Volume 51, Number 4 · March 11, 2004
A Double Life
By John Banville
Judge Savage
by Tim Parks
Arcade, 442 pp., $24.95
One of the prime difficulties the novelist faces is that he must work within the delusion that life as human beings live it is a fair representation of reality. He must work as if, to adapt Wittgenstein's famous dictum, life is all that is the case. The composer, for whom form is content and content form, can bypass mere daily doings and go straight to the essence of things, pure ideas, unmediated expression. So too the poet, despite having to lug the baggage of common words, can achieve effects between the lines that are beyond the reach of all but the most slim-fingered and sublime purveyors of prose. 'Gesang ist Dasein!' Rilke exclaims, and who would gainsay him? Even the painter, a great one such as Cézanne, dabbling among surfaces, can plunge into depths and fix what seems the secret of Being in a few abstract lines, a few planes of pure color.
Review, 3529 words
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