The Book of Evidence

John Banville has created a memorable villain with a "special, slow" smile. Freddie Montgomery is a beast of little burden. A dissolute son of privilege, he bungles his way into the All Ireland bludgeoning team where he joins the likes of Monaghan's Francie Brady and Mayoman Christy Mahon. In a monologue of sinister undertone Freddy recounts the unfortunate missteps that conspire to push him to the brink of desperation. He lands in debt, uses his wife and child as collateral, and travels to his ancestral patch to wring blood from a turnip. Erin has no welcome for this prodigal son. His opening gambit as art thief on the country estate circuit proves disastrous. Poor, poor Freddie, he can't do anything right. The novel contains a darkly comic murder scene involving a maid, a hammer, and a rented car which springs "forward in a series of bone-shaking lurches."
Our narrator, two years in the nick, grapples with age old questions, the poles of Catholicism and Calvinism tugging at his mind and soul. Freddie alternates between contrition and rationalization, questioning "whether it is feasible to hold on to the principle of moral culpability once the notion of free will has been abandoned." This existential conflict puts the novel in Camus territory. But Freddie, as character, as articulate lizard, most resembles Humbert Humbert. Villainy is always afforded a certain degree of sympathy if it accompanies such dazzling displays of imagery and word craft.
With leaps of imagination Banville breaths life into the inanimate and lends substance to shades of feeling that normally elude remark. Take for instance his description of prison visitors: "They must feel the force of our longing, must hear it, almost, the mermen's song, a high needle-note of pure woe buzzing in the glass that separates us from them." Through Freddie, Banville registers the kind of revulsion and regret that make everyday existence so excruciatingly labored. Freddie's pomposity and sense of entitlement ("I wanted my share of this richness, this gilded ease.") attract derision, but he is no monster. Despite protestations to the contrary, he is all too human. His crime seems doubly terrifying because his flaws, not wholly unlike our own, are so familiar, so common.

I know a quite a few people who love this book, so my opinion may be an anamoly. Banville is quite witty and there are a few lines here and there that made me chuckle aloud. That said, you'll hear The Book of Evidence compared to a great many literary heavyweights. Unfortunately, your time would probably be better spent reading the originals to which the book is compared. Take the character of Freddie Montgomery, for example. There are, as many have stated, more than a few traces of Humbert Humbert, but none of Nabokov's acrobatic command of language and metaphor; an impulsive murderer-protagonist with nowhere near the depth of a Mersault or a Raskolnikov; then about a hundred or so vaguely-reworked modernist cliches (e.g. - the mind/body split, the "untethered in the current" metaphor that plays so heavily in books like Tropic of Capricorn, the "finding oneself in a reality that feels like a simulacrum of nonreality" motif, etc.) that seem to have been ripped wholesale from Banville's forerunners (a short passage about a third of the way through, for example, wherein Montgomery describes how, upon awakening, he cannot tell whether he is in the present or in his childhood, seemed taken right out of the opening chapter of Proust.) How much you enjoy this kind of thing depends on whether you regard the preceding as an imitation or as an "homage".
This is not to say that Book of Evidence is a BAD novel...at worst, it just offers nothing new. If you're looking for an introduction to the "anti-narrator" genre, this is a decent place to start. But, if you've already devoured Banville's predecessors, you may feel a bit disappointed when you find he doesn't quite measure up.

I just finished The Book of Evidence, having read it in just 2 days. Prior to this, I devoured John Banville's Eclipse, The Sea, and Ancient Light. So far, my first Banville, Ancient Light, is my favorite. We get some of the same in each Banville novel. Seems that the author's first-person narrator usually visits old haunts, remembering the past, making new discoveries, and realizing the flaws in the memories. In some of this books, the narrator follows and observes strangers, studying, making a life for them, as an actor or writer might do.

Dialogue is rare in Banville. Basically, the novels are not plot-driven. You'll already know most of the story contained in "The Book of Evidence" just by reading the back cover. Likewise for many of his novels. These are not page-turners in the sense that the reader is pulled forward to find what happens next. Rather, it's Banville's powers of description, his humor, and his humanity, that pull the reader forward. "Little happens", some will say, but actually, what happens are words, words, words - the best any book has to offer. Otherwise, you may as well just wait for the movie.

It's Banville's control and mastery of the language that makes his books such a joy to read.

