He may be regarded as one of the greatest living writers, a prose stylist of global renown, but John Banville hates reading his own work. “All I can see,” he says, “are the flaws, the mistakes. I can’t bear it it makes me sick.”
LITERARY FICTION: The first novel from Cormac McCarthy since his desolate masterpiece The Road won the Pulitzer Prize 15 years ago is both a Big Event and an anticlimax.