John Banville: Snow (Paperback, 2021, Hanover Square Press)
Paperback, 304 pages
Published Sept. 14, 2021 by Hanover Square Press.
Despite being "A Strafford and Quirke Murder" the latter is conspicuous by his absence but this strange and haunting book is really rather fine. A plot very much of its time and place, with a lot left unsaid, and it is very dark but it's well written (and I polished it off in only two days, which is a bit of a giveaway).
I tore through the book in one sitting. On the surface, it has some tried and true Christiesque elements: an anachronistic and dogged detective, murder in an old (Irish) country home filled with inbred whack jobs, an incompetent local constabulary, and ominous weather with relentless snowfall. It also has more contemporary features like the cleric as pedophile and sexual abuse by Catholic priests that sent me to the web to learn about generations of Christian Brothers' molestation of Irish boys. What it doesn't have is a definitive solution, and we're left in a slightly ambiguous place at the end, although I think the ending works to underscore the very unresolved situation of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
Apparently Banville is now doing crime under his real name, but I wish he had stayed with Benjamin Black. His other novels that deal so beautifully with aging, time, and memory are …
I tore through the book in one sitting. On the surface, it has some tried and true Christiesque elements: an anachronistic and dogged detective, murder in an old (Irish) country home filled with inbred whack jobs, an incompetent local constabulary, and ominous weather with relentless snowfall. It also has more contemporary features like the cleric as pedophile and sexual abuse by Catholic priests that sent me to the web to learn about generations of Christian Brothers' molestation of Irish boys. What it doesn't have is a definitive solution, and we're left in a slightly ambiguous place at the end, although I think the ending works to underscore the very unresolved situation of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
Apparently Banville is now doing crime under his real name, but I wish he had stayed with Benjamin Black. His other novels that deal so beautifully with aging, time, and memory are very different from these gritty crime novels that are great stories, but also expose some awful facets of Irish history perpetrated by the Church. On the other hand, maybe he's about to find some way to bring it all together.
