This is a book about death. Or rather, it is about that stand-off between existence and extinction which all of us find ourselves caught in, and which, aficionados of the bullfight would claim, is solemnised into a form of art in the corrida. A.L. Kennedy puts it beautifully: "The corrida can be seen as both a ritualised escape from destruction and a bloody search for meaning in the end of a life, both an exorcism and an act of faith."
On Bullfighting is itself an effort at exorcism and a search for faith. It opens with an account - mesmerisingly well written - of an abandoned suicide attempt by the author, and ends with the chilling declaration: "I don't know what to do." In between is a meditation, informed and informing, on the oddest, cruellest and, some would say, most authentic and aesthetically refined sport in the world. Even if you disagree with this view, even if you consider the spectacle of a black-slippered marionette in a Woolworths suit and ridiculous hat slaughtering a magnificent and entirely innocent animal for the entertainment of a Saturday afternoon crowd to be a bloody stain upon the character of an otherwise civilised country, you will still find Kennedy's book a thrilling and thought-provoking read.
First, that failed suicide. Kennedy, a novelist seemingly abandoned by her muse, and a lover betrayed by the object of her passion, finds herself sitting on the window ledge of her Glasgow flat one Sunday afternoon at the beginning of spring and telling herself to jump. For those who have read her fiction, the predicament and her description of it will seem entirely characteristic. The fact that this is not fiction does not dim the glint in that famously cool and piercing eye. She urges herself to jump now - "I really should go" - while there is no one in the street below. "It's only me I want to kill. And I don't wish to be gawped at while I'm killing. I believe I've had enough embarrassment for one life."
Then she hears from somewhere nearby the song Mhairi's Wedding, and realises that she cannot possibly listen to "this piece of pseudo-Celtic pap" and at the same time kill herself: it would be too ridiculous. So she changes her mind. The absurdity that can lead to suicide can also save a life. Instead of dying, she takes on the commission to write this book. She knows little about bullfighting, but she will learn.
There is more painful absurdity to come. For months she has been suffering from an excruciating pain in her upper spine - she will eventually discover that she has a slipped disc - which, by horrible coincidence, is sited in exactly the area of her back where, if she were a bull, the picador would drive in his lance and the banderilleros their barbed darts. It is a coincidence that fiction would not tolerate; as Kennedy says, the idea of going to Spain to write on bullfighting "while inadvertently acting as a (barely) walking personification of the corrida's first two acts would never see the light of day in any self-respecting novel".
The practice of bull sacrifice is prevalent in myth and throughout recorded history, and bullfighting, Kennedy tells us, goes back at least to Roman times, when Julius Caesar introduced the aurochs, the now extinct ancestors of the Spanish toro bravo, to the circus. These vast ur-bulls were fought "over sand on foot by pig-tailed gladiators who were armed with swords and crimson lures": the continuity is obvious.
Kennedy's attitude to the corrida is one of curiosity rather than judgment; she wants to know not only the technicalities of the sport, but the reasons why an otherwise sane young man - there have been only a couple of women toreros - would risk life and limb by engaging in an insane dance of death with half a ton of horned, pain-maddened animal. Despite her Scots-Calvinist scepticism, she does eventually catch a glimpse of something transcendent, something that is at once sexual and religious, in the confrontation between man and beast, one of whom must die.
HOWEVER, she is no blood-and-dust romantic. Hemingway and his kind are wrong: the bull is not a natural enemy of man, even though Spanish bulls are bred to be aggressive. In fact, it is likely that, finding itself trapped in a ring with a seeming madman in a gold suit intent on killing it, the toro bravo will be not so much enraged, as confused and fearful. The response of the bovine species to many forms of threat is to charge at it. "They run away, forwards."
Kennedy hints, too, that frequently the matador looks as if he is no less terrified than the bull. Far from being a noble ritual, therefore, most bullfights are a squalid mixture of cruelty, fear and delusion. That such spectacles should be laid on as entertainment is surely indefensible. Kennedy is not so sure.
By the end of her investigations she has developed a deep regard for the great matadors. As she watches Enrique Ponce at the kill, "willing in, taking in, an animal's life", she cannot but acknowledge the dark grandeur of the moment. "It is a strange thing to watch: an elaborately prepared transgression, a sacrifice and a sin, ugly and peculiarly moving."
The poet Lorca, murdered in Granada in 1936 by Nationalist thugs, hovers in the background of Kennedy's narrative, a tragic, smiling ghost. Thinking of him and his fate, the fate he seemed to invite by travelling from the relative safety of Madrid to his home town that violent summer at the beginning of the civil war, she tells herself that "if I had any backbone I would write as best I can, simply because I can, because of the silenced dead, because writing is a privilege and also a responsibility".
As she shows in this book, she is a natural writer, and writing, though it can offer her little solace against the pains and losses of life, will not release her. On Bullfighting is a subtle, wonderfully controlled yet deeply affecting essay on life as a ceaseless struggle against the dominion of death. She recalls how, before setting out for Spain, she watched on cable television edited highlights of the corrida . . .
"and stopped, caught by the sight of successive animals standing, heads low, tongues protruding, while successive matadors advanced, a weird kind of weight in every slow step across the sand. Death was coming, startlingly obvious - the secret we rarely see - but the bulls just stood and panted, uncomprehending. I remember I took the symbolism to heart, considered our helplessness when it comes to the end, when we meet the pantomime surprise of death, the one we should always be expecting but never quite do."
A writer who can write like that has nothing wrong with her backbone.
John Banville is a novelist and Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times