Freddie Montgomery is a highly cultured man, a husband and father living the life of a dissolute exile on a Mediterranean island. When a debt comes due and his wife and child are held as collateral, he returns to Ireland to secure funds. That pursuit leads to murder. And here is his attempt to present evidence, not of his innocence, but of his life, of the events that lead to the murder he committed because he could. Like a hero out of Nabokov or Camus, Montgomery is a chillingly articulate, self-aware, and amoral being, whose humanity is painfully on display.
You can depend on a murderer
Freddie Montgomery, is an alcoholic intellectual work-shy scion of Anglo-Irish aristocracy. He is witheringly sarcastic about the lesser intellects he is forced to associate with. He is also a murderer.
As Nabokov's Humbert Humbert said "you can always depend on a murderer for a fancy prose style" (at least in literature, the real ones I've known were not great stylists). Some other murderers' stories that come to mind are Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" and Camus's "L'Etranger" and Simenon's "The Man who Watched Trains go by" (l'homme qui mirait passer les trains). Banville isn't quite up to Nabokov as a fancy writer and isn't quite up to Simenon as a starkly realist page-turner maker, or up to Camus or Dostoevsky as a philosopher but this is entertaining and brilliant. .
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For a refreshing review of Banville’s The Book of Evidence, click on http://davidmurph.wordpress.com/book-reviews/
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