Is The Blue Guitar a witty observational piece about a pathetic male adulterer or a clever meditation on the nature of art and imagination? I’m not sure I know, I thought, as I closed the book. A week later, I’m not sure I care.
Verdicts aren’t John Banville’s stock in trade. The award-winning Irish novelist writes dense, profound and poetically written novels that meditate on life’s big questions. The Sea (2005), which won the Booker Prize, was about an art historian who considers the deaths of those closest to him; The Book of Evidence (1989) is about theft and morality; Eclipse (2000), which was followed by Shroud (2002) and Ancient Light (2012), formed a trilogy around Alexander Cleave, an actor, and his difficult relationship with his daughter Cass. His novels leave an impression, even if the plot fades quickly from your memory.
The Blue Guitar does just this. Oliver is a painter and a thief — a painster, Oliver describes himself accidentally. Tortured, sulking and middle aged: this is prime Banville territory. Oliver shares his name with his daughter, Olivia, who dies aged three; his sister, Olive; and a schoolfriend whom he loved, also Oliver. He paints things to get to their “essence” but, he comes to realise, “there was no such thing as the thing itself, only effects of things, the generative swirl of relation”. Right.
Anyway, he has the same ethereal approach to theft: he never takes useful objects, only those which “can’t be put to practical use”. Which is rather harsh on poor Polly, who is the “thing” he stole most recently: she’s his best friend’s wife. The old, washed out painter with wet-rust, curly hair and flaccid, moist skin, tells us Polly was “no great beauty”, a “country lass” who is the opposite of his wife Gloria. Polly tells him she loves him but all he wants is to “consume her entirely”. And so he does.
Banville is a gorgeous writer who can nail an emotion. Take this on Oliver’s feelings towards Polly: “Loving her was like being let into a place she had been hitherto alone in, a place no one else had ever been allowed to enter.”
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However, you have to weather some fairly florid passages in between, such as Oliver’s ramblings on his middle name, Orme: “A painterly name. It looked well, down at the right-hand corner of the canvas, modestly minuscule but unmissable, the O an owlish eye, the r rather art-nouveauish and more like a Greek τ, the m a pair of shoulders shaking in rich mirth, the e like — oh, I don’t know what. Or yes, I do: like the handle of a chamber pot.” Here’s a character who’s ripe for a fall from grace.
The reason for the title The Blue Guitar comes, finally, on page 249. It’s an allusion to a poem by Wallace Stevens, which is inspired by Picasso’s painting The Old Guitarist, which carries the line “You do not play things as they are”, to which the guitarist — Oliver — replies “Things as they are/ are changed upon the blue guitar”. Banville expertly manipulates the characters at the end to make Oliver face up to who he is. But for me, the feeling remained: this is a well-told book, but so what?
The Blue Guitar by John Banville, Viking, 250pp, £14.99 . To buy this book for £12.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
John Banville will be at The Times and The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on Oct 9. Cheltenhamfestivals.com