The Book of Evidence

by John Banville

Overview

MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • From the Booker Prize winner of The Sea comes “an astonishing, disturbing little novel that might have been coughed up from hell" (The New York Times Book Review) about the dark confession of an improbable murderer. 

“Ireland’s finest contemporary novelist.” —The Economist

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

ISBN-13:	9780375725234
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/12/2001
Series:	Vintage International
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	185,042
Product dimensions:	5.18(w) x 7.99(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He has been the recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1976), the Guardian Fiction Prize (1981), the Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award (1989), and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction (1997). He has been both shortlisted for the Booker Prize (1989) and awarded the Man Booker Prize (2005) as well as nominated for the Man Booker International Prize (2007). Other awards include the Franz Kafka Prize (2011), the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2013), and the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature (2014). He lives in Dublin.

Editorial Reviews

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

"Banville has excelled himself in a flawlessly flowing prose whose lyricism, patrician irony and aching sense of loss are reminiscent of Lolita." —Observer

"One of the most important writers now at work in English—a key thinker, in fact, in fiction." —London Review of Books

"Remarkable ... If all crime novels were like this one, there would no longer be the need for a genre." —Ruth Rendell

From the Publisher

Comparisons with Camus's The Stranger and Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment are not lightly made, but spring irresistibly to mind after finishing Banville's dazzling novel, which was short-listed for Britain's Booker Award and won Ireland's very rich Guinness Peat Aviation Award, adjudicated by Graham Greene. Banville, who has written three previous books but is not widely known here, is literary editor of the Irish Times. His protagonist and first-person narrator is Frederick Montgomery, a former scientist who has taken to drifting aimlessly through life, keenly self-conscious, a brilliant observer of himself and his surroundings, but with no coherent moral center. In the course of a pathetically absurd robbery attempt--he is trying to steal a painting, with which he has become obsessed, from a neighbor of his mother--he brutally and pointlessly kills a maidservant. He tells his story as he sits in jail awaiting his trial, imagining it as a courtroom statement. But is his account--hallucinatory, spellbinding, full of the poetry and pity of life--true? In response to that question from a police inspector, the novel's last chilling line: ``All of it. None of it. Only the shame.'' 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 the greatest writers of crime and guilt. It is difficult to imagine a reader who would not find The Book of Evidence both terrifying and moving. (Apr . )

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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.

Library Journal