The Book of Evidence is an ex-scientist's confession of his gruesome but motiveless murder. Thirty-eight-year-old Freddie Montgomery returned to Ireland (from some Mediterranean island) hoping to solicit funds to pay off his debts. When his mother told him that she had got rid of the pictures his deceased father left behind, Freddie paid a visit to the Behrens who might have bought the pictures from his mother. At Behrens' Whitewater House, Freddie, with a ball of twine and a roll of wrapping paper, stole a painting that for him had become an obsession-Portrait of a Woman with Gloves. Never would Freddie expect what started as a casual escapade ended up in a gruesome homicide when a maid caught him red-handed.
John Banville bears the tour de force of storytelling that evokes Dostoyevsky. Freddie Montgomery showed no remorse for his crime, unlike Raskolnikov (the protagonist of Crime and Punishment), he had no motive to kill. But when he could go back in time, Freddie would still choose to kill simply because he had no choice. Freddie left marks of careful premeditation of his stealing but not murder. Banville intermingled the events leading to the atrocious act with Freddie's dreams, dreams that were not some tumble of events but states of feelings, moods, pangs, and emotions. Freddie somehow lost track of the perception of time-so much so that somehow time was warped. Places (like he reminisced on his Berkeley days), people (how he met Daphne through her roommate), and events (annecdotes of his father and childhood) became like movie stills so isolated that he had no way to tell if they could be real.
The inebriating prose reminds me of Nabokov (especially Lolita). Freddie simply indulged in a hazy, disheartening, and morbid sensation. The prose was full of his gripes-about his distaste for the world, resentment toward his mother, disdain for the attorney (...a life spent poking in the crevices of other people's nasty little tragedies...p.73). At one point he felt he had committed the murder a long time ago. The prose exerted a mounting sense of panic and unease that infect the readers. 4.1 stars.

"My Lord, when you ask me to tell the court in my own words, this is what I shall say." Thus begins "The Book of Evidence," the sardonic, self-pitying, occasionally witty, and ultimately unreliable narrative of Frederick Charles St. John Vanderveld Montgomery (a/k/a Freddie Montgomery). I say "unreliable" quite consciously, because Freddie Montgomery says as much throughout the novel, another in a long line of remarkable fictions from John Banville, perhaps Ireland's finest living author. As Freddie relates at the end of his tale, "I thought of trying to publish this, my testimony. But no. I have asked Inspector Haslet to put it into my file, with the other, official fictions . . . [H]ow much of it is true? All of it. None of it. Only the shame."
And what is Freddie Montgomery's story? An educated and brilliant academic, he married a young woman, Daphne, whom he met while teaching at Berkeley. He left academia for a dissolute life on a Mediterranean island. He became indebted there to apparently dark and unseemly characters, left his wife and young child behind, and returned to his family home in Ireland to obtain enough money to repay his debts. While in Ireland, he committed a brutal and seemingly inexplicable murder, fled the scene of his crime in a kind of "Lost Weekend" of drunken binging and obsession with his dark deed, and, ultimately, is apprehended and imprisoned. He writes the dark, powerful, obsessive interior monologue of "The Book of Evidence" while sitting in prison awaiting his trial.
The reader is never quite certain what to make of Freddie Montgomery. He is, indeed, a disturbed and disturbing narrator, someone who kills an innocent woman for no apparent reason, with chilling sang-froid. He bludgeons her with a hammer and then wonders, as if he were the victim: "How could this be happening to me-it was all so unfair. Bitter tears of self-pity squeezed into my eyes."
Freddie Montgomery's narrative is lucid, but it's not clear that he is entirely sane. There is complete lack of feeling. He seems a psychopath, or worse. Perhaps he's simply mad. Perhaps he is commenting on himself when he says, "Madmen do not frighten me, or even make me uneasy. Indeed, I find that their ravings soothe me. I think it is because everything, from the explosion of a nova to the fall of dust in a deserted room, is to them of vast and equal significance, and therefore meaningless."
There is a cold anomie that pervades Freddie's actions, his reflections, his feelings. It reminds the reader of "Crime and Punishment" or "Notes from Underground". But there is also a dark humor and a sleight of hand working here that is absent from the great Russian master. Perhaps Irish sensibility is creeping in, perhaps just the penumbra of the post-modern. Whatever it is, it works.

You might like to know, first off, that the hardcover reproduces a depiction of the painting Freddie steals, at least a "detail" from it; the paperback post-Booker nominee (and pre-Booker winner for The Sea) does not. It helped me to see what Banville so well describes on the page, and I flipped back and forth between cover and paper repeatedly in this key section.

