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Summary
Summary
John Banville, the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea and Ancient Light, now gives us a new novel--at once trenchant, witty, and shattering--about the intricacies of artistic creation, about theft, and about the ways in which we learn to possess one another, and to hold on to ourselves.
Equally self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating, our narrator, Oliver Otway Orme ("O O O. An absurdity. You could hang me over the door of a pawnshop"), is a painter of some renown and a petty thief who has never before been caught and steals only for pleasure. Both art and the art of thievery have been part of his "endless effort at possession," but now he's pushing fifty, feels like a hundred, and things have not been going so well. Having recognized the "man-killing crevasse" that exists between what he sees and any representation he might make of it, he has stopped painting. And his last act of thievery--the last time he felt its "secret shiver of bliss"--has been discovered. The fact that the purloined possession was the wife of the man who was, perhaps, his best friend has compelled him to run away--from his mistress, his home, his wife; from whatever remains of his impulse to paint; and from a tragedy that has long haunted him--and to sequester himself in the house where he was born. Trying to uncover in himself the answer to how and why things have turned out as they have, excavating memories of family, of places he has called home, and of the way he has apprehended the world around him ("one of my eyes is forever turning towards the world beyond"), Olly reveals the very essence of a man who, in some way, has always been waiting to be rescued from himself.
Author Notes
JOHN BANVILLE was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He has been the recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1976), the Guardian Fiction Prize (1981), the Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award (1989), and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction (1997). He has been both short-listed for the Booker Prize (1989) and awarded the Man Booker Prize (2005) as well as nominated for the Man Booker International Prize (2007). Other awards include the Franz Kafka Prize (2011), the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2013), and the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature (2014). He lives in Dublin.
john-banville.com
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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 [feeling] 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 damp-and 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 sentences-infusing them with wit and yearning-that 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." (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
HERE IS "RUFOUS-HEADED, roly-poly" Oliver Orme, "the hypochondriacs' hypochondriac," a man with "no fortitude, no sticking power; no grit," but inexplicable charisma. "I'm pushing 50," John Banville's latest narrator announces, "and feel a hundred." His heart is still beating, though: "A thief's heart is an impetuous organ," and Orme is compulsive. He's been stealing since he pocketed a tube of zinc white paint as a child. Even though he is married to the youthful Gloria, he cannot keep his hands off the wife of his friend Marcus, the local watch repairman. "I pinched Polly," he boasts. "Polly I purloined." If his outline is familiar, Orme benefits from his resemblance to previous Banville narrators. Sixteen novels in, and the author has stated he does not "really believe in the third-person mode." His recent books are narrated by men adrift, prone to musing. "Why is there grass everywhere, covering everything?" asks Orme. "Why are there so many leaves?" These are men with painters in their pockets. Some look at the sky and think of Poussin, others turn to Bonnard. These men seep into one another; their tones intermingle. Like the narrator of Banville's Man Booker Prize-winning "The Sea," Orme suspects he does not fully comprehend human interactions: "Sometimes I have the suspicion that there's a lot I miss in the day-to-day run of events." Not for lack of intelligence. Banville men speak with hyperarticulacy. Orme micturates and muses. The air around him occasionally sounds with "borborygmic blarings." ("Yes, I have been rifling the dictionary again," he admits at one point.) He is meticulous with language, save for the occasional tactical bout of ineloquence. "When I had climbed the stairs - scaffold, I nearly wrote," he says. Another slip happens early when he almost describes himself as a "painster." A formerly famous painter, he has returned with Gloria to smalltown Ireland in the long wake of a tragedy. His ability to create has disappeared. The embers of inspiration have become ashes, "and cold ashes at that." He steals his friend's wife, and like the narrator of Banville's novel "Eclipse," Orme retreats to his childhood home to survey the wreckage. Of the past, of course. By the second page of text we're back in a place that should be all radiant sunshine but for Orme is constant autumn. "I'm tired of the past, of the wish to be there and not here," Orme would like us to believe. "I'm tired of brooding," he says later; "it availeth naught." But soon here is "the past, the past" again, pulsing, the Banvillean incantation, guiding the prose. Gone are the subtle slips that took "The Sea" from past to present. Instead, bright announcement: "Yes, here it comes, the past again." And like an undeniable