So. Why, exactly, did I like this book? As a mystery it certainly has its failings– not enough clues are given, and as a reader you constantly feel either bewildered or stupider than the other characters, neither of which is a good feeling for a mystery to inspire. Certain key moments or developments in the story are, I feel, handled poorly. But I actually enjoyed the book, and I enjoyed it a lot. Why, then?
Because the characters and the places are so excellent, really. The characters are all very well-done, are all out of the ordinary– no cliche personality types here. When we get inside their heads– and that’s something about this book I didn’t like, the merciless head-switching, often several times in the same scene, can get a little wearisome– when we do get inside their heads, they are engaging and realistic. They were all capable of surprise and nothing they did seemed forced. It was the satisfaction of reading perfect characters, I think, that kept me going– that and the job Banville did with the setting. Anyway, nothing to disappoint from the characters and setting aspects of his style.
Even though the mystery is very slow to develop, however, and even though there were no rewards for the attentive reader– no way to feel as if you were figuring the plot out, anyway– Banville managed to keep me feeling as if I were in SOME state of suspense, and I put that down entirely to his above-mentioned craft. That and the fact that he did allow himself a few plot twists, yes. They were pretty good ones.
Here’s the thing, though: winner of the Man Booker Prize, like a hero, decides to write what he considers a piece of genre fiction. Good for him, I say! Breaking down the boundaries of the elitist literary establishment! As good as Chabon! Huzzah! But he goes and writes it under a PEN NAME, and then puts the fact that it IS a pen name right there in the text, no hiding it, in order to ALSO mention that he has won the Man Booker Prize. What exactly do you want, Banville? Do you want the secrecy of a pen name, the kind of cover that will allow you to go write commercial fiction despite the fact that you’re supposed to be ‘literary,’ or do you want the plaudits and praise of a literary career? This market and these harsh establishments are not exactly going to want to give you both. The fact that you’ve written what amounts to a literary crime novel– not a proper crime novel in itself, since it doesn’t have a good enough plot, but not a proper literary novel either, since it’s got this skeleton crime-plot sitting there– is going to make it hard for people to know what to make of you. You’re being MARKETED here in the hardback edition I have as a crime novelist, but you get your trade paperbacks printed like you’re a literary novelist. So who is going to read you? Crime readers will be disappointed by your amateurish stab at trying to be ‘gripping.’ Literary readers are going to wonder why, when you’ve clearly got your chops down, you have stuck old Quirke and his conundrum into the find-what’s-hidden formula that a crime novel should have. You can’t make everyone happy, Banville!
Well, you can certainly try, and if more people gave it a good try then literary fiction would quite being so shitty and stop being almost exclusively about boring nonsense. There would be fewer books about small-town New England and more literature about, say fighter pilots! Or astronauts! Stuff, basically, that I would actually find interesting to read. That’s the problem with the modern literary/genre fiction bifurcation: I don’t like reading about boring stuff, so why would I want to read most of the literary fiction that’s out there? But, simultaneously, I don’t like reading shitty writing, so why would I want to read any of the genre fiction that’s out there? There’s no happy medium, except for when people like Banville and Chabon try to bridge the gap by writing well about topics that have usually been considered the purview of genre writing. So keep it up, Banville, I say: get better at this and you could knock everyone flat. This is the kind of direction I want to see writers going in.
Also, this book is begging to be made into some kind of a movie. It’s the dour 1950s-Dublin setting, I think. Good for a lot of foggy shots and ‘atmosphere.’ Could somebody get on this quick, please?
