The Book Of Evidence by John Banville

Freddie Montgomery, the central character of John Banville’s The Book Of Evidence, is an apparently complex man. The word ‘apparently’ is important because he has a tendency to cloak really quite simple actions in complex, sometimes convoluted narrative.

The