Part 2: Dublin, Banville, and the Novel
Nigel Beale's latest Biblio File Backstory Adventure
Dublin is a pretty colourful place
Splendid weather just serves to brighten
the paint…
and petals
for
that
matter.
Hell, even the alleyways are colourful here.
And look at the local rag
The people too seem a little brighter when there’s a clear blue sky and sunshine.
I figured the brightest thing I could do after landing in Dublin was to get a pint of Guinness in front of me.
(here’s where they store the stuff before it goes to the pubs):
Only then could I think about finding a bookstore. The publican told me there was one nearby called Chapters (not to be confused with the bedroom furnishing chain in Canada). It sold new and second-hand books (as all great bookshops do).
I snared a copy of Clive James’s translation of Dante and a book of essays by John Banville that I planned to read in advance of interviewing him the following evening at his place in Howth, a 30 minute DART ride north of Dublin.
Howth Head, with its purple heather and rhododendrons, is where Leopold Bloom proposes to Molly in Ulysses. Call me stupid but I missed the marriage part entirely; thought she was just saying “Yes” to his importuning her for sex (not that the marriage was anything to write home about).
Anyhow, despite having read the book decades ago and knowing that the Martello towers were waterside, I’d completely forgotten as well that Dublin was on the sea. Howth is where Dubliners go to clean off and sun themselves on the beach. I took the train up
but I’m getting ahead of myself.
After Chapters I made my way over to the hotel in the Docklands, an area that glistens with new buildings that are festooned with the logos of giant accounting firms practiced in the art of enabling tax avoidance. They, in turn, are surrounded by the headquarterses of clients that have benefited from their advice; together they proudly impoverish national governments around the globe, blythly denying the world’s poor essential social services.
The tax avoidance business is booming in Dublin. Here’s a view from my window:
I dropped off my bags and made for Merrion Square in hopes of catching the tail end of a writers festival that was underway. Lovers’ Park
they should’ve called it.
Unfortunately, I was too late to catch any of the events but was able at least to mug with Oscar Wilde.
Can’t say I think much of the smirk sculptor Danny Osborne put on his face, but I do like the fact that the jade for his smoking jacket was mined in British Columbia. Statues
of writers
are a bit of a thing
in Dublin. And characters
etched in pavement. Chalk flowers too.
On the walk to the Square I passed the fine looking frontages
of several
bookstores. Plus there were these cricketers
who put me in mind of the good things Richard Charkin is doing to raise money for Wisden.com
Next morning I decided against donning the horns
favouring a pointed search for bookstores, instead of just happening upon them as I’d done the previous evening.
First I visited Hodges Figgis where an associate named
Martin showed me a couple of Irish classics in which the shop features. These editions of Ulysses
and At Swim Two Birds
are specific to Hodges Figgis. Of course it’s nice to believe that the store is an independent, but Waterstones owns it; only the name remains…as a front.
Speaking of Ulysses, here’s a shot of the next bookstore I hit:
along with its strikingly eyebrowed owner
Others along the route included this one perched on the Liffey
This one that had a nice shiny set of measuring weights
for sale
in its window. And this one
which had a lovely “Cake Cafe” tucked in behind it
that sold these scrumptious looking hip-stretchers:
The shop with the smartest bookseller was this one:
He took the time to inquire about my collecting interests then brought in and sold me these the next day:
I also had a very good espresso at Dubray’s lovely second floor cafe, where I struck up a conversation with this young Irish-Portugese woman, Larissa Brigatti,
who was working on her second novel, a psychological thriller published by Chiado, and had won some sort of fellowship at the Dublin-based Irish Writers’ Centre.
Surprisingly I only hit three or four pubs while I was in town. Asked the bartender at this one
what “the best” Irish whiskey was. He told me that Redbreast was his best-seller:
Okay.
That afternoon at about 4pm I squeezed onto a twice-delayed train for Howth. John Banville met me at the station in front of The Dog House. We ambled up a nearby hill to his place, past a neighbour’s house. The kids had gone nuts on it with their chalk. John thought the work was fantastic, though you’d never know by the look on his face:
We conducted our interview and then strolled back down the hill past the mural to meet John’s daughter Ellen for dinner. We sat outside. The sun lit up her phallic fare very nicely:
Ellen showed me her tattoo. The three of us talked about love, and Nobel Prize hoaxes.
And that’s it. You’re now all caught up on the Backstory.
To close off, here are some jottings from my notebook - para-phrasings, quotes and ideas, mostly strained through John - sourced from various interviews, articles, etc., some of which were used in my campaign here to fenagle something new out of him. Something he’d never ever said before about novel-writing and life.