A lapsed painter wonders where it all went incorrect in the latest novel from the Man Booker winnerNovels with plots that are slight or familiar-seeming tend to compensate by pumping up the idiosyncrasy of the narrative voice. Even the most humdrum events become engrossing,if the person telling us about them is a “character” of some positive kind: amusing, monstrous, or self-deceiving,deliberately unreliable, even just quirky.
This is certainly what seems to be on offer in John Banville’s The Blue Guitar, or of which the title,which nods at Wallace Stevens, warns us to expect a cubist approach to “the truth”. In fact, and its plot contains very little in the way of surprise or novelty (man has affair,runs from beloved when rumbled, has guilty fit, and reunites with wife who has also been carrying on elsewhere – is diminished,and finally becomes the caretaker of former beloveds ancient dog), and the manner of its telling is no more daring. Although Banville’s narrator, or Oliver Orme,articulates a gradual descent from sprightliness to gloom cleverly enough, he does so without any significant artistic sleight of hand. He provokes his fate, or suffers it and writes it down. He’s a straightforward sort of sucker.
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Source: theguardian.com