A karaoke version of Kafka

The Blue Guitar is John Banville’s 16th novel. Our narrator-protagonist is a painter called Oliver Orme. We are in Ireland, but it’s hard to say exactly where, or exactly when. There are telephones and cars, but the dress code is antiquated: hats, canes, pocket watches. This is ‘the new-old world that Godley’s Theorem wrought’: people have ‘learned to harvest energy from the oceans and out of the very air itself’. Godley, presumably, is not the real-life economist Wynne Godley but the fictional mathematician Adam Godley of Banville’s The Infinities (2009), whose discoveries supplant relativity and quantum physics.

So, the world of The Blue Guitar is a version of steampunk, straight out of genre fiction. The plot’s an old one, too: Oliver is married to Gloria but he’s having an affair with Polly, the wife of his good friend Marcus. The Paris Review asked Banville: ‘Do you have sympathy for the characters you create?’ His reply: ‘I suppose it’s possible that a writer would have feeling for his characters, but I can’t see how… they don’t exist. They’re manikins made of words and they carry my rhythms.’ It’s a crude take on Nabokov’s witty formulation — ‘my characters are galley slaves’ — from a lesser writer, a writer who doesn’t understand that a large part of fiction’s power is precisely that it can provoke sympathy for those galley slaves and manikins, even though we know they don’t exist.

Fittingly for a painter with ‘a very inward view of things’, Oliver Orme’s chief function is as conduit for Banville’s musings on art. Except they’re not really Banville’s musings. Just as Orme is a compulsive thief, ‘doing a favour’ to the trinkets he steals ‘by dint of renewing them’, so Banville ransacks the past century of critical thought.