davidclensy.com

John Banville, who won the Booker Prize in 2005 for The Sea, confirmed he has written his last literary fiction, speaking in Bath this week. As he promoted his new book The Lock Up, he indicated that he would now be concentrating purely on his Strafford & Quirke mystery series. His new work is the third in the series, which has been said to elevate the crime novel to new heights.

The 77-year-old covered everything from the dumbing-down of literature to the rise of AI (artificial intelligence) during the event on Tuesday (May 30).

“In an age like ours, as Auden said of the 1930s, ‘a low, dishonest decade’, the role of art is more important, because it’s a place of authenticity,” he said. “That’s a very valuable thing in our time.”

He added: “It mightn’t be bad for the arts to go back into the catacombs. It mightn’t be bad for artists too, to have to be ignored, and feel lonely, and feel isolated for a couple of decades.”

Describing the difference between his “literary” work and his Strafford & Quirke series, he said: “These are craft works. I’m quite proud of them. But now that I’ve written my last literary novel, in The Singularities, which ends in the words ‘full stop’, I’m putting more and more of myself into these. A friend of mine said the other day, ‘you’re gentrifying the crime novel’, which wouldn’t be a bad thing. There are many crime novels that are works of art. … It doesn’t have to be done in literary language to be authentic and to have that electric charge that a work of art has.”

Wexford-born Banville, who initially wrote his crime fiction under the pseudonym of Benjamin Black, described genre fiction as “less tedious” to write than literary fiction. “The Singularities took about six years to write. These take about four months. What you get in these is spontaneity. What you get in the others is concentration.”

Banville said he didn’t believe AI would ever be able to create works of art truly comparable with those to come from the human brain.

“Of course artificial intelligence is astonishing, it’s been around since the Sixties, and it’s becoming very acute now,” he said, adding that AI has the intellectual level of a six-year-old, because it can’t have our experience. “AI can’t cross the road. It can’t live the way we live. It can’t fall in love. It can’t fall into hate. It may destroy us, of course, God knows we’re a stupid enough species to let it do it, but it will never achieve the subtlety of our minds.”