Customer Reviews

The Book Of Evidence

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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.

"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.

The Book of Evidence is a marvelous piece of literary, philosophical, and political fiction. This is what critic Eve Patten has to say about the novel and its author:

"Regarded as the most stylistically elaborate Irish writer of his generation, John Banville is a philosophical novelist concerned with the nature of perception, the conflict between imagination and reality, and the existential isolation of the individual. While his writing flirts with both postmodernism and magic realism, it is best understood as metafiction in the tradition of Samuel Beckett, Banville's acknowledged mentor. Like Beckett, he moves fluidly from Irish landscapes and characters to European contexts and histories, and from conventional narratives into fabulism and distortion. Relentlessly and some might argue, pretentiously allusive, his works play with both overt and hidden references to his literary idols, particularly Proust, Dostoevsky, and Nabokov. . . .

". . . The Book of Evidence (1989) consists of the prison memoir of Freddie Montgomery, on trial for the brutal murder of a female servant who interrupted his plan to steal a painting. Freddie is at once a disarming and objectionable narrator, blinded by his own ego, capable of the most intense response to the portrait he steals, but unable to empathise in any way with his human victim. At the heart of his predicament is his own existential insecurity, his perceived lack of substance: 'How shall I describe it, this sense of myself as something without weight, without moorings, a floating phantom? Other people seemed to have a density, a 'thereness', which I lacked. Among them, these big, carefree creatures, I was a child among adults.' In this fragility of identity the novel locates an ethical dilemma: if Freddie's concept of self is ultimately a fiction, then can he legitimately be held responsible for his crime? What is the nature of his guilt, defined by Freddie himself as 'a failure of imagination'? And how far can the reader trust his narration, a dubious construct fraught with implausibility, inconsistency and pride." (Copyright Eve Patten, n.d., British Council website accessed May 16, 2003)

Why do I add "political fiction"? Because the "picture," a master's portrait of, Freddie imagines, a successful burgher's protected wife from the era of the Dutch Republic, hangs on the wall of one of the big houses associated, in Banville's novels, with the English overlords of Ireland. Freddie's muddled crime, moreover, occurs against the backdrop of an anarchist's bombing and with much the same result. Further, every plummy accent, every civilized affectation (including even "Smyth," the name Freddie adopts to rent his get-away car, a Humber Hawk, at once an allusion to England's fabled river and Nabokov's Humbert Humbert) is associated with England. Freddie's confused effort to claim, or possibly to reclaim, the painting, like his effort to define his missing self, is thus, on one level, Ireland's effort to reclaim something of its robbed patrimony.

This is a great short read. Robert E. Olsen

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.

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.

When I read the Book of Evidence, I understood that I was experiencing a masterpiece. Clearly, Banville deserves a place not only in the cannon of Irish literature but in the greater western cannon as well. Stylistically, the writing is nothing shy of stunning. Likewise, the characters are fleshed out and three-dimensional. Lastly, the social, philosophic, and literary observations show the mark of true insight. Mix Dostoevsky and Camus with a little Beckett and Proust and add Banville's own originality and you have the above work of genius.

Freddie Montgomery killed because he could. This one liner economically but eloquently nails the issue at the heart of John Banville's splendid novel, "The Book Of Evidence". The horror that Freddie's act of murder evokes is not so much that he killed but he killed because it was expedient for his purpose and because he failed to glimpse even the first sign of humanity in the victim he so cruelly and senselessly batters to death as he makes away with the loot. If for one moment he did, the dastardly act would have been avoided. The novel, written as a confession to us readers, suggests that it took his arrest and conviction for him to recognize the meaning of his action. Punishment is justified and meted out because he broke faith with society and is ostracized for it. The moral bankruptcy that Banville depicts in Freddie isn't a fantasy. It is an unspoken condition a society finds itself in, even as its inhabitants go about pursuing their goals with no larger purpose than to attain them. The amorality at the heart of Freddie's story is never more pointedly suggested than in the chilling scene of a menage a trois signifying an unholy alliance among the threesome (Freddie, Daphne and Anna) early in the plot. This scene is unforgettable for its sense of foreboding and evil. Banville has written several superb novels including the underated "The Untouchable". His literary craft is truly awesome. Simply astounding. There is no better writer of contemporary fiction today. Read "The Book Of Evidence". It's wonderfully entertaining and insightful. You won't regret it.

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.

Patients who are truly mentally ill have a disadvantage. They've lost their point of reference in what you or I would call "reality." So, as a psychiatrist, when I approach a patient like this, I know how to get them to tell me the truth. Simply...I engage them in conversation. The more we talk, and the more I listen to what they have to say...the more *I* become their reference point. In essence, I just "walk" along with them. Step by step, by not disputing their "facts" or showing undue concern over anything they say--in truth, by my showing genuine interest in them as a person--we move closer and closer to the core of their experience. Eventually, they will speak plainly, not realizing how out of the mainstream what they're telling me really is. Herein is the starting point of *all* therapy. Or, as in the book at hand, herein is the basis of criminal prosecution.

Banville's book is a startling confession of a murderer. As he rambles--as he loses track of the mainstream---he gets closer and closer to an accurate description of what really occured. I suspect, perhaps, that some of the other Amazon reviewers were a bit "let down" by the ultimate revelation. You don't think that's what Banville intended? The killing is finally portrayed as utterly banal...stupid...pointless. The confessor has *no* clue as to the seriousness of what he's done. He is completely locked within his own perspective. This is about as far as you can get from the seductive "media violence" everyone complains so much about. And yet...why is it so much less compelling? Well, you can struggle with that on your own as you work your way through THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE.

Banville is one of Ireland's top contemporary writers. His books are not for those who would prefer New York Times best-sellers, or a "good" Hollywood movie. They are complex, they have depth, and they take you to somewhere other than the usual endings. And this is one of his best!

"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.