olly is a painter whose creative juices have dried up, but he is a painter nonetheless, so the prose rises marvellously to the challenge faced by a painter who has no recourse to his sketches, his oils and canvas. Now Orme is reduced to mere words to describe and represent things, in clauses such as the following: "the sky of depthless turquoise held a kind of dark pulsing at its zenith..."
Luxuriate thus in the beautiful sentences that surface pliantly and frequently in Banville’s unflinching, intensely confrontational tale. The Blue Guitar runs to 250 pages and confirms once again the presence of one of the most gifted and perceptive writers working in English today.
Paddy Kehoe
