The Wexford-born writer and Man Booker Prize winning novelist John Banville has paid tribute to his fellow author Aidan Higgins, who passed away in Kinsale, aged 88, earlier this week.
"He was a wonderful writer, and that rarest of phenomena, a truly cosmopolitan Irish artist, " Banville told TEN.
"His misfortune was to have written his best book too early in his career - although if to be the author of Langrishe, Go Down is a misfortune, then we should all be so misfortunate.
"I salute his shade, and like to think of him happy in an interesting Underworld where he can consort with the likes of Djuna Barnes and his old drinking companion Samuel Beckett."
Higgins' most famous novel, Langrishe, Go Down, published in 1966, was adapted for a successful TV film starring Judi Dench and Jeremy Irons. Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay, however the movie ended up being banned by the Irish film censor who took grave exception to the film's scenes of nudity.
Judi Dench and Jeremy Irons in Langrishe, Go Down
Other notable works included Balcony of Europe - which was shortlisted for the Booker prize - and Bornholm Night Ferry. Higgins perfected an almost Joycean, old-world elegance in his prose, an elegance and richness of vocabulary which has all but disappeared from Irish fiction.
In his novels, short stories and autobiographical sketches, Higgins evoked the very atmosphere of sultry places, notably the South of Spain and the town of Nerja, in his compelling Balcony of Europe. He did so to marvellous effect in vivid prose and depicted torrid, but inevitably conflicted love affairs in many of his stories.
The late Aidan Higgins
His memoirs, notably Donkey's Years, are masterpieces of the genre.
In the 1970s, Banville and Higgins were cited - often together in the same sentence - as the two most important and exciting Irish writers working in fiction. While rooted in the Irish scene, they had successfully investigated foreign and exotic locales, and seemed in their work, to have broadened out the canvas somewhat.
