Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #562860 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-24
• Released on: 2008-06-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .40" h x 5.60" w x 8.25" l, .33 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 132 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780312428082
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Black (aka Irish novelist John Banville) offers this stunningly dark and mysterious tale in which journalist John Glass hires a man he deems the Lemur to research his father-in-law, of whom he is writing a biography. John Keating is simply marvelous here. His strong Irish accent does wonders when combined with Black's prose, creating a dark, brooding, and occasionally funny atmosphere that will surely draw listeners into the tale. As the Lemur, Keating reads with an American dialect that bears no hint of his heritage. As a result, the characters are, in their own way, unique and captivating—as is Keating's knack for storytelling and performance. A Picador paperback (Reviews, May 26). (June)
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From Booklist
Black’s earlier forays into crime fiction are as dense and alarming as dark woods. His first stand-alone thriller is a more concentrated affair, a stretch of rain-pelted pavement, as befits its initial serialization in the New York Times Magazine. But narrative compactness does not equal simplicity of situation or psychology. No, this is a many-faceted tale of class conflicts and passion gone cruelly awry. Irishman John Glass was the sort of journalist of conscience people revere. Now he’s a burnout married to a wealthy American, saddled with a despicable stepson, and acrophobic in his posh, Manhattan skyscraper digs. An old-style smoker and boozer who would prefer to keep his feet on the ground, Glass ruefully agrees to write his commanding father-in-law’s biography. A CIA operative turned communications mogul, Big Bill has his secrets and expects Glass to keep them. But Glass hires a researcher, a funny-looking, faintly ludicrous, yet menacing guy he dubs the Lemur, who quickly ends up dead. Who killed the Lemur and why? Black’s mordant wit and profound world-weariness make for a classy, character-driven mystery. --Donna Seaman

Review

Customer Reviews

(3.5 stars) "If you don't know who the patsy in the room is, it's you."


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.

All of the reviews are written about other books by the author
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.

"Aristotle was right: he that holds a secret holds power."
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)