I think that Banville characteristically in the novels I've read tends to compress much into the last pages, and if you tend as I do to adapt to a steady pace as you acclimate to his style, allowing yourself to be immersed in his prose, you may weary of its elaboration by the time in its fading moments when your stamina's most demanded. He often places in final sections key realizations faced by his narrators, but he does not highlight these from the rest of the detail and density. It's easy to skim past important sentences if you're not fully attentive. This makes for an exhilarating but challenging read.

Some others who have here commented on the novel claim that Freddie lacks any insight into his crime, and is incapable of feeling, and that his sanity is to be questioned. I disagree. He states that he does not feel remorse because remorse implies that the sufferer expects forgiveness. For the murder of Josie, Freddie acknowledges no such remedy is possible. The final pages turn very moving as he grapples with his failure to realize until far too late that his victim deserved to be taken as if a fully living, rounded, respected human being, and that Freddie comes to this realization only after the murder, while incarcerated, makes the ending of this book powerful.

The more I read Banville, the more I recognize his pattern: he sets up his plot around a tormented character looking back on his failure. You read a couple hundred pages dense with felt detail but with little dialogue, from within the narrator's fevered recollections, justifications, and anguish. You grow a bit tired of the pace, relentless yet after a while similar in its torrents of elegant but rather detached observations about the wider society from which the protagonist removes himself. Then, in the last few pages, the perspective shifts, and the denouement carries you into the workings of, if not grace, then enlightenment, however brilliantly painful it may be for his erudite but often spiritually self-blinded speakers of such rich and ornamented self-consciousnesses at last being dragged out into the light to gasp, blink, and cringe.

This is part of a trilogy, continuing obliquely into Ghosts before coming back to Athena. It has been compared to Beckett's masterful and dauntingly fearsome prose trilogy of novels; while Banville shares with Beckett a fascination with style, the former's works are perhaps more accessible, an ideal preparation and inspiration of Beckett's own bold encounter with pain and hope. Both authors write to discomfort, prophets for a secular age, but both concerned with our fragile and stumbling humanity, whether murderers or victims, that all share.

This was my first John Banville book. After reading countless reviews of his other books that were somewhat scathing, and hearing highly positive reviews from my girlfriend, I wasn't quite sure what to expect.

Banville's writing has the feel of the "classics." Literary, beautiful prose, descriptive metaphors (can someone explain why using metaphors is often frowned upon?) and he paints a vivid picture that is breathtaking and truly takes you to "another place." He really is an excellent wordsmith.

The characters are very interesting and easy to relate to (which is quite a feat considering how little they actually speak.)

I guess the only thing that I'd warn readers about (and it seems to be the case in many of his books based on Amazon cust. reviews), is that not very much happens in his stories. The plot of this book could easily be broken into 3 or 4 events at best. Now I'm not one of those spy-novel readers who expects the story to feel like an action film, but it is somewhat disappointing that given Banvilles wonderfull style and voice, that we don't get to see a bit more on the plot side of things.

Also, I've heard people refer to this story and it's main character as "chilling". I don't see that at all. If anything it's quite the opposite. Banville shows how a somewhat ordinary (albeit slightly OFF and very self-centered) individual can casually become a killer. To me that's the main point. But I certainly won't be losing sleep over this criminal.

Overall, great book. Highly recommend it. Especially if you like "literary" prose.

Banville's Montgomery occasionally reminded me of Raskolnikov, but not often enough. (I won't repeat the novel's premise because previous reviewers have done a remarkably good job on it. I read this bk on a close friend's recommendation, it came with no pedigree, other than what's on the book cover: shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and the winner of an Irish prize that I'm not familiar with. Since I'm only reading prize winners this summer, that qualified it. Also, get this, it was a gift from the people of Dublin to the San Jose, CA library.) So I didn't know I was actually reading a wanna-be classic.

I thought the writer's style was remarkably compelling and I think that's what kept me reading, because it was not Monty's plight. Monty, from his jail cell, is writing what turns out to be a book length confession as he awaits his murder sentence. The book itself is dense, like a journal with no dialog, just his dogged narrative, broken only when he interrupts his own thoughts. I totally enjoyed that device for telling this story.

But to the story itself, I had no sympathy whatsoever for this total jerk. His sense of entitlement and overbearing manner was unfathomable, but something kept telling me that people like him actually exist. Maybe that's why I kept reading.

