Freddie Montgomery is very much alive. It is not just the complete appearance, for the first time in Spain and edited by Alfaguara, of the trilogy that make up The Book of Evidence , the only one of the three books that had been translated to date, Ghosts and Athena , nor the the fact that its author, John Banville (Wexford, 1945), is embarking on a fourth installment around the character. There is a story behind it. Or in front. Malcolm MacArthur, sentenced to 30 years in prison for a double murder in the 1970s, is now free after serving his sentence. He lives somewhere in the south of the city and has a son who is a math teacher. MacArthur is the embryo of Montgomery, the man who inspired the Irish writer, who receives The Sphere at the Dublin restaurant Terra Madre, where he has long used to pick up momentum in his creative activity.

What has he been working on throughout the morning? In a new novel by Benjamin Black and in another sequel by Freddie Montgomery, the fourth, where he roams an alternate universe. A peculiar book. I have been with him for many years. I'm not sure I can finish it, I understand that the next installment of Black takes place in San Sebastián, yes, it will be called April in Spain. I am in love with San Sebastián and decided to send Quirke [the pathologist-detective protagonist of this series of novels] there with his wife. It's a complicated story, where there is also a role for Strafford [the detective in his last two crime novels, Sin and The Secret Guests]. Analogies have been drawn between the 'Book of Evidence', 'Crime and Punishment', Dostoevsky's and Camus's 'The Stranger' Well, there is a long tradition of confessed criminals in literature. I would say that I feel closer to Dostoevsky than to Camus. However, Freddie Montgomery is based on a real character, a famous murderer. He's free now, and I see him frequently around town. He used to greet me, but lately he eludes my eyes.

Banville shows a photograph of MacArthur on his mobile phone, pointing out the obvious physical resemblance that unites him with him. "What could happen to my brother?" He says with a smile. “A week or two before the book was published, in 1989, my publisher urged me to consult with an attorney about the possibility of libel. I did and hired one to read it. He told me that he had really enjoyed it but that there were quite a few aspects in the text for which he could be accused of libel, as well as a number of characters that could be identified as real. His advice was not to publish it, but it was impossible to stop it at the time. I made a few cosmetic changes and my editors bravely decided to go ahead. After the post, we feared a lawsuit, but nothing happened. When the book became a finalist for the Booker Prize, I met another famous Irish lawyer, Patrick McEntee, who died in 2018, in a Dublin pub. He also argued about the book and added, "I decided not to sue you." He insisted, with good humor, that I had obviously been inspired by him as a model for Freddie Montgomery's lawyer. I denied it, of course, but he laughed, clapped me on the shoulder, and left. The following year I received a call in the Irish Times , where I was working as a book publisher, from a woman related to Bridie Gargan, the nurse who was one of the people killed by Malcolm MacArthur. He wanted to know if I had seen him. I said no and apologized if the book had hurt her family. I also asked her if she had read it and she told me that a friend had given it to her at Christmas.

Back then I was winking at the police novel. Yes. In a way, it can be said that this was my first novel as Benjamin Black. But Black's books lack the narrative intensity that Banville's possess. Sometimes, in one day, I only write a couple of sentences from a Banville book, which can take me three or four years. I can write Black's in months or even weeks. Something similar happened to Georges Simenon with Maigret's novels and the most ambitious, without his detective. I had never read him until the beginning of the millennium. It was recommended to me by a friend, the philosopher John Gray. The first novel I read was Snow Was Dirty , and I was already impressed. I thought I could do something in that direction. Arguably Simenon is the father of Benjamin Black. In this Freddie Montgomery trilogy, as in many moments of his work, he opts for the interior monologue, it seems to me the most honest way of narrating. All I can do is look at the world like anyone else. Sometimes it is very difficult to believe the omniscient narrator who knows what everyone thinks. His books are usually surrounded by a thick haze. Nothing is what it seems. Banville's books have more poetry, so it's hard to write them. In the end, we live in a fantasy. We believe that we make decisions, that we will never die, that our children will grow beautiful and intelligent, that our wives will never abandon us ... It is fantasy, but it is necessary. And it is wonderful at the same time. Living with the truth would be unbearable. If right now you and I fully felt for a second any of the agony situations that are suffered in the world at this time, we would die. We could not bear to live with the full assumption of things. We have to lie. We are all novelists. We are all artists. As Wallace Stevens, the great American poet, said, we live in supreme fiction. Hemingway said, "How can we live thinking that we are going to die?" I told a friend about it and he replied: "But how could we live without knowing it?" Both are true. 'The Sea' is not only the title of the book that won the Booker in 2005, but also a benchmark in all his work. Many people thought it was my first book. Yes, it can represent something like the lost world, the last place of childhood, the end of innocence, which never really existed, because since childhood we have fought on the street for a share of power. I was born in Wexford and when I write I always go back there even though I don't identify the setting in my books. All artists are children. As Baudelaire said, genius is nothing more than childhood recovered at will. Childhood is our subject. And every reader is also a child, who still wants to listen to them. Beckett said that with the passage of time it became increasingly difficult to write. Before this meeting with you I was reviewing for three and a half hours texts of the new book by Benjamin Black. I left it much worse than when I started. And it's not a Banville book, it's a Black book. Every morning when I start working, I say to myself, "I don't want to do this." Today, yesterday, before yesterday ... Then you start, write, redo and at the end of the day, after a horrible process, there may be something. The result is seductive. For you; not for me. All I see is defeat, failure. Beckett also said it: fail again, fail better. It is all we can do. Do you think reading is threatened? The truth is that if someone watches the world from another galaxy in recent times they will wonder what is happening, but I think there will always be good readers. It is hard to be a good reader. You have to abandon yourself, enter the book and rewrite it, imagine the characters. Recently, in a meeting with readers, I compared Quirke's physique to that of Donald Trump, a big guy with very blond hair. A reader asked me: 'stop saying that Quirke has blond hair; has it brown. ' People build the characters. Reading is a very, very strange process. Transforming the text into ideas, fantasies, history, philosophy ... New technologies do not seem to favor the act of reading as we conceived it. The books will continue because, after all, they have always had a minority interest. The great mistake of many people is to get excited about technology as a source of change in the human being. We do not progress. We are not better or worse. And we will be the same until the sun declines. We have not changed since the Garden of Eden.

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