Frequently I am asked, in interviews and in question-and-answer sessions after public events, about the origins of this or that novel – “Where did you get the idea?” – and for the most part I am helpless to answer. Of course, I can go back to the manuscript and find the date when I put down the first words, but that was just the formal moment of actual, pen-on-paper writing; in fact, of course, the thing will have been in my mind, on my mind, for a long time, “growing in secret the claws and wings of a novel”, as Vladimir Nabokov pleasingly has it.
Christine Falls is an exception to this general mistiness. It was some time in the 1990s and my friend Laura Magahy, who had developed the Irish Film Institute and the IFI Centre,put to methe idea of a film noir, set in Dublin, against the backdrop of the mother and baby homes, the Magdalene laundries and the “industrial schools” such as the notorious and much-feared St Joseph’s in Letterfrack, Co Galway.
Investigations of these appalling institutions were just getting under way – the State Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse was set up in 1999 – and we felt the subject would be a good, if dark, basis for a movie or television series set in the Ireland of the 1950s. I wrote the script, and showed it to a few people in the screen business, including Alan Gilsenan, who suggested the title.
By then, Laura Magahy had moved on to other ventures, and I hawked the project in various quarters – I suspect that for every 10,000 scripts written, one makes it to the screen – and eventually Tyrone Productions, run by Riverdance’s John McColgan and Moya Doherty, took it up. For a time it seemed that it would be filmed by RTÉ in collaboration with ABC Television in Australia, of all places, but then there were changes at the top in ABC and the project was dropped. Poor Christine, she was having no luck.
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I should add that the first few “Quirke novels” – Quirke, a Dublin pathologist in the 1950s, was and remains my hapless protagonist in the series – were filmed by the BBC and RTÉ and broadcast in 2014, with scripts not by me but by Andrew Davies and Conor McPherson, starring Gabriel Byrne in a wonderfully brooding performance in the title role.
But in the early years of the new century, Christine Falls, like Christine Falls herself, languished, and I set it aside. It niggled at me, however, for I hate to see work go to waste. Then one day, when I was driving into Dublin from my home in Howth, I had just come in sight of the Bull Island when, as with a character in a Hollywood cartoon, a light-bulb went on above my head, and I thought, why don’t I turn the script into a novel?
In fact, I’m not sure that the idea was entirely my own. At the time my agent was Ed Victor, a colourful adventurer in the literary world – “I’m a pleasure-loving Jew from Brooklyn” – and it may have been he who lighted the first spark; certainly he always claimed it was he who struck the steel against the flint. Now I put the idea to him of adapting my television script into a novel, and he was enthusiastic. But then, Ed was always enthusiastic; it was what now would be called his default mode.
I confess I was a little wary. I had just finished writing The Sea, the novel which, to my astonishment, and to the greater astonishment of many others, would win the Booker Prize in 2005, and I was already feeling the stirrings of the wings and claws of The Infinities, which would be published four years later. What would readers of those novels, that stalwart band, think if I presented them with what would be regarded as a crime novel?
[ Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks: 2005 – The Sea, by John BanvilleOpens in new window ]
To be clear, I have nothing against crime novels; some of the finest writers of the 20th century worked in that form, including Raymond Chandler, Margery Allingham, Richard Stark, James M Cain and, the greatest of them all, Georges Simenon. But I deplore the very notion of genre fiction. To me, there is good writing and writing that is less than good, and the former can happen in any kind of novel – or history book, memoir, letter or instruction manual. All the same, might not my readers think that with Christine Falls the novel I was indulging in a postmodernist joke at their expense?
So I decided to invent a pseudonym for myself. I thought of using Benjamin White, the protagonist of my first novel, which no one reads any more. However, Ed Victor, wily as ever, thought the name too bland, and suggested instead Benjamin Black – “Nice and dark,” he said, “and besides, you’ll be high up on all the alphabetical purchase lists.” So Benjamin Black I became.
I have a good friend in Italy, the redoubtable Beatrice Monti della Corte von Rezzori, who runs a small retreat for writers at her 11th-century house in the Tuscan hills. She had urged me to come and stay with her on a number of occasions, and now I thought that this would be the ideal place to go to, as I mutated into my new persona. I wrote to her, and asked if I could come over there for a month or so.
The month was March, and it was bracingly cold up in those deer-infested, boar-tormented hills. One Monday morning I sat down before my typewriter, trembling from more than the cold, and set to work.
Now, a novel such as The Sea or The Infinities takes me anything from three to five years to write, and I feel satisfied – insofar as an artist is ever satisfied – if I get a few paragraphs done in a workday. On that Monday in that chilly room at Santa Maddalena, amazingly, I wrote 2,000 words by lunchtime.
Of course, I had the screenplay to work from: there was a plot, there were characters, there were pages and pages of dialogue. But as to that last, I had a surprise in store. Every single line that the characters spoke in the script had to be altered when I put them into the novel. The reason is not hard to discover. A film script is little more than a blueprint, or better say scaffolding, around which the picture will be fleshed out by others, literally so, in the case of the actors. Therefore the screenwriter must “write white”, and leave the colouring-in to the cast. I remember Glenn Close, when we were working on Albert Nobbs, saying to me one day, “John, you see all these words you’ve written? We don’t need so much description and elaboration. We’re actors.”
[ From the archive: Christine Falls review – joining the criminal fraternityOpens in new window ]
In a novel, words alone are certain good, and words alone have to do all the work. But the work they do on the page does not work on the screen. I doubt there is a single line of dialogue in the script of Christine Falls that did not have to be reshaped for Christine Falls the novel. The medium is the master.
Before I went to stay with my friend at Santa Maddalena I was not at all sure that I could bring off what I was going there to do, and so, out of prudence, I did not tell my publisher what I was about. However, by the autumn I had finished the novel, and packed it off to Ed Victor. It was September 2005. On the day in that month when the longlist for the Booker Prize was announced, and The Sea was on it. Ed was lunching with Andrew Kidd, my editor at Picador publishers, and as the wine was being uncorked he produced, with great glee, the typescript of “Banville’s new novel”.
“John,” Ed told me afterwards, “you should have seen his face.” I wish I had.
From the start I regarded the novelisation of Christine Falls as not much more than a jeu d’esprit, a one-off little adventure. And after I had done it I had no thought of writing another “crime novel”; one foray down those mean streets would be enough. However, one never fully knows one’s own motives, or at least I don’t, and I wonder now if at the time I needed to strike out in a new direction, and write novels that would allow me more technical elbow room. Up to then, for me, the novel form, and even language itself, were not ways of exploring or considering the lives that human beings live in the quotidian world. Nor were they modes of self-expression – God bless the mark, as my mother would say. Art is a means of making something new and putting it into the world, something that only I can devise and shape, whatever its quality, whatever its inevitable failings.
In Christine Falls and the Quirke series that followed – nine books so far, I see, to my consternation – I found myself working in the traditional novel form, which depends for its effects on plot, character delineation, lively dialogue: story, in other words, the oldest form there is. And why not? At a fundamental level, even the most grown-up of us are but children at bedtime, clamouring to be told a tale.
Christine Falls by John Banville is the Dublin City Council One Dublin One Book choice for 2026. To view and book for the related programme of events throughout April go to dublincityofliterature.ie
