The Book of Evidence (urspr publ 1989; utgåvan 2001)

One of the most intriguing novels I've read in quite awhile not written nearly a century ago. Banville creates a likeable murderer, someone worthy of both pity and near admiration. One of the strengths of this novel is the point of view. Freddie Montgomery is the protagonist and also the book's unreliable narrator. He's entertaining, frustrating, and thoroughly hilarious in his own dark manner. Montgomery lets pieces of his life slip through his writing which is meant to be a confession and sort of testimony for the court. There are a few points where the narrator either backtracks and changes his story or admits what he has just said to be a lie which makes this novel a pretty fun sort of puzzle. Montgomery's life has been tumultuous if anything and what readers end up with is a man's character contained in about two hundred pages. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a novel which doesn't feed everything to its readers and which requires a willing participant in its form of mind game. Stick with this one if you don't quite jive with the first few pages. The ending is literary beauty. ( )

Hm. Definitely wasn't what I expected. Bit boring, actually. But there are a couple of prime moments where the book kicks you in the face in the most hilarious way possible with how unreliable the narrator is. So, not completely irredeemable. ( )

John Banville is one of my favorite authors and, although this is not my favorite of his novels, this book was my introduction to his work. It is narrated by Freddie Montgomery, a 38-year-old scientist, who murders a servant girl during an attempt to steal a painting from a neighbor. Freddie is an aimless drifter, and though he is a perceptive observer of himself and his surroundings, he is largely amoral. He is also an unreliable narrator who tells his life-story and recounts the events leading up to his arrest for the murder of a servant girl in one of Ireland's "big houses". A cultured but louche Anglo-Irish scientist who has been living abroad for many years, Freddie returns to his ancestral home seeking money after falling foul of a gangster in the Mediterranean. Shocked to discover that his mother has sold the family's collection of paintings, Freddie attempts to recover them. This leads to a tragic series of events culminating in Freddie's killing of a maid while stealing a painting. On the run, he hides out in the house of old family friend, Charlie, a man of some influence, before being arrested and interrogated.
It reminded me of one of the best novels I've read and reread, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, since like Ford, Banville has cannily constructed novel about sex, betrayal and self-deception, a novel whose narrator's testimony is notoriously unreliable and laced with internal contradictions. Mr. Banville's book also recalls other, mostly French, novels, among them Andre Gide's The Immoralist (which, like Mr. Banville's book, depicts the consequences of sexual repression) and Albert Camus's The Stranger (which concerns a senseless murder). ( )

As always with Banville the writing is exquisite and catches beautifully human frailties and venality. Never an author to use one word when two will do and not shy at challenging and expanding a reader’s vocabulary (how about minatory, flocculent, acedic, stravaig anyone?) Mr. Banville is a writer to stimulate and intrigue. The very complexity of language perfectly comments the complexity of our hero, a man with serious feet of clay. In drawing this man the author gives the character greater self awareness than most of us possess (or care to possess) and in doing so makes one flinch from time to time. At the same time Freddie is peculiarly blind in the way only enormous egos can be. A wonderful read and part of the evolving oeuvre of Banville. If you like this then know he only gets better. ( )

splendid, language alive, crisp with no excesses. Banville dids you into the inner workings of a complex mind suprisingly accessible. The sounds and colours crowd the space and paints a masterful story. Banville almost have an unrestricted access to the common soul and thought. What is remarkable is how he expresses it at times slow, almost frozen and naturally fluid at others. Economical and poetic in his prose, Grand, difficult to immitate. Eddie. ( )