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Books

If there’d been a Gilbert and Sullivan opera about Roland Barthes, it might have sounded like John Banville’s The Blue Guitar

Banville’s absurdly mannered, derivative novel is a crime against the English language

12 September 2015

9:00 AM

12 September 2015

9:00 AM

The Blue Guitar John Banville

Viking, pp.256, £14.99, ISBN: 9780241004326

The Blue Guitar is John Banville’s 16th novel. Our narrator-protagonist is a painter called Oliver Orme. We are in Ireland, but it’s hard to say exactly where, or exactly when. There are telephones and cars, but the dress code is antiquated: hats, canes, pocket watches. This is ‘the new-old world that Godley’s Theorem wrought’: people have ‘learned to harvest energy from the oceans and out of the very air itself’.

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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £12.99 Tel: 08430 600033. Claire Lowdon’s novel Left of the Bang was published in June.

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