Customer Reviews

The Lemur

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Under the Benjamin Black pseudonym, John Banville offers a view into the luxury of wealth in Manhattan. John Glass, a former journalist unafraid to face the grit of the world, now labors in a glass-walled office high above the clouds. Intimidated by the spaciousness of his environment and tasked with the authorized biography of his father-in-law, Big Bill Mulholland, communications magnate and ex-CIA agent, Glass toys with hiring a researcher to pry into Mulholland's past- not for public consumption, but for his own curiosity. Glass nicknames the odd young man The Lemur. When the researcher (The Lemur) calls, making demands for what he has discovered, John is immediately anxious. What has he found out? But before Glass can take any action, The Lemur is murdered. With little information, John assembles what facts he can, guilt eventually pointing back to himself and his extended family: wife, Louise; step-son, David; and father-in-law, Big Bill Mulholland.

I greatly enjoyed Black's other novels (Christine Falls, The Silver Swan) and was delighted to start this one after finishing Australian Peter Temple's latest work, an appropriate segue from one angst-riddled author to another. However, I am not a great fan of short stories and the length of The Lemur does not, in my opinion, favor Black's style, the usual depth of character, layered plots and seductive language that are this author's trademark. Although not imperative, I didn't find any of these characters even remotely likeable: John Glass has betrayed his youthful ideals for a marriage of privilege, long-inured to the luxury his wife's money provides; Louise, Big Bill's daughter, has looked to John for a comfort he cannot deliver, relief from her father's demands; Louise's son, David, snide and rude, assumes his place in the family with ill-disguised contempt for his step-father; Big Bill is shocked that Glass didn't understand the implied rules of the biographical assignment; even Alison O'Keeffe, Glass's extramarital lover, has grown weary of his company.

Black making a clear distinction between the vast differences that separate social classes, these characters seem to float from day to day, from Manhattan to the Hamptons with an ennui that borders on sleepwalking. All has been reduced to image, perception, continuing the façade of marriage and family while the relationships decay from lack of honesty and commitment. If John has been secure in his ivory tower, the murder is an opportunity to reclaim some significance from life. He faces a conundrum once the murderer has been revealed: whether to become- or stay- complicit or to cling to the privilege that has protected him while savaging his humanity, a difficult, if not impossible choice for one such as John Glass. (The Lemur was formerly serialized in The New York Times Magazine.) Luan Gaines/ 2008.

I was half-way through this book in no time, came up for a breather, and thought that it was an awfully quick read. The cynical side of me wanted to ask if this were meant as made-for-movie book, sort of like McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. Maybe Banville needed to fulfill a contract or was banking on a new car (surely he's one of the names who can support himself with writing). But it is published as a paperback, in the summer, and so that alone seems to calibrate expectations. So ultimately I've come down somewhere else. I think the book accomplishes what it sets out to do; on it's own terms it is complete and does not need to be longer. Banville does write lengthier novels as a rule, much more involved. I actually wanted Silver Swan though to move a bit faster. I think the first person narrator works for this short approach. Here's my ultimate test: short, narrative driven books can often be consumed like writerly candy--tastes good going down, doesn't nourish, and you certainly don't remember it next day. This book though, three days later, another novel read in the interim, stays with me. There is a consistent voice, a masterly control of plot, enough insight into character...the narrator still lives for me in all of his existential complexity. That's enough.

Set in New York, not Dublin, this novella by Benjamin Black (the pen name used by Booker Prize-winning author John Banville for his mystery novels) follows the attempts by John Glass, a former journalist from Ireland, to write the biography of his American father-in-law. Big Bill Mulholland, described as "South Boston Irish," is a legend. Recruited for the CIA upon his graduation from Boston College, he was a specialist in electronic surveillance in Korea, Latin America, Europe, and Vietnam. Later he went into the communications business, set up Mulholland Cable, became a millionaire many times over.

Now Mulholland lives the good life, having set up a charitable trust, which is run by Glass's wife Louise, who is also a UN Special Ambassador for Culture, and he wants Glass to write his biography. "Not a hagiography--I don't merit one, I'm no saint," he insists. "What I want is the truth."

Glass, who has covered Northern Ireland, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and the Rwandan genocide, fears that writing this biography may undermine any journalistic credibility he ever earned, but he has no choice. He secretly hires a young man, Dylan Riley, to gather information for him, and Riley soon discovers something--something so secret that he tries to blackmail Glass into giving him half of the money Mulholland is paying Glass, or he will reveal his information publicly. Before Riley can meet Glass to talk, however, Riley turns up dead, shot through the eye. John Glass turns detective, fearing that his own affair with a young artist may be the damaging secret. When a journalist injects himself into the story of Riley's death, the backgrounds of the various Mulholland family members are gradually revealed.

