John Banville - The Blue Guitar

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Great writing, but doesn't add up to much in the end

This is a superbly written book (of course it is - it's John Banville) but I was left with the feeling that I'd just read an awful lot of superb writing without the writing having said all that much.

The narration is in the first person by Oliver Orme, a once-successful painter whose inspiration has deserted him and who is now living in a small, unnamed Irish town.  He has an interesting quirk (sorry!) in that he steals small objects from people, which Banville uses to give an insight into his character.  Not all that much actually happens: it becomes clear within a few pages that Orme has had an affair with a friend's wife and has been rumbled by his own wife.  The subsequent playing out of events is pretty unremarkable so even to hint at them would be a spoiler, but the plot, such as it is, isn't the point here.

Banville is interested in creating and exploring in depth a character who has gone from youthful joy and hope to middle-aged jaded gloom.  He does it brilliantly, as always.  The slightly rambling, digressive and disjointed monologue of the narration is completely convincing as a portrait, Banville is excellent in conveying the unreliability of memory and he creates extremely vivid scenes and reminiscences from minutiae.  The vocabulary is rich, slightly pretentious as befits the character, often esoteric...and given all this, if you've read Ancient Light you will understand my feeling when reading The Blue Guitar that I had done this once and didn't really feel the need to do it all over again.

It is always a pleasure to read Banville's prose, but I didn't think there was sufficient content here to carry a whole novel.  There are little gems of insight occasionally, but they are thin on the ground.  There are writers whom I read primarily for the pleasure of their prose (P.G. Wodehouse, Damon Runyon and Flann O'Brien, as three more recent examples) but they all have a real wit and sufficient content or narrative drive, of whatever kind, to keep me reading.  This book didn't, I'm afraid.  Because I received a free ARC through the kindness of Penguin and Netgalley I had an obligation to carry on, but I'm not sure I would have finished it otherwise.  I can luxuriate in fine prose and well-drawn character for a while, but a whole book does need more than that, so I can only give The Blue Guitar a very qualified recommendation, I'm afraid.