The Blue Guitar

Starred review from August 24, 2015
Readers will hang on to every word written by Man Booker Prize winner Banville (Ancient Light), because he knows their thoughts before they do. Narrating this tale is the curmudgeonly, melancholy, and hapless Olly Orme, who, "pushing fifty and a hundred," is back in the English village of his birth and suffering through a mid-life crisis. A modestly successful "paintster" who gives up painting for existential reasons ("What's the difference between a blimp and a guitar? Any old object serves..."), and a rather philosophical thief for whom the thrill of stealing eventually wanes, Olly stumbles through an affair with Polly, his friend Marcus's companion. When the lovers are found out, Olly runs away to the house where he was born, but is set upon by Polly and dragged to her own family home. A mad-hatter couple of days ensues in which Olly is tortured with cups of tea and English dampâand for the first and last time is caught stealing, in this case a little volume of poetry bound in crimson cloth. When he finally escapes and encounters his sensible wife again, she reveals a secret of her own. Olly muses on each escapade, hilarious until such sadness sets in that no one inside or out of the story seems likely to survive it. And yet, Banville is such a fine architect of sentencesâinfusing them with wit and yearningâthat the plot hardly matters. For what a brilliant navel-gazer Banville is: he creates loop-de-loops of self-absorbed prose that resonate so deeply about the human condition that they never become tiresome. Bon mots fill these pages, every one essential. "What we were sorrowing for was all that would not be, and that kind of vacuum, believe me, will suck in as many tears as you have to shed." If in the end readers believe they know Olly Orme, they will know themselves as well. "Make some lesson out of that, if you will; I haven't the heart."

Starred review from August 1, 2015
A painter who has quit painting finds his life unraveling as a soured love affair impels him to reassess his past and present and face a possibly bleak future. Oliver Orme's paintings have brought him fame, yet for reasons he tries to explain throughout this painful, artful book, his muse has left him- "one day I woke up and the world was lost to me." He also can't fully explain his lifelong compulsion to steal small things, usually from people he knows. As he approaches age 50, he's living in the town where he grew up and pursuing an affair-with a woman he "pinched from her husband"-in the art studio he still has above his late father's former print shop. The early death of his only child casts a shadow over his marriage that isn't lightened by his infidelity. Orme, a largely unlikable and unreliable narrator, says he's writing in a "thick school jotter" about "my loves, my losses, my paltry sins." At times he makes light of or tries to gloss over his flaws, and he laughs when he mistakenly writes "painster" instead of "painter." But this self-examination, an effort to "learn over again all I had thought I knew but didn't," is far from painless, offering familiar Banville (Ancient Light, 2012, etc.) themes of memory and regret. Still, there is constant humor, of the sly variety for which the author is well-known, and something more: a section where Oliver visits the tatty estate of his lover's eccentric family has elements of Stella Gibbons and P.G. Wodehouse. Then there's the sheer pleasure of the writing. Banville delights in descriptions of people and nature, and here he has the added excuse of writing through a painter's gifted eye. The artist Orme is not a pleasant creation to spend several hours with, but in the hands of this gifted Irish writer, even a potbellied, melancholic petty thief and Lothario offers countless delights.

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April 1, 2015

The Man Booker Prize-winning Banville returns with another of his tough-to-like, tough-to-ignore characters, in this case a reasonably successful artist and secret petty thief named Oliver Otway Orme who possesses the self-congratulatory self-deprecation you might expect of someone thus named. Disappointed that his canvases don't capture what he envisions, Oliver has betrayed probably his closest friend by sleeping with his wife and upon discovery feels compelled to flee to the house where he was born to sort through his memories. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

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