John Banville: My twin, lost and found

For as long as I can remember, which by now is a long time, I have suspected that I was conceived as one of a pair of twins, and that my brother – for surely it was a brother – died at birth and no one told me. It’s perfectly possible that this is so, since my mother was strongly averse to speaking of anything to do with the messy business of sex and reproduction, and would have preferred to let me grow up in ignorance than to have had to explain to me that I was hauled into the world cheek-by-jowl with tragedy and loss.

Originally I believed that I was unique in harbouring such a suspicion, but I've since discovered that it's a common fantasy. Many people, perhaps many thousands, perhaps many hundreds of thousands, are convinced that they were once one of two, and, like Job's servants, have alone survived to tell the tale. I don't care; so far as I'm concerned, my uncanny sense of incompleteness, of unfinishedness, is unique to me, and I'm sticking to it.

None of us, of course, is a singular entity. The notion that behind all my posings and posturings there exists an enduring and indissoluble self, in the form of a kind of pilot light burning unquenchably somewhere behind my breast-bone, is an instance of what Coleridge would call spilt religion. For there is, I believe, no soul, no self; I am my postures and my poses, which is precisely what lends me any interest I possess as a human being. I’m an actor acting the role of who I am, or of the person I should like to be taken for, and all the world before me is a stage.

A frolic of his own

When I began to write my Benjamin Black novels – in 2004, on the brink of turning 60 – I saw myself as setting out late in life on an adventure, a jeu d'esprit, a frolic of my own. Worried that my readers might suspect I was playing a tiresome postmodernist literary trick on them, I decided to write this new kind of fiction – new to me, that is – under a pseudonym. I did this not with the intention of hiding behind a pen name – although nowadays I ask myself wistfully if I wasn't foolish in thus letting pass an opportunity for a little light entertainment, low-jinks, shall we say, at the expense of my readers – but merely to indicate that I was trying my hand at something different, and that as Benjamin Black I would indeed be writing straightforward mystery novels, if that's not too much of an oxymoron.

Therefore it was, from the outset, a lark. I had been compelled towards crime fiction by a twin (!) set of circumstances. The first was that I had begun to read the work of Georges Simenon, which had been drawn to my attention by the English political philosopher John Gray, a long-time admirer of the great Belgian's superb novels, especially those which didn't feature Inspector Maigret, and which the author referred to as his romans durs, his "hard novels". I was astonished to discover what wonders Simenon could and did achieve by way of a plainer-than-plain prose style, a restricted vocabulary, unfussy narrative, undramatic dialogue, and an eye that was cool yet always sympathetic, or at least empathetic.

Baby trafficking

The other circumstance, the surviving twin, as it were, was that some years previous to 2004 I had been commissioned to write a television drama in three one-hour episodes, which I called Lost Innocents. The story was based on the trafficking of newborn babies from Ireland to the United States in the 1950s, the facts of which were at that time just beginning to come to light. I wrote the series, but as is the case with so many such commissions, the thing didn't get made.

With the example of Simenon before me, and because I hate to let perfectly workmanlike work go to waste, I thought one day, "I know, I'll turn Lost Innocents into a novel!" Thus was conceived Christine Falls, Benjamin Black's first venture in crime fiction.

I thought Christine Falls would be quite enough for me in the way of fun – though "fun" is perhaps not the first word that should spring to mind where that grim, blood-spattered book is concerned – but then I realised that I would have to do one more "BB", just to show that I could write an original crime novel, without the prefabricated foundation of a screenplay to build on. So I wrote The Silver Swan, the plot of which was very loosely based on a sensational murder case in Dublin in the 1950s.

After that, it was too late to stop; I had become addicted, to a drug of my own design and manufacture. Now, nine novels later, the monster has escaped from Dublin, and from contemporary times, and in his latest, Prague Nights, we find him dabbling in blood and alchemy at the court of Rudolf II in Prague in 1600.

His own life

It would be foolish to try to analyse the nature of my addiction. And anyway, is it really I who am the addict? By now, Benjamin Black seems to have taken on a life of his own. This assertion, too, is foolish, I know, since BB doesn’t exist in any sense of the word as we commonly understand it. For the most part, he lies quiet and seemingly unbreathing in his own special crypt in a dark, secluded corner of my consciousness, and only comes to life, thirsting for blood, when I summon him up and put him to work.

Is he my lost brother, or am I his baffled father? Will he one day achieve an autonomous life, of whatever kind, and eclipse me? There are countries, Spain, for instance, where BB’s popularity far outstrips JB’s. Shall I, as if in a tale by Borges, gradually fade as my mysteriously revivified twin flourishes?

I blame television, and Georges Simenon; it was they, and not I, who between them begot the monster.

Prague Nights by Benjamin Black(Penguin/Viking) is out now. John Banville will be appearing in conversation with Stuart Neville at the Dead in Dún Laoghaire Crime Writing Festival on July 22nd at the Pavilion Theatre. Tickets available from paviliontheatre.ie