guest: "Damn it, here's another digression." As evidenced by his four previous novels, Banville is far from tired of this sort of excavation, of his descriptions of the quality of Irish light on a long-ago afternoon. "If I can catch the play of light on a wall, and catch it just so, that is enough for me," he said in an interview with The Paris Review. "I don't want to write about human behavior." The sentence, he believes, is the greatest invention, and this love of formal detail means Banville's sentences are sumptuous, unfurling addendums, waves. This time round, the sea is "as black and shiny as patent leather," some of it bordered by "the khaki shine of chilly summer beaches." By now Banville's talent for economical character sketch has been exported to the novels of his alter ego, the crime writer Benjamin Black. Black novels move. Banville novels have become thick, rich, slathered. Over the years, Banville has developed an antagonistic relationship with his previous works. In interviews and nonfiction, he refers, in a world-weary manner, to his fiction coming to "creaky life," the "vast synecdoche" of his backlist, his ambivalent creation of "new marionettes, with nice silken strings." Is he playfully debasing an exercise he obviously adores? Why else would he go on "spinning yarns, trying to emulate blind Fate herself" in this particular way? If he does disdain the process, he seems unable to step away from convention. "The Sea" is a book so filled with descriptive poetry it slows to moments of stasis, but Banville still leases out enough brilliance to construct a tragic, gorgeous plot. It's not just that the extended cast of "The Blue Guitar" is underdrawn and the plot underfed, the difference here is that the narrator himself gets involved. Oliver Orme pre-empts any criticism of the book by repeatedly criticizing its melodrama. Orme is son of Oscar, brother to Ossie. He lives in a world populated by Polly Pettit (née Plomer), Perry Percival, Maggie Mallon. He looks at the other characters as if they are "violent strangers driven by ungovernable passions, like the characters in, yes, in a particularly overblown operatic drama." Polly can be as "aloof as a stage heroine." He worries that Gloria, at one point, will storm in "and the grotesque bedroom farce" will be complete. "Glumly I foresaw the days and weeks to come, as gradually our drama unfurled itself in all its predictable awfulness." Perhaps most revealing is when his attention turns away: "Polly was still telling her story, more to herself it seemed than to me. ... I kept being distracted by the window and the washed-blue sky outside." The sky, the light, the sea. Of course, but why choose this construction? Why make a reader pick through the marionette work? In his Benjamin Black novels, "character matters, plot matters, dialogue matters," Banville has said, "to a much greater degree than they do in my Banville books." So what does a book become when the narrator himself is kicking at the construct, questioning its flimsiness? Banville's crime characters are never endowed with enough self-knowledge to criticize their worlds. Banville has divided his writing into "Banville" and "Black," but a further split opens in "The Blue Guitar" - the halfhearted shuffle of characters about their Irish locale on one side of this pronounced chasm, and on the other the glorious accumulation of sentences. The book becomes vital as it moves away from the plot, when Banville describes the process of creation. "Painting, like stealing," he writes, "was an endless effort at possession, and endlessly I failed." Painting is difficult but can't compare with writing: "How treacherous language is, more slippery even than paint." What's important is not the characters, certainly not their psychology, but the surface of the world. "So it was the world, the world in its entirety, I had to tackle. But world is resistant, it lives turned away from us, in blithe communion with itself. World won't let us in." Here, finally, is a worthy conflict. The stakes are raised, not for the characters, not for Olly, Polly and Percival, but for the creator, for Banville himself. Will he be able to capture the world, to create it anew? "Technique can be acquired, technique you can learn, with time and effort, but what about the rest of it," he writes, "the bit that really counts, where does that come from?" Will he finally achieve the unparalleled linguistic beauty? Will it happen in this round of transformation? "Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar," Wallace Stevens writes. This process is dangerous and thrilling, bridging "the man-killing crevasse." Will art make it across? "It was great to discover that linguistic beauty could be pursued as an end in itself," Banville said in his Paris Review interview. So we come to "The Blue Guitar" for this beauty, melody and rhythm. It's just that this investigation of the surface of the world, of the creation of art, is shackled to a plot sabotaged by its own narrator. It raises a central question: Why not leave this approach behind? In his novel "The Infinities," a compelling narrative voice rose from a mathematician who had suffered a stroke - a pure, roaming brain. "The Blue Guitar" advances Banville's lifelong project, pushes the world through his "mesh of language." It reveals new, opulent sentences. But if his story is set upon a sabotaged narrative scaffolding, the chiming beauty of all these sentences competes with another sound, an underscore of persistent wooden thunk. CRAIG TAYLOR, editor of the literary magazine Five Dials, is the author of "Londoners."
