I can’t pretend I was looking forward to a public interview with John Banville at last week’s West Cork Literary Festival in Bantry. I remember him, in a previous life, as a very taciturn subeditor on the Irish Press. He had a penchant for tank tops, pipe smoking and commenting despairingly about the quality of reporters’ prose.
As far as I could gather, he had not become any more chatty or charitable in the intervening years. On the contrary, he has a bit of a reputation for reducing interviewers to blubbering wrecks with long, bored silences that speak louder than despair.
In the event, Banville turned out to be a delight. He was relaxed, courteous and thorough in his answers. He was also gleefully candid about the spiteful reviews of The Sea, his Man Booker-winning novel, and the pleasure he derived from getting up the noses of po-faced literary critics.
The Sea is certainly his most accomplished work and, as he reminded his critics after receiving his award, a genuine work of art. Of all the books to his name, it is the one most likely to survive him and secure his international reputation. But in this country it is for another of his books that he will always be remembered.
That honour goes to The Book of Evidence, his 1989 novel based very closely on the Malcolm Macarthur case. Freddie Montgomery, the suave dandyish antihero, was vividly identifiable as the man at the centre of the most celebrated and controversial murder case in Ireland in generations. Banville’s prose put fictitious, but wholly credible, flesh on the bones of the charismatic killer with the bow tie and the neat finger-waved hair.
It’s hard to know how Banville feels about the real-life inspiration for his fictional creation. His only comment, about the prospect of liberty for Macarthur, was a throwaway quip about expecting the killer to pursue him for a portion of his royalties.
There is little doubt that The Book of Evidence helped elevate Macarthur to near-mythological status. It may even have contributed in some way to the outcry that is heard every time the possibility of Macarthur’s release from prison is raised. If that is so, then Banville has had some unwitting part to play in the killer’s continued incarceration, but only a very small one.
The real reason why Macarthur remains in jail after 23 years, having now served almost twice the average prison term for murder, remains clouded in myth and rumour.
Tomorrow the state will give its explanations for continuing to hold Macarthur, despite a parole board recommendation that he qualifies for release. It seems inevitable that Macarthur will stay in jail for the foreseeable future, but regardless of the legal justifications advanced tomorrow, there seems to be no good reason for his continued incarceration.
For some years now Macarthur has been held in an open prison. This status suggests nobody really considers him a threat to society. He certainly committed two of the most cold-blooded and calculated murders imaginable, but we have become so inured to similar crimes in recent years that the names of the victims, much less of their killers when convicted, are forgotten within a week.
Macarthur never faced trial for one of the murders, that of Donal Dunne, a farmer. The prosecution’s decision continues to baffle after all these years. It was explained that since Macarthur had already pleaded guilty and been sentenced to life for the murder of Bridie Gargan, imposing another life sentence would have been a futile exercise. But some years later Brendan O’Donnell was charged, tried and convicted of three murders — those of Imelda Riney, her son Liam and Joe Walsh. Nobody suggested that was futile.
And then there was the haste with which Macarthur was sent to jail — not uncommon in the case of a guilty plea, of course, but it did nothing to ease the public’s feeling that there was more to the case than met the eye, that people in high places did not want the minutiae of the Macarthur case aired in public.
Add to all of these piquant factors the publication of a bestselling novel about the case, the creation of a compelling and memorable fictional character to satisfy the avid public interest in Macarthur, and you create a criminal demonised in popular myth.
Everything about the Macarthur case shimmers with the mesmerising aura of celebrity and glamour — even the nature of his crime, its almost pornographic violence and chilliness, seems like a dazzlingly capricious indulgence at a time when we are used to thuggish gangsters wasting each other for minor debts and grudges.
But flimsy though their reasons for taking life may be, at least they have reasons. Macarthur, so far as anybody could tell, really had none at all.
Into this mix we must now add the crowd-pleasing impulses of a government warming up for a general election. Disturbingly for Macarthur, his fate is in political hands, specifically those of the minister for defence, Willie O’Dea. Michael McDowell has absented himself from the case on the grounds that he was part of Macarthur’s defence team in 1983.
Given the status and dimensions he has attained as both a real-life and fictional villain, it would take a brave politician to grant Macarthur his freedom. The tabloid fascination with Macarthur is another reason for politicians to pause since news of his release is bound to unleash a volley of boos and hisses from this pantomime quarter.
These pressures should be ignored. Macarthur is hardly an enduring threat to civil society. Rehabilitation is one of the stated objectives of our criminal justice system and, after almost 24 years in jail, he deserves a chance to turn his life round.
Even after all these years he is still recognisable from the famous pictures of the smirking man-about-town making his way into the Central Criminal Court to face murder charges, making it unlikely that he will live out the rest of his days in complete anonymity. But Macarthur is still entitled to try for relative normality in his late middle age.
This case illustrates the worrying implications of allowing electioneering politicians to decide the fate of a high-profile prisoner.
More than 17 years after he wrote The Book of Evidence, John Banville is still answering questions about the Macarthur case, and however tedious the subject has grown, he continues to do so with good grace.
It is a safe bet, though, that Macarthur himself would quite like to consign that chapter of his life to the past and never have it mentioned again — a vain aspiration, of course, but after almost 24 years in prison he deserves that chance.
