The Book of Evidence by John Banville
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"I killed her because I could, I said, what more can I say?"

I have found another favorite author. My Goodreads friend, Judith, highly recommended John Banville, and in particular his The Untouchable. I read good books very slowly so since I still work more than full time I began with a much shorter novel, one of Banville's earlier works, The Book of Evidence (1989), which made the short list for Booker Prize. It took me almost an entire week to read the 217 pages (a popular novel of this volume would take me one evening), but it was a literary delight - almost entirely because of Banville's wonderful prose.

I am including a synopsis after the rating if the reader wants to avoid "spoilers," even if the so-called plot (rather minimal here) is not an important component of the novel and it is basically known from the beginning how the events will develop. One does not read books like that for the story. Thousands of authors can tell a story; only very, very few can tell it in a way that inspires awe for their writing talent. For me, Banville's prose is on par with three supreme masters of language: Patrick White, Vladimir Nabokov, and Cees Nooteboom. Life is worth living to read sentences like

"The sun, the salt air, leached the significance out of things, so that they lost their true weight."

Let's note, though, that it is not just the language. It is - to use a horrible cliché - the depth of psychological insights that adds profundity to that sentence. This is in fact the first extraordinary aspect of Banville's prose that I noticed: the language he uses is completely interwoven with the psychological states he describes; it is hard to find where one ends and the other begins. This entanglement of language and psychology is evident in many passages and in some places it is even explicit:

"I am struck by the poverty of the language when it comes to naming or describing badness. Evil, wickedness, mischief, these words imply an agency, the conscious or at least active doing of wrong. They do not signify the bad in its inert, neutral, self-sustaining state."

Three fragments of the novel are so gorgeous that I had to read them several times, just to savor the writing. First, the magical, breathtaking passage about the woman from the painting whose life story Freddie creates when looking at the picture. Then there is the spellbinding account of the murder and the threesome scene with Daphne and Anna.

The murder scene reveals yet another outstanding feature of Banville's prose: almost complete absence of clichés, which to me one of the most important attributes of great literature. While most of us conceptualize murder based on depictions in movies or TV Banville's scene of killing avoids popular stereotypes. Furthermore, why did Freddie kill? He does not know and the reader will not know either. That's how things often are in life. The movies, TV, and popular literature tend to artificially create a semblance of sense in human behavior. Reading Banville's novel one might understand that the causality that narrative arts create is often artificial and fake. The reader of Book who likes to have things explained at the end will likely be quite disappointed.

And finally, the most obvious aspect of the novel: it might be read as a modern rewrite, or perhaps homage to Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, which was written 123 years earlier. Even the author himself alludes to the similarity. Let's make it clear, though, Freddie is no Raskolnikov and while Dostoyevsky is all about moral issues, guilt, and consequences of evil deeds, Banville focuses on post-modern motifs in his writing. The depth of both novels is comparable but the artistry of Banville's prose makes his story so much more readable (however I read Dostoyevsky only in Polish translation; maybe the original Russian is better). Yet another difference is the "narrative unreliability" of Freddie's account. We cannot be sure what really happened; he himself is not certain.

Four and a quarter stars.

[A brief (and, frankly, misleading) synopsis] Freddie Montgomery, formerly a scientist for a government institute, now lives the life of leisure somewhere in the Mediterranean. He has borrowed money from a local gangster and, unable to pay back the debt, leaves his wife as a hostage and returns to Ireland with hopes to sell some paintings owned by his family. He finds out that the paintings have already been sold to a friend of his so he decides to steal one of them. He kills a woman during the burglary and is now in jail awaiting the trial.

View all my reviews