As always, author John Banville (writing as Black) writes with powerful descriptive skills, and his sense of narrative pacing is unerring. This novella, however, is too short to allow for much development of mood or atmosphere, and there is little opportunity for him to develop the kinds of complications which make mystery stories challenging. His characters, too, are sketches, rather than fully developed human beings, and they remain stereotypes, their behavior fairly predictable. As a result, the kind of last minute revelations and dramatic tours de force which sometimes make short mysteries such a delight to read never occur here. Ultimately, the book feels like the outline for a much longer and more complex novel. n Mary Whipple

Writing as Benjamin Black: Christine Falls: A Novel
The Silver Swan: A Novel

Writing as John Banville: The Untouchable
Shroud
The Sea (Man Booker Prize)

It's my fault for not noticing that all of the praise written on the back of this book are for other books by this author. Although, I still feel duped, mostly because this book is the literary equivalent of "phoning it in." The plot is like a "Law and Order" episode: pointless, obvious, and over in less than an hour, 30 minutes too many. The only thing I find interesting is that this is a mystery in which the protagonist seems to have almost no interested in solving it and does so with almost no effort. There is nothing to be gained from reading this book. Maybe you should read one of the other books that are lauded on the back of this one.

After reading Christine Falls and The Silver Swan, i found this to be a huge disappointment. As another reviewer wrote, the brevity of this story does not allow Black to show that he is a very talented mystery writer. I actually had a hard time getting through this book, or really wanting to find out the identity of the murderer. If I hadn't had high expectations for this book, based on previous Benjamin Black books, I probably wouldn't have even finished the book. Hopefully Black's next mystery will have more developed characters and a more complex plot.

Novella by Banville/Black, in his free time, about a beleaguered former semi-celebrity, semi-serious Irish journalist who married into a powerful American family patriarched by an OSS/CIA spook resembling Wild Bill Donovan. Another derivative is the x-ray spouse identified by Wolfe in Bonfire of the Vanities. As a murder mystery, a cypher character, the epyonymous Lemur, did get killed, but the book is about a male professional's middle-age anxiety, and done not as deeply as a writer like Roth seems better to understand. Banville also worked in gorse, though in Ireland, not the Magic Island. (Paperback p. 25.)

Originally serialized in The New York Times Magazine, this novella doesn't meet the standards of Black's Quirke novels. Irish journalist John Glass has given up reporting on foreign wars and accepted a commission from his wealthy and powerful American father-in-law, "Big Bill," to write the old man's biography.

His reduced role in the world - complacent, unfaithful husband of a rich wife, occupying a glassed-in office in the old man's Manhattan skyscraper - doesn't square with his war-correspondent persona. There may be such people, but Black never convinces and the story - a dark secret in the past and a murder in the present - is Chandleresque but ordinary.

Black (pseudonym of award-winning novelist John Banville) is a fine writer, but readers interested in his noir books should turn to his Dublin pathologist Quirke series, beginning with "Christine Falls."

To call this novella slight is perhaps too much praise. There are so few characters that there is little thought required to determine who' dun' it and it is almost writing by numbers. The characters are stereotypes that we are all familiar with from countless TV detective dramas.
The writing is terse and could almost be culled sentence by sentence from a myriad similar novels.
As an admirere of Banvilles previous work and even the first two Black novels all I can say is 'How the mighty are fallen'.
This book wasn't so much a detective novel as daylight robbery.

This is the third Benjamin Black book I have read in a few days. I am as addicted to his writing as his characters are to cigarettes and alcohol.

It is true that the "mystery" is interesting: A burned out journalist hires a researcher to assist him in finding detail so that he can write his father-in-law's biography -- a biography that the father-in-law requested. The old man is a retired CIA star and business millionaire. But somehow, it appears that the researcher (the Lemur of the title) must have turned up something interesting -- he is found murdered. Who did it?? And why?? That is the mystery.

While that is intriguing, the most important part of this book is the way the characters are drawn, how they come to conclusions. Unlike many authors, Black leaves people with wrong conclusions and, indeed, lots of existential angst, so to speak. He leaves us, the reader, to draw conclusions -- or not, as we wish. But by the end of his books, and especially this one, we have had an excellent introduction to these people and their own special interior torments.

Enjoy!

Banville is my favorite living author and I provide this review with a heavy heart. Before the publication of this book and (it must have been) with tongue firmly in cheek based on the succeeding events, that Banville informed a room full of his devotees at a book signing event that he would not attempt a contemporary novel sited in the United States. He said that he couldn't catch the language and as we all sagely nodded in agreement, language is perhaps the element of his work that most enchants his fervent admirers. Well, he must have either known this book was a poor effort or been joking because the language is really DOA. I vote for the first and suggest it may be a joke of some kind intended to demonstrate how very good Banville can be when he stays with the timeless and vaguely European rather than the contemporary and very different context Of rich American's with dark secrets in their pasts and oversized current egos. Read The Sea to get a feel for this author and if you must read the Lemur for the sake of exhausting Banville's canon (my personal goal), then forgive him because this one just is either not up to snuff (to use an more antique turn of phrase in honor of the real Banville voice) or a private joke that one hopes will someday be explained.