OPINION:
THE BLUE GUITAR
By John Banville
Knopf, $25.95, 272 pages
Quirky is the word that captures this author. Who else would write with such drollery about the collapse of a love affair.
Certainly only John Banville would launch a plot by urging “Call me autolycus” then explaining this is a fancy way of saying he steals things. “Always did I may fairly claim to have been a child prodigy in the fine art of stealing.”
He emphasizes that he does not steal for profit, and caresses the word “purloin” as an appropriate description for his behavior. The first thing he stole, he recalls, was a tube of oil paint.
What he has stolen most recently, he discloses, is Polly, someone else’s wife whom he describes as “my own dear pudding.” Mr. Banville delivers an unlikely and hilarious description of an affair gone wrong and does it in what is not only humorous but elegant prose. He describes their lovemaking in a cold room at the top of the house and then plunges into a description of how he runs away from Polly to a frozen house which is his childhood home. He doesn’t tell her he’s going, of course and offers no explanation for it.
He is an eccentric artist, he suggests, and his name is Oliver Orway Orme, “O.O.O.” which he denounces as an absurdity, adding crisply,” You could hang me over the door of a pawnshop.”
Yet he contends that Orme is a “painterly name” that looked well at the right-hand corner of a canvas with the letters like “the handle of a chamber pot.”
He recalls his childhood as a time of storm, of “furious gusts of wind booming against the house, shivering its ancient timbers.” And he wonders why his recollections of childhood coincide with such weather. Childhood was supposed to be a radiant springtime, he observes, but his seems always to have been autumn. He remembers it as “gales seething in the big beeches the rooks above them wheeling haphazard like scraps of char from a bonfire and a custom coloured gleam having its last go low down in the western sky.”
Now he is “pushing fifty and feels a hundred, big with years.” Whether you like the author’s style, you have to admit that it takes a firm grasp of the reader, if only because of his unusual use of language which he inveigles into sentences that are tangles of his thoughts. And he is darkly, bitterly humorous, a man looking back while trying to find out what he is doing in the present. He uses a pen like a paintbrush to conjure up his memories. His characters like Polly his mistress, his wife Gloria who is suddenly pregnant with a child who isn’t his, his dealer Perry who is puzzled by his feelings about his vanishing art, are all part of the jigsaw puzzle that is Orme.
Perhaps most exasperated is his dealer, Perry who is “always on his way to somewhere else” yet who has an eye for a picture. He will say, “There’s the heart of the thing and its not beating. And he is always right, I find. Many’s the bloodless canvas I stabbed with the sharp end of a brush on the strength of his strictures.”
It is characteristic of Mr. Banville or Mr. Orme that he recalls how Polly had said to him in he middle of a particularly vigorous bout of guilty self-laceration that I wasn’t as bad as I thought I was. His wife, Gloria, suggested he be “at least honest and admit you’re a liar.”
“Kept me mulling for days that one did. I mull over it yet,” the author reports, adding, “There’s no limit to how finely Orme’s razor can slice.”
Of course that is basis of this odd yet fascinating book about odd but fascinating people. Probably very much like Mr. Banville.
• Muriel Dobbin is a former White House and national political reporter for McClatchy newspapers and the Baltimore Sun.
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