I'm not sure where the notion that Monty was an ex-scientist came from. (See other reviews.) What I remember of his background was that he was a math student at Berkeley when he met Daphne and eventually married her, but from his own account, it didn't appear to be a love match. Apparently his dad was funding his education abroad, and perhaps continued to fund his life in general, which appeared to be one of penurious leisure somewhere off the coast of Spain with his wife and child. A man of manners but no job or ethics or morality, he gets into a financial jam that eventually risks the lives of his wife and child.

So he dashes home to Ireland to see if he can get mum to give him some cash so he can literally free up his family from a loan shark. Things go badly at home so he comes up with a plan to steal some artwork, which he also thinks really belongs to him (that sense of entitlement again). That plan goes even worse and now he's murdered somebody.

That's when we begin to see the similarities between him and Raskolnikov. He is nearly undone by his shame, I guess. It's not remorse that works him over to the point where he cannot run away, even though a family friend lends him the money to take off. He holes up with said friend and waits for the inevitable moment when he will be captured.

But remember, this tale is recounted from his prison cell, so he has had time to embroider the details into what could be considered sympathetic. We could ask ourselves if he was mentally unstable and thus explain his behavior that way. We could ask ourselves if he felt some remorse and was therefore worthy of our compassion. Or we could question whether it's society's fault that landed gentry or even pseudo landed gentry like Monty exist in the first place.

So the bottom line here is if you are left asking yourself questions like these at the end of a novel, perhaps the novel was worthwhile after all. I still cannot say that I would place this book among the greatest classics ever written, but it is definitely close.

To a time, in my case anyway, roughly two months ago when I first undertook reading this marvelous book. Now I didn't follow this up with study, didn't probe for the accuracies or inconsistancies of this unconventional narrative--no, I moved on to something else I liked perhaps even better (I wrote a review recently for Oscar and Lucinda, by Peter Carey, where I also reference Banville, so this is a mere presumption of recent consistancy in tone--). But The Book of Evidence is a masterpiece--a true, glorious masterpiece of Western Literature that one day will likely be noticed in the speech in ten to twenty years time when John goes to Sweden to accept his Nobel Prize. It is among the most gorgeously written examples of English prose and tells a baffling, frequently maddening story with twists and turns and riots all told by a detachedly engaged narrator who is the victim of all the horrible happens. This is a tragedy where there is laughter, this is a brutal, satiric comedy complete with tears. Here is a story about everything that could go wrong when you've reached the middle of life and find yourself unsatisfied and bored. This is a story about intellectual pretention and general human contempt. The Book of Evidence actually seeks to test the reader to see how much graphic confession they can take from a man who is admittedly offensive before they experience pity. This is a magical tale about failure and unfulfilled expectations, about self-acuity and self-actualization and the shudderingly realized moment when one admits they are corrupt.

Something that one day, when I am feeling old no doubt, I will dredge up again to hear the glorious song of a man who is worse off than I--

Why have I put off reviewing this book, which is rightly regarded as Banville's breakthrough novel, while reviewing (almost) all his other books? Perhaps, as Freddie would say, because I could. - Some of it has to do with the fact that certain other reviewers and critics regard Athena and Ghosts to be a continuation of this book. I don't concur with this assessment, for reasons stated in reviews of those books, and I wanted to give these books their just due as integral works on their own without a reference to a review of this book. But here I go:

What makes this book such a wonder? First, there's the sumptuous, poetic language on display in all of Banville's work - At times I felt as if I was reading a Conrad Aiken poem - that makes for a feat of literary seduction unparalleled. Indeed, if there is one adjective I would use for Banville's stylism, aside from poetic (perhaps redundant anyway), for readers with a keen ear for the use of language, it is, without hesitation - Seductive. This seductive style, luring the reader into Freddie's mindscape, goes pari passu with the philosophical underpinnings of the novel. In plain speech, determinism is very seductive in its own right. There is no free will here, no choice, and Banville's great feat here is to have seduced us into a mindset where we can very easily imagine, mutatis mutandis, doing exactly the sort of thing Freddie has done, murdering. This is what's so frightening about the novel: We come to see ourselves, like Freddie, as the playthings of inner and outer forces over which we have scant control, as playthings of the gods, so to speak.

Putting the book down, one wonders if, really, there is not much more to our place in the world than, as Freddie puts it:

"....The ceaseless, slow, demented drift of things." P.135

A very eerie book indeed.