Meeting John Banville

Only the other day:

I was coming out of the dentist's on Bath Avenue (one must aspire!) and making my way along Grand Canal Street when the writer John Banville passed me. To borrow a phrase (and amend it slightly) he was looking elegantly isolated: scurrying along in his now trademark fedora with a satchel slung across his shoulder. For all I knew, as he perambulated so hurriedly, he was composing, in his fevered head, a lengthy passage of significant prose. Mildly starstruck, I stopped to compliment him on his writing. I wanted to tell him I'm a huge fan.

"Hi, Mr Banville," I say. "My name is Brian."

He stops in his tracks, slightly bemused, then looks at me expectantly as though waiting for a punchline.

"I just want to say I love your writing," I continue.

"Thank you very much," John says.

There's a bit of an awkward silence. I'd like to let him know how his books, so many times, have helped me through dark nights of the soul. I remembered reading Athena in the Apollo House canteen in 1996 without a friend in the world, and shivering in my Phibsboro bedsit with only Ghosts for companionship. I emerged from these blue periods, to borrow another phrase, a wiser weaker man, and a better-read one to boot! I want him to know I'm no bandwagon jumper, that I was with him long before he won the Booker. But I can't muster any of this into words on the wintry city street, with the writer right in front of me, so instead I say:

"I loved that thing you said about driving down Pearse Street early one morning and seeing a gathering of albinos on a street corner. Truth is stranger than fiction and yet nobody would believe a scene like that if you were to put it in a book."

The flicker of a smile emerges on his lips, but he says nothing just chuckles mildly. He knows well the reference. I'd heard him saying it late one night on an RTÉ radio show. By repeating it, I'm hoping to burnish my credentials as some kind of super fan. Still, this gambit is not enough to get the famous scribe to open up and start conversing at length. That would be my dream of course, a long conversation with John Banville on a city street in the heart of the Hibernian metropolis. Something to tell the grandkids, something to write in my blog.

Now, though, sensing that he wants to go, to continue his sidewalk scurrying and perhaps resume his internal monologue, I throw a last gasp (and somewhat clichéd) question his way:

"Are you working on anything at the moment?"

I'm sure it's a question famous writers get asked all the time but he takes it in his stride, patiently and good-naturedly.

"Oh, I'm always working on something!"

He really wants to go now, he's been held up long enough. Perhaps the thought has struck him that I'm some kind of Dublin Mark Chapman.

"Thanks," he says. And then delivers a coup de grâce to end my awkwardness: "You've made my day!"

Au contraire, it's made my day to meet him!

And with that he's gone, off up the street in the direction of Ballsbridge, to keep God knows what appointment with God knows whom.

It was only later on the bus home that I realized I had a Richard Ford novel in my own satchel (the terrific Independence Day) that I could have shown Banville as we spoke, for slap-bang on the back cover was Banville's own blurb 'The best novel out of America in many years.' I'd love to have asked him if he remembered writing the blurb and if he still believed what he had written. It would have been, and I hope I've got my definitions correct here, a postmodern, metafictional kind of moment.

©Brian Ahern 2018