SNOTGREEN, SCROTUMTIGHTENING: the words that stately, plump Buck Mulligan uses to describe the Irish Sea have become among the most quoted from Joyce’s Ulysses, and along with “wine-dark”, which they are intentionally parodying, arguably the most famous marine adjectives in literature. Mulligan’s full rhapsody, less often quoted, actually begins with the question: “Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a great, sweet mother?” Algy is Algernon Charles Swinburne, and he uses the mother/sea analogy in much of his work; he is also the poet of whom T. S. Eliot said that “what we get in Swinburne is an expression by sound . . . the meaning is merely the hallucination of meaning, because language, uprooted, has adapted itself to the independent life of atmospheric nourishment”. Which bring us to the winner of this week’s Man Booker Prize, John Banville.

Even Banville's detractors, many of whom have pounced since the announcement of the award, are quick to say that he is a great prose stylist. Here, for example, is his description of the sea in The Sea:

“The seabirds mewled and swooped, unnerved, it seemed, by the spectacle of that vast bowl of water bulging like a blister, lead-blue and malignantly agleam.”

This is fairly typical stately, plump John Banville. It is self-conscious “high” writing, aware of its Joycean antecendents, and its key element — apart from what the diseased similes and adverbs (“like a blister”, “malignantly”) tell us about the state of mind of the narrator, Max Morden — is its sonorousness. The sway of the prose mimics the movement both of the waves and of the seabirds; alliteration of “s’s” and “b’s” abound; and the word “sea” is embedded throughout, in the pun on “seemed” and in the rhyme of “agleam”.

At the same time, one could, if one wanted, take it apart easily. How does mewling and swooping, something seabirds do all the time, imply that they are unnerved? Why “agleam”, an archaism, rather than “gleaming”? Is “bulge” actually a good description of the movement of the sea? But these are criticisms that can come to mind only by snapping Banville’s spell, breaking the hypnotic rhythms of his prose, a hypnosis which is saying, all the time, in beautiful whispers: “I am a great writer.”

This, I think, is what has led to some of the attacks on Banville this week. He’s someone who sounds like a great writer; built into our inner reading ear these days is a cadence that tells us when we’re reading Literature with a capital “L”, and Banville’s pen is hard-wired to it. And this sonic touch is backed up by big themes — always death, always grief, always a mannered intellectual narrator who is himself a man of big themes, a writer or art historian — and by multiple buried allusions to Proust, and Dostoevsky, and Beckett, and, of course, Joyce. Some readers love all this; some might feel that Banville preserves what they consider the dignity of writing. Others may feel railroaded by it. When I was a judge, in 2002, I thought his Shroud the most complete example I had read of a book designed, unconsciously no doubt, to win the prize.

But one thing this win made think is that there is no question that the prize should be opened up to America. It is supposed to be for British and Commonwealth writers in English, but Ireland left the Commonwealth in 1948. The reasons for the inclusion of Ireland are many — a deference towards Irish literature in English criticism (which is itself a semi-colonisation of it), a feeling that without Irish writers the international range would be too small — but these only point up the ridiculousness of basing a literary prize on such an irrelevant arena as the Commonwealth. And, in so doing, highlight the fear in the English literary establishment that opening the prize up to America would mean that it would be won, year after year, by Americans.

Good, I say. If you want genuinely great writing, read Updike; read Roth; read Franzen; read Delillo. Hear in their work many types of beauty, not only a kind of linguistic chamber music. See how they use actual comedy, words that make you laugh, not just that most dead literary trick, narrative irony. And, most importantly, discover how the mundane, the everyday, the unserious, the undignified, the low, the grubby, and the sleazy are where modern prose finds its real poetry. John Banville would not agree with me; but I think it’s possible that the man who described the sea as snotgreen and scrotumtightening would.

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