‘Nightspawn’ by John Banville

A Year With John Banville | #JohnBanville2024

Fiction – Kindle edition; The Gallery Press; 224 pages; 2018.

Nightspawn is John Banville’s debut novel, first published in 1971.

It’s a slippery story, impossible to get a handle on. It’s full of political, often murderously violent, intrigue, peopled with a cast of strange characters and, despite its Greek island setting, pulses with a darkly Gothic atmosphere.

From an alleyway came the flash of a fang and one red eye, there, gone. (Location 264)

It’s narrated by an expatriate Irish writer called Benjamin White who’s entangled in a devious revolutionary plot he doesn’t quite understand and, for much of the story, he lurches from one strange catastrophe to another as he tries to work out what is real and what is not.

Secret document

At the heart of the story is a mysterious document — “containing certain signatures” and sometimes described as “the little thing, the little thing which means so much” — that could be used to help a cause or put certain people in power.

A revolution is brewing and Benjamin, constantly mistaken for an Englishman (a running joke throughout the book), is advised to leave.

The army was everywhere, in tanks, in jeeps, in lorries, on foot, but through it all, the battered yellow cab came nosing, its windows wide, and the car radio blaring martial music, appropriately enough, filling the streets with the strains of war. (Location 2598)

Murder, kidnapping and violent assaults abound. Their ferocity is only matched by the moody weather, the stormy sea “alive with ghostly glimmers of phosphorescence” and the “uneasiness in the air”.

Out over the sea a gathering of ugly black cloud was smeared like a grease stain on the sky. (Location 78)

A game of chess

Benjamin’s detailed moves — including his steamy love affair with Helen, a married woman, whom on one occasion he rapes — is a bit like a game of chess. (Interestingly, there are characters named Black, White and Knight, which can’t be a coincidence. Even the novel’s title could be a pun on “Knight’s pawn”.)

Toward the end of the story, there’s a quote that perfectly describes the experience of reading this book:

My mind would not work very well; my thoughts were fragmented and dispersed, and I had a vertiginous sensation of planes of awareness slipping and sliding uncontrollably, running into each other and locking, like loose, shuffled pages of a book. (Location 2564)

Not a ‘normal’ novel

Nightspawn isn’t an easy book to follow — but it seems Banville deliberately intended it to be so. In an article he wrote in 1994 looking back on his first novel, he said he had a “deep distrust of the novel form” and “at the age of 25 I had no doubt that I was about to transform the novel as we knew it”.

Plot, character, psychology: such words had me reaching for my revolver. 

He apparently wrote eight drafts, all in the third person; it wasn’t until he introduced a first-person narrator that he felt happy with it.

Do not mistake me: the book holds a dear place in my heart. Whatever its faults, it contains the best of what I could do. It is incandescent, crotchety, posturing, absurdly pretentious, yet in my memory it crackles with frantic, antic energy; there are sentences in it that I still quote to myself with secret and slightly shame-faced pleasure.

I understand what he means. The prose is astonishingly good; he writes with a painterly eye and has an uncanny ability to make inanimate things come alive:

The fog comes to my window, nuzzles at my window like some friendly blind animal. (Location 1279)

And:

The ancient telephone spoke. One could not say that it rang, for it had an oddly querulous, croaking call, like that of some awkward, ugly and sullen bird. (Location 1672)

And:

Her hands fluttered nervously, and fell together like frightened animals. (Location 2709)

And despite the heavy subject matter — death, betrayal and the Greek junta — humour is never far away:

I took a couple of steps across the floor, and then, in a flash of blinding white light, something hard fell on the back of my head, behind my ear, and I was falling, down, down into total darkn— wait now, wait, I am getting carried away with all this thriller stuff. Backspace, a bit. I took a couple of steps across the floor, and halted. (Location 2142)

Challenging romp

Nightspawn is probably not the right novel for first-time Banville readers, but if you are relatively acquainted with this work, you’ll likely recognise some of his trademarks — a flare for showy writing, wonderful descriptions of art and a focus on the unreliability of memory.

I found it an enjoyable, if somewhat ambiguous, challenging and occasionally perplexing, romp.

It’s the sort of book you read not for the plot or the storyline but for the sheer delight in the wordplay and the stylistic prose. It’s strange and bonkers and beautifully Baroque, perfect if you like that sort of thing.

I read this book as part of A Year With John Banville, which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books. You are invited to join in using the hashtag #JohnBanville2024. To learn more, including our monthly reading schedule, please visit my John Banville page.

♥ This month Cathy reviewed ‘The Newton Letter‘, the last in his Revolutions trilogy, published in 1982.

♥ Next month I plan to read ‘Birchwood’, published in 1973, and Cathy plans to read ‘Christine Falls’, the first book penned under his pseudonym Benjamin Black. (I have previously reviewed ‘Christine Falls’ here.)