The Sea turns tide for literary fiction

John Banville’s Booker win is a triumph for artistic merit over popularity, writes Arts Editor Ian Kilroy.

WHEN this year’s Man Booker winner, The Sea, by John Banville, was published, the critic Peter J Conradi hailed it as the work of a “writer’s writer.” This phrase is really shorthand for, ‘this is literary fiction, a less commercial book’.

Indeed, yesterday Banville himself tacitly underscored this judgment by saying The Sea “seemed to me too poetic a book to win.” He added: “I thought it was a little book that wouldn’t survive against the great beasts that have stalked the literary jungle this year.”