Guardian Review
A lapsed painter wonders where it all went wrong in the latest novel from the Man Booker winner Novels 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 interesting, if the person telling us about them is a "character" of some definite kind: amusing, monstrous, self-deceiving, knowingly unreliable, even just quirky. This is certainly what seems to be on offer in John Banville's The Blue Guitar, of which the title, which nods at Wallace Stevens, warns us to expect a cubist approach to "the truth". In fact, its plot contains very little in the way of surprise or novelty (man has affair, runs from beloved when rumbled, has guilty fit, reunites with wife -- who has also been carrying on elsewhere -- is diminished, and finally becomes the caretaker of former beloved's ancient dog), and the manner of its telling is no more daring. Although Banville's narrator, 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, suffers it and writes it down. He's a straightforward sort of sucker. He is also cultured, digressive and, in his way, charming, a roly-poly Dylan Thomas type -- but Irish, and without the genius -- who introduces himself with apparently minimal embarrassment as a lapsed painter and a still-active petty thief (very petty, as it turns out). He might also have added narcissist and self-analyst with a special interest in exploring the connections between the various elements of his existence. Just as he tried to bridge the gap between "things in themselves" and their artistic representation in his painterly days, so now in his thieving and in his adultery he takes from one reality to establish another. Since these attempts all lead Orme to failure and disappointment, it is fair to say that his story has a tragic dimension. And yet we don't feel it as such in any compelling way. Orme's narration is too chattily affable for that, too intent on deflation and self-mockery. Besides, he is too much of a klutz. Does this mean that Banville, who is generally so skilful at showing the sufferings of the human heart in love, wants us to withhold our sympathies in this case? It seems unlikely. More probably, by making his main character a familiar kind of fool and not a figure of gigantic anguish on a blasted heath, he intends that his readers will identify with him more readily. And we do identify, of course -- but the restrictions are there. The modesty of scale cannot be denied. Especially since the downsizing that affects Orme himself also applies to others caught up in his debacle. Gloria, his wife, is a "preternaturally composed" and largely absent figure -- a water-colour character among the oilier others. Polly, the object of his affections, is (at least to start with) a jolly, pink-cheeked country girl with "something childlike" about her. Her husband Marcus is a likable but wet repairer of watches. The local grandee Freddie is a mild-mannered toff from central casting. None of them, in other words, is able to act as a sufficiently extensive canvas on which Orme can project his largest human feelings. Neither are they smart or canny or ironical enough to offer him other ways in which to express these things. The same might also be said, albeit in different terms, about the setting in which all this takes place. Orme has returned to where he spent his childhood -- an unidentified Irish town in which the landmarks are as generic as the inhabitants (big house, studio, gatehouse, fish-and-chip shop). But any hopes that he might cherish of being stimulated by these old connections to take up his paintbrushes again are already extinguished by the time we meet him. In fact, it is partly as a result of feeling like "a familiar alien" that he flirts with Polly, and so precipitates the "grotesque bedroom farce" of the plot. At every turn (and the structure and setting of the book are very tight, so there aren't many turns), The Blue Guitar leaves us in the hands of a character who wants to think big thoughts about the mess he has made of things, but who struggles to rise to the occasion. He cannot even think amply, healingly enough about what he believes is the root cause of his present waywardness -- the death of his daughter in early childhood, which has turned his own and his wife's present life into "aftermath". As for the waywardness itself, there is the same self-knowledge but the same peculiar government of the tongue. In life and in love Orme cannot connect with himself; the original vagueness of his temperament has mutated into paralysing uncertainty; focus has become selfishness; engagement has become wearily passive acceptance. And what's the conclusion? "One does what one does," he sighs, "and staggers bleeding out of the china shop." * Andrew Motion's The New World is published by Jonathan Cape. To order The Blue Guitar for [pound]11.99 (RRP [pound]14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. - Andrew Motion.
