Product Description

John Banville’s stunning powers of mimicry are brilliantly on display in this engrossing novel, the darkly compelling confession of an improbable murderer.

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #187501 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-12
• Released on: 2001-06-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 219 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780375725234
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
A former scientist who pointlessly murdered a woman during a robbery attempt describes his amoral, aimless life as he awaits trial. "Banville's style, which is spare yet richly eloquent, and his extraordinary psychological penetration, are what lift his novel to a level of comparison with Camus's The Stranger and Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment ," said PW.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Freddie Montgomery is a schizophrenic 38-year-old ex-scientist haunting dingy pubs who, nonetheless, ponders life and his illness via this superb novelized murder trial "confession." After study in America, Freddie returns to Ireland to find that his disowning mother has sold what he believes is part of his inheritance from his late father, some paintings that include an old Dutch master of a woman he thinks regards him with caring, benevolent authority. As he steals it, he murders a maid who catches him in the act. His lawyer advises him to plead manslaughter to quash evidence. Instead, the brooding, contradictory Freddie writes the "book of evidence" that we read. How much of it is true, how much sick fancy? Freddie makes us think, too.
- Kenneth Mintz, formerly with Bayonne P.L., N.J.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

?Here is an astonishing, disturbing little novel that might have been coughed up from hell.??The New York Times Book Review

?Ireland?s finest contemporary novelist.??The Economist

?The Book of Evidence is a major new work of fiction in which every suave moment calmly detonates to show the murderous gleam within.??Don DeLillo -- Review

Customer Reviews

Prick Up Your Sneers
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.

A Dark, Powerful, Obsessive Interior Monologue
"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.

Marvelous Fiction
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