'We all wear masks... that's what people do'

Sinéad Gleeson meets John Banville, whose latest novel The Sea is out this week

When people discuss John Banville's work, it's all about the writing, the philosophy, the Nietzschean overtones, the Nabokovian echoes – never how funny he can be.

"Most of the time people talk about me being this very serious, literary writer. They miss out on the humour in the books and that makes me sad," he says.

He sounds serious, but there is a hint of playfulness in the remark and he's bashful in a "what the hell do I know?" sort of way. He answers many questions with a question, and feigns ignorance when asked about the predictable comparisons to Beckett and Joyce. ("Do I get compared to Joyce and Beckett? I don't think I do.")

He doesn't see himself as post-colonial. "I'm more of a post-human writer. Going right back to the Renaissance, people believed that man was the centre of the universe, and for me, he's not. It's about everything else going on around us."

Born in 1945 in Wexford, Banville attended a Christian Brothers school and St Peter's College in Wexford. He didn't go to university and ended up working for Aer Lingus and later as a journalist. He was a sub-editor at The Irish Press (he recalls subbing copy by Vincent Browne) and was literary editor of The Irish Times until 1999. It's no surprise, then, that language is a key theme in his work.

"I suppose in a way I like to make the reader think about language and the words we use."

In his writing, this is most obvious in his 'scientific' quartet of Dr Copernicus, Kepler, The Newton Letter and Mephisto, where the inadequacy of language to explain the phenomena of the world is explored.

He followed these with the 'art' trilogy of The Book of Evidence, Ghosts and Athena. Like the quartet before them, these saw Banville revisit themes and even reintroduce the same characters through the series. This revisitation marks his work, picking up issues and ideas and tilting them to inspect them from another perspective.

In his new book, The Sea, his protagonist, Max, worries about "how imprecise language is, how inadequate to its occasions".

Banville's protagonists are always male, of a certain age, dogged by self-loathing, unfulfilled and to varying degrees, caddish. (They have much in common with John Self, the pathetic figure in Money by Martin Amis, a writer comparable to Banville in many ways.)

The Sea is possibly Banville's most emotional book. It tells the story of a tragic childhood memory which has haunted Max, and more besides.

"This book didn't start out as a novel about a man whose wife has died of cancer a year ago. It was just a tale about the sea, a tale about a childhood, but Max wouldn't let me just tell that story, it was as if he kept interrupting with the story of his wife."

In Banville's other books, death is violent; many of his characters are murderers. His masterpiece, The Book of Evidence, features Freddie Montgomery's savage killing of a maid with a hammer. In The Sea, however, death is sedate, dignified.

Morality and mortality overlap in Banville's writing. Max is a pitiful figure, a "paltry shivering thing", aging, bitter and condemned by his daughter for "living in the past". So too were the characters Freddie and Victor Maskille in The Untouchable. So is the past where most of his characters live?

"Memory is a very potent force and there's no future and present, only past."

In Banville's novel Shroud, Axel Vander becomes a prisoner of the past and all its layered intricacies. One reviewer said of it: "The story is like an onion, with Banville stripping away layer after rotten layer of Vander's history until we are at the heart of darkness indeed." This is a perfect synopsis of Banville's narrative approach. The story is revealed as the characters reveal themselves. They are very real and very recognisable, even at their most malign. It is akin to being presented with a Russian doll, each containing many inner selves, some of which we identify with.

"Well we all wear masks in our public lives which change from situation to situation," he says, "that's what people do."

Banville constantly inverts fact and fiction, the real and the unreal, particularly in his early historical-fiction novels. He has said in the past that melting fact and fiction is a process that "achieves a kind of illumination of character".

He has described himself as a "machine that writes" but Banville is far from mechanical. He may well be the best humanist writer working today; he, though, is more modest.

"I don't know how my work will be judged, it will be years before we'll ever know if it makes an impact."