The Two Mr. Banvilles

"I thought I'd be doing it week by week, and I was thrilled by this," Banville says. "I'd have been like Dickens!" Alas, the Times insisted the whole thing be finished before it printed Chapter 1 -- but he still loved the challenge of matching a story arc to a rigid format.

"Benjamin Black is like a schoolboy who's been given an extra week's Christmas holiday," Banville says.

"This, of course, is worrying. To enjoy writing is deeply worrying. I must be doing something wrong."

* * *

The schoolboy on holiday is grinning. He knows he's not doing anything wrong. But he also knows -- despite the fun he's had pitting Banville against Black -- that his writing personas are more closely linked than he sometimes implies.

For one thing, Black was created because Banville needed a kick in the novelistic pants.

"I see now that it was a device to get John Banville to think differently," he explains. For too long he'd been writing first-person narratives about men in deep trouble who are all "intensely telling their own story."

The Black books, he says, are his first venture into the third person in decades.

For another thing: Banville's taste may not match that of most thriller writers or fans, but he can sound a lot like them when he calls James M. Cain's "The Postman Always Rings Twice" a masterpiece or praises Georges Simenon's more serious novels as "up there with the best of 20th-century literature."

"All art at a certain level is entertainment," Banville says. The heck with Aristotle: "We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained."

No one is likely to confuse "The Sea" (first sentence: "They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide") with "The Silver Swan" (first sentence: "Quirke did not recognize the name"). Yet there are plenty of passages -- such as the following dense slice of Black prose -- that could slip easily into either book:

"Sometimes the beauty of things, ordinary things -- those unseen flowers, this burnished foliage, the honeyed sunlight on the pavement at her feet -- pressed in upon her urgently while at the same time the things themselves seemed to hold back, at one remove, as if there were an invisible barrier between her and the world."

And when the next books by John Banville and Benjamin Black come out, their respective admirers may be in for some surprises.

The Banville novel will, on one level, continue in extreme highbrow mode. "It takes its inspiration from Heinrich von Kleist's great play 'Amphitryon,' " he says. His publisher's reaction: "Another crowd-pleaser, John, what?"

Yet it will be lighter than recent Banville efforts and written largely in the third person -- "a different kind of book for me."

As for the next Benjamin Black: Fans may be alarmed to hear that Banville is bored with Quirke.

He's more drawn to the pathologist's wayward daughter, Phoebe, these days. Little more than a plot device at first, she has grown into the troubled young woman from the passage quoted above -- the one simultaneously drawn to beauty and detached from the world.

"Phoebe," says her two-headed creator, "is more of a John Banville character than a Benjamin Black character. That's probably why she interests me so much."