Kirkus Review
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 affairwith 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
"They would all see what I saw, but not as I did, with my eyes, from my particular angle, in my own way that is as feeble and imperceptive as everyone else's but that is mine." So says Oliver Orme, the famous painter, now stilled, at the center of a new work from Man Booker Prize winner Banville that aims to capture the specificity of our experience-and, particularly, the artist's transformative vision. Unappealingly short, stout, and nearly 50, with a moody and self-indulgent streak, Oliver is a poor, strutting hero in his own story and a thief besides-he snatches small things perhaps for the same reason he paints: to manage the world. Except now he readily acknowledges "the man-killing crevasse" between what's there and how it's seen in his mind, the real picture he wants to paint and now can't. But he's still thieving, this time taking friend Marcus's wife, Polly, which leads to much groaning and "puny catastrophe" even as we get an outline of Oliver's life from weaselly childhood to the death of his daughter, a tragedy he doesn't seem able to touch. Verdict What the reader gets: Banville's always gorgeous writing (though sometimes a bit arch), a fascinating sense of how creative sorts do and don't work (more of that would have been welcome), and the account of the sort of banal affair we've seen before. [See Prepub Alert, 3/16/15.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
CALL ME AUTOLYCUS. Well, no, don't. Although I am, like that unfunny clown, a picker-up of unconsidered trifles. Which is a fancy way of saying I steal things. Always did, as far back as I can remember. I may fairly claim to have been a child prodigy in the fine art of thieving. This is my shameful secret, one of my shameful secrets, of which, however, I am not as ashamed as I should be. I do not steal for profit. The objects, the artefacts, that I purloin--there is a nice word, prim and pursed--are of scant value for the most part. Oftentimes their owners don't even miss them. This upsets me, puts me in a dither. I won't say I want to be caught, but I do want the loss to be registered; it's important that it should be. Important to me, I mean, and to the weight and legitimacy of the--how shall I say? The exploit. The endeavour. The deed. I ask you, what's the point of stealing something if no one knows it's stolen save the stealer? I used to paint. That was my other passion, my other proclivity. I used to be a painter. Ha! The word I wrote down at first, instead of painter, was painster. Slip of the pen, slip of the mind. Apt, though. Once I was a painter, now I'm a painster. Ha. I should stop, before it's too late. But it is too late. Orme. That's my name. A few of you, art lovers, art haters, may remember it, from bygone times. Oliver Orme. Oliver Otway Orme, in fact. O O O. An absurdity. You could hang me over the door of a pawnshop. Otway, by the by, after an undistinguished street where my parents lived when they were young and first together and where, presumably, they initiated me. Orme is a plausible name for a painter, isn't it? A painterly name. It looked well, down at the right-hand corner of a canvas, modestly minuscule but unmissable, the O an owlish eye, the r rather art-nouveauish and more like a Greek τ, the m a pair of shoulders shaking in rich mirth, the e like--oh, I don't know what. Or yes, I do: like the handle of a chamber pot. So there you have me. Orme the master painster, who paints no more. What I want to say is -- Storm today, the elements in a great rage. Furious gusts of wind booming against the house, shivering its ancient timbers. Why does this kind of weather always make me think of childhood, why does it make me feel I'm back there in those olden days, crop-haired, in short trousers, with one sock sagging? Childhood is supposed to be a radiant springtime but mine seems to have been always autumn, the gales seething in the big beeches behind this old gate-lodge, as they're doing right now, and the rooks above them wheeling haphazard, like scraps of char from a bonfire, and a custard-coloured gleam having its last go low down in the western sky. Besides, I'm tired of the past, of the wish to be there and not here. When I was there I writhed fretfully enough in my fetters. I'm pushing fifty and feel a hundred, big with years. What I want to say is this, that I have decided, I have determined, to weather the storm. The interior one. I'm not in good shape, that's a fact. I feel like an alarm clock that an angry sleeper, an angry waker, has given such a shake to that all the springs and sprockets inside it have come loose. I'm all ajangle. I should take myself to Marcus Pettit for repair. Ha ha. They will be missing me by now, over there on the far side of the estuary. They will wonder where I've got to--I wonder the same thing myself--and won't imagine I'm so near. Polly will be in an awful state, with no one to talk to and confide in, and no one at all to look to for comfort except Marcus, whose comfort she is hardly likely to call on, much, given the state of things. I miss her already. Why did I go? Because I couldn't stay. I picture her in her cramped parlour above Marcus's workshop, huddled in front of the fire in the murky light of this late-September afternoon, her knees shiny from the flames and her shins mottled in diamond shapes. She will be nibbling worriedly at a corner of her