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'Writing a novel is like wading through wet sand, at night, in a storm': John Banville on The Sea

<span>Photograph: Ian Middleton/Alamy</span>
Photograph: Ian Middleton/Alamy

At what moment can the composition of a novel be said to have begun? Nabokov claimed he felt the first tingling caress of Lolita when he read a newspaper report of a captive ape that after much coaxing had produced a drawing of – what else? – the bars of its cage. Joyce’s first date with Nora Barnacle fixed Ulysses in Dublin on 16 June 1904 in perpetuity. And there was a real-life model for the Tadzio of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, spotted by the author one evening in the summer of 1911 in the dining room of the Grand Hotel des Bains on the Lido and lovingly, adoringly, remembered, for ever. Or so they say.

For my part, any novel that I am working on seems to have had no beginning, but to have been always somehow under way; perhaps there is only one novel, of which every so often I publish a segment. Yet in the case of The Sea I do seem to recall an initiating moment. I say “seem”, because it’s possible I imagined it; in art, origination myths are common, and enduring.

I see myself walking on a beach on a cold pale morning in the spring of 20--, to use a formula borrowed from the Mighty Russians. Or it might have been back in 19--, for a novel has a long gestation period. It was one of those days when sky and sea are the same shade of dull pearl and there is no horizon. As I trudged over the packed and squeaky sand I had the impression that I was walking into myself, into some part of my own past.

John Banville ... ‘A novel has a long gestation period.’
John Banville ... ‘A novel has a long gestation period.’ Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

Such experiences, liminal yet touched with a mysterious significance, insist on being reified into words. I remember, I seem to remember, muttering to myself in the dully rancorous tone of a journeyman labourer about to undertake a thankless job, “Well, if anyone can write a novel about the sea, surely I can.” Not that The Sea is about the sea, but I knew what I meant.

I had a rich store of material, having spent my childhood summers at the seaside. For those two or three months my siblings, my friends and I were transformed into amphibious creatures, little mermaids and merlads. Who can forget the season’s first scrotum-tightening, nipple-shrivelling plunge into a turgid ocean still as cold as winter? And remember lying in the sun for too long and waking next morning with the bed sheet plastered like a poultice to one’s seething shoulder blades? The exquisite agony of a bad sunburn is a thing that brands itself on the memory. And then there were the kisses, those chaste kisses of childhood, tasting of brine and breath, and redolent less of sex than a faint and inexplicable sorrow that had something to do with the future.

So I wrote the book. I wish I could say I did it with the rhythm of the waves beating in my head. Writing a novel should be like swimming, but it’s not; it’s like wading through wet sand, at night, in a storm, with no lantern to guide one’s steps and no lighthouse to warn of the submerged reefs and wrecks that lie ahead.

And what remains? By now that tide has receded so far that when I look back across the sands of time the faint blue line I make out in the distance is not The Sea, but the sea.

Snow by John Banville is published by Faber (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.