Banville Bashes "Bad" Book @ Booker!

Aye, the Irish are a feisty lot!

At lunchtime I usually focus directly on eating. No abstractions.
But today, while focussing intently on the above activity, I happened to glance at the newspaper which someone had left there, and which just happened to have fallen open to the BOOKS section, where a certain Reuters article proceeded to draw me into its vortex.
In other words, I guess you could also say, “I saw something in the paper today.”

The article discussed certain comments made by this year’s winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize.
John Banville won this year’s Booker, for his novel The Sea, which I admit, I have been periodically drooling over in the stores. Perhaps I shall crack the wallet and buy the thing.
The Sea is the story of a recently widowed man visiting the seaside resort where he spent time as a young man. He is now trying to find the meaning inherent in his life-changing memories. Themes like that interest me.
Banville won out over a prestigious shortlist consisting of writers Julian Barnes, Sebastian Barry, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith. Interestingly enough, I was keeping an eye on the online readers-voting page at the Man Booker website, and Banville was consistently a last-runner, popularity-wise, right up until showtime.
But yet he won!
By most advance-polls, he was considered a longshot.
So, you would think that upon winning he would be very deferential.... very “I am greatly humbled, I want to thank my grandfather... yadda yadda.....”
Apparently though, this was not exactly the scenario that was played out.
Banville (the newspaper article says) made the comment that “this time” the Booker had gone to “a work of art.”
Wow.
His point was that books qualify as "art" only when they deal in timeless themes and not when they ballyhoo around in social commentary.
“When they [novels] take on current events... they cannot succeed,” he said.
Writers err, said Banville, when they incorporate topics like the war in Iraq and the Sept.11th, 2001, attacks.
Then..... THEN.... dear reader.... he touchethed the anointed one!
He said of Ian McEwan, his co-Booker-fellow and former winner of said prize.... [I’m sorry, this is where part of my lunch went down the wrong pipe].... Banville said that Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, which dealt with the above mentioned themes a bit, was a “dismayingly bad book.”
Whoaaa! Whoaaa! “Who peed in your Guinness?” I want to exclaim.
Saturday?
A “dismayingly bad book”?
I happened to love it.
Now.... having said all of this, am I angry? Do I conclude that Banville is a whacko?
No. In some ways, I am intrigued.
Is Banville’s comment brash? As in “confident in a rude or overbearing way?” Showy or tasteless in appearance?
Perhaps.
I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt, however, and see his words as bold or maybe even brave, for I cannot imagine an author, in the fellowship of authors, saying something like that for the sake of being malicious. In the definition of the word "brash" I would like to overlook the issue of his being rude or overbearing, and explore the "confident" nature of what he said.
Perhaps he meant “bad” in comparison to other things that McEwan has written?
In all fairness, Banville went on to comment that he has since wondered about the wisdom of his harsh review of Saturday (which appeared in the New York Review of Books). He said, “Some people saw it as one novelist giving a kicking to another and that’s not what I intended.”
I will probably read The Sea now, if for no other reason than to see how an author who is this critical of McEwan’s Saturday goes about writing his own book.