mouth with those little sharp teeth of hers that always remind me of the flecks of glistening fat in a Christmas pudding. She is, was, my own dear pudding. I ask again: Why did I leave? Such questions. I know why I left, I know very well why, and should stop pretending that I don't. Marcus will be in his workshop, at his bench. I see him, too, in his sleeveless leather jerkin, intent and hardly breathing, the jeweller's glass screwed into his eye socket, plying his tiny instruments that are in my mind's eye a steel scalpel and forceps, dissecting a Patek Philippe. Although he is younger than I am--it seems to me everyone is younger than I am--his hair is thinning and turning grey already and, see, hangs now in feathery wisps on either side of his leaning narrow saintly face, stirred by each breath he breathes, stirred a little, a little. He used to have something of the look of the Dürer of that androgynous self-portrait, the three-quarters profile one with tawny ringlets and rosebud mouth and disconcertingly come-hither eye; latterly, though, he might be one of Grünewald's suffering Christs. "Work, Olly," he said to me dolefully, "work is all I have to distract me from my anguish." That was the word he used: anguish. I thought it queer, even in such dire circumstances, more a flourish than a word. But pain compels eloquence--look at me; listen to me. The child is there too, somewhere, Little Pip, as they call her--never just Pip, always Little Pip. It's true she's quite small, but what if she grows up an amazon? Little Pip the Gentle Giantess. I shouldn't laugh, I know; it's jealousy jogging my funny bone, jealousy and sad regret. Gloria and I had a little one of our own, briefly. Gloria! She had slipped my mind until this moment. She too will be wondering where on earth I am. Where, on earth. Damn it, why does everything have to be so difficult. I am going to think about the night I finally fell in love with Polly, finally for the first time, that is. Anything for diversion, even though thoughts of love are what I should be diverting myself from, seeing how hot the soup is that love has got me into. It happened at the annual dinner of the Guild of Clockmakers, Locksmiths and Goldsmiths. We were there as Marcus's guests, Gloria and I--Gloria under protest, I may add, she being as susceptible as I am to boredom and general fed-upness--and were sat with him and Polly at their table, along with some others whom we needn't take any notice of. Beefsteak and roast pork on the menu, and spuds, of course, boiled, mashed, baked or chipped, not forgetting your perennial bacon-and-cabbage. Perhaps it was the flabby stink of seared flesh that was making me feel peculiar; that, and the smoke from the candles on the tables and the borborygmic blarings of the three-piece band. There was a ceaseless clamour of voices behind me in the big hall, a rolling heavy swell out of which there would spurt now and then, like a fish leaping, a shriek of some woman's tipsy laughter. I had been drinking but I don't believe I was drunk. All the same, as I talked to Polly, and looked at her--indeed, gloated on her--I had the sense of dawning illumination, of sudden epiphany, that so often comes at a certain stage on the way to drunkenness. She seemed not newly beautiful, exactly, but to radiate something I hadn't noticed before, something that was hers, uniquely: the abundance of her, the very being of her being. This is fanciful, I know, and probably what I thought I was seeing was merely an effect brought on by the fumes of bad wine, but I'm trying to fix the essence of the moment, to isolate the spark that would ignite such a conflagration of ecstasy and pain, of mischief, damage and, yes, Marcusian anguish. And anyway, who's to say that what we see when we're drunk is not reality, and the sober world a bleared phantasmagoria? Polly is no great beauty. In saying this I am not being unchivalrous, I hope; it's best to start out candid, since I aim to continue that way, in so far as I am capable of candour. Of course, I found her, find her, altogether lovely. She is full-figured, biggish in the beam--picture the nicely rounded nether half of a child-sized cello--with a neat, heart-shaped face and brownish, somewhat unruly hair. Her eyes are truly remarkable. They are pale grey, they seem almost translucent, and in certain lights take on a mother-of-pearl sheen. They have a slight cast, which finds an endearing echo in the slight overlap of her two pearly front teeth. She has a placid mien for the most part, but her glance can be surprisingly sharp, and her tone at times can deliver quite a sting, quite a sting. Mostly, though, she keeps a wary eye on a world she doesn't feel entirely at ease in. She is always conscious of her lack of social polish--she's a country lass, after all, even if her folk are shabby-grand--in comparison to my poised Gloria, for example, and is unsure in matters of etiquette and nice behaviour. It was very affecting to see, that night at the Clockers, as the evening is colloquially known, how at the start of each course she would glance quickly about the table and check which item of cutlery the rest of us were favouring before daring to pick up knife or fork or spoon for herself. Maybe that's where love begins, not in sudden seizures of passion but in the recognition and simple acceptance of, of--of something or other, I don't know what. The Clockers is a tedious affair, and I felt a fool for coming. I had turned my back on the festive