Excerpt from The Blue Guitar by John Banville, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Marcus will be in his workshop, at his bench. I see him, too, in his sleeveless leather jerkin, intent and hardly breathing, the jeweller's glass screwed into his eye socket, plying his tiny instruments that are in my mind's eye a steel scalpel and forceps, dissecting a Patek Philippe. Although he is younger than I am—it seems to me everyone is younger than I am—his hair is thinning and turning grey already and, see, hangs now in feathery wisps on either side of his leaning narrow saintly face, stirred by each breath he breathes, stirred a little, a little. He used to have something of the look of the Dürer of that androgynous self-portrait, the three-quarters profile one with tawny ringlets and rosebud mouth and disconcertingly come-hither eye; latterly, though, he might be one of Grünewald's suffering Christs. "Work, Olly," he said to me dolefully, "work is all I have to distract me from my anguish." That was the word he used: anguish. I thought it queer, even in such dire circumstances, more a flourish than a word. But pain compels eloquence—look at me; listen to me.

The child is there too, somewhere, Little Pip, as they call her—never just Pip, always Little Pip. It's true she's quite small, but what if she grows up an amazon? Little Pip the Gentle Giantess. I shouldn't laugh, I know; it's jealousy jogging my funny bone, jealousy and sad regret. Gloria and I had a little one of our own, briefly.

Gloria! She had slipped my mind until this moment. She too will be wondering where on earth I am. Where, on earth.

Damn it, why does everything have to be so difficult.

I am going to think about the night I finally fell in love with Polly, finally for the first time, that is. Anything for diversion, even though thoughts of love are what I should be diverting myself from, seeing how hot the soup is that love has got me into. It happened at the annual dinner of the Guild of Clockmakers, Locksmiths and Goldsmiths. We were there as Marcus's guests, Gloria and I—Gloria under protest, I may add, she being as susceptible as I am to boredom and general fed-upness—and were sat with him and Polly at their table, along with some others whom we needn't take any notice of. Beefsteak and roast pork on the menu, and spuds, of course, boiled, mashed, baked or chipped, not forgetting your perennial bacon-and-cabbage. Perhaps it was the flabby stink of seared flesh that was making me feel peculiar; that, and the smoke from the candles on the tables and the borborygmic blarings of the three-piece band. There was a ceaseless clamour of voices behind me in the big hall, a rolling heavy swell out of which there would spurt now and then, like a fish leaping, a shriek of some woman's tipsy laughter. I had been drinking but I don't believe I was drunk. All the same, as I talked to Polly, and looked at her—indeed, gloated on her—I had the sense of dawning illumination, of sudden epiphany, that so often comes at a certain stage on the way to drunkenness. She seemed not newly beautiful, exactly, but to radiate something I hadn't noticed before, something that was hers, uniquely: the abundance of her, the very being of her being. This is fanciful, I know, and probably what I thought I was seeing was merely an effect brought on by the fumes of bad wine, but I'm trying to fix the essence of the moment, to isolate the spark that would ignite such a conflagration of ecstasy and pain, of mischief, damage and, yes, Marcusian anguish.

And anyway, who's to say that what we see when we're drunk is not reality, and the sober world a bleared phantasmagoria?

Polly is no great beauty. In saying this I am not being unchivalrous, I hope; it's best to start out candid, since I aim to continue that way, in so far as I am capable of candour. Of course, I found her, find her, altogether lovely. She is full-figured, biggish in the beam—picture the nicely rounded nether half of a child-sized cello—with a neat, heart-shaped face and brownish, somewhat unruly hair. Her eyes are truly remarkable. They are pale grey, they seem almost translucent, and in certain lights take on a mother-of-pearl sheen. They have a slight cast, which finds an endearing echo in the slight overlap of her two pearly front teeth. She has a placid mien for the most part, but her glance can be surprisingly sharp, and her tone at times can deliver quite a sting, quite a sting. Mostly, though, she keeps a wary eye on a world she doesn't feel entirely at ease in. She is always conscious of her lack of social polish—she's a country lass, after all, even if her folk are shabby-grand—in comparison to my poised Gloria, for example, and is unsure in matters of etiquette and nice behaviour. It was very affecting to see, that night at the Clockers, as the evening is colloquially known, how at the start of each course she would glance quickly about the table and check which item of cutlery the rest of us were favouring before daring to pick up knife or fork or spoon for herself. Maybe that's where love begins, not in sudden seizures of passion but in the recognition and simple acceptance of, of—of something or other, I don't know what.

Excerpted from The Blue Guitar by John Banville. Copyright © 2015 by John Banville. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.