crowd and, propped on my elbows, was leaning forwards earnestly across the table so that my face, hot and throbbing, was almost in Polly's bosom, or would almost have been had she not turned halfway away from me on her chair, so that she was looking sideways at me along the curve of her nicely plump right shoulder. What did I talk to her about, with such force and fervour? I can't remember--not that it matters: the matter was in the tone, not the content. I could feel Gloria monitoring us, with an amused and sceptical eye. I often think Gloria married me so as always to have something to make her laugh. I don't mean to sound resentful, not at all. Her laughter is not cruel or even hurtful. She just finds me funny, not for what I say or do but for what I am, her rufous-headed, roly-poly and, did she but know it, light-fingered manling. Polly at this time, the time of the night at the Clockers when I fell in love with her, had been married for three or four years, and was certainly no dewy-eyed lass of the kind that might be thought susceptible to my insinuative blandishments. All the same, it was plain I was having an effect on her. Listening to me, she had taken on that vaguely staring, wide-eyed expression, accentuated by her lopsided gaze, of a married woman in whom a tentative delight is dawning as she realises, incredulously, that a man she has known for years and who is not her husband is suddenly telling her, in however roundabout and high-flown a fashion, that he has all of a sudden fallen in love with her. Marcus was away among the dancers, whooping and stomping. Despite his diffident and incurably melancholic disposition he does love a party, and joins in with violent enthusiasm at the first pop of a cork or blast on a bugle--that night he had invited Gloria no fewer than three times to jump up and join him in his capers, and on each occasion, to my considerable surprise, she had accepted. In my early days with Polly I used to try, treacherous hound that I am, to get her to talk about Marcus, to tell me things he said and did in the privacy of their lives together, but she's a loyal soul and let me know straight away and with impressive firmness that her husband's peculiarities, if indeed he had any, which she wasn't saying he had, were a forbidden topic. How did we meet in the first place, the four of us? I think it must have been Gloria and Polly who struck up a friendship, or better say an acquaintanceship, though I seem to have known Marcus all my life, or all of his life, since I'm the older of the two of us. I recall an initial picnic in an ornamental park somewhere--bread and cheese and wine and rain--and Polly in a white summer dress, bare-legged and lissom. Inevitably, I see the occasion in the light of old man Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe --the earlier, smaller one--with blonde Gloria in the buff and Polly off in the background bathing her feet. Polly that day seemed hardly more than a girl, pink-cheeked and creamy, instead of the married woman that she was. Marcus was wearing a straw hat with holes in it, and Gloria was her usual glorious self, a big bright beauty shedding radiance all round her. And, my God, but my wife was magnificent that day, as indeed she always is. At thirty-five she has attained the full splendour of maturity. I think of her in terms of various metals, gold, of course, because of her hair, and silver for her skin, but there is something in her too of the opulence of brass and bronze: she has a wonderful shine to her, a stately glow. In fact, she is a Tiepolo rather than a Manet type, one of the Venetian master's Cleopatras, say, or his Beatrice of Burgundy. To my luminous Gloria, Polly could hardly hold one of those little votive candles people used to pay a penny for in church and set burning in front of their favourite saint's statue. Why then did I--? Ah, now, that's the nub of the matter, one of the nubs, that I have worn everything down to. The Clockers ended in the mysteriously abrupt way that such things do, and most of the people at our table had already risen and were making befuddled attempts to organise themselves for departure when Polly fairly sprang to her feet, thinking of Little Pip, I imagine--Polly's father and her addled mother were supposedly minding the child--but then paused a second and did a curious, shivery little flounce, surprisedly smiling with eyebrows raised and her hands held out from her sides with the palms flat on the air, like a toddler attempting a curtsy. It may have been nothing more than the effect of her bum detaching itself from the seat of her chair--it was very hot and humid in the room--but to me it seemed that she had been lifted, suddenly, lightly, by the action of some invisible and buoyant medium: that she was, literally, and for a second, walking on air. This was hardly the result of the fervid harangue I had been subjecting her to in the absence of her husband, yet I was moved, to hot tears, almost, feeling I had somehow been allowed to share with her in this brief and secret exaltation. She took up her velvet purse, still with a trace of that faintly surprised smile--was she even blushing a little?--and made a show of looking about for Marcus, who was fetching their coats. Then I too rose, my heart fluttering and my poor knees gone to rubber. In love! Again! Excerpted from The Blue Guitar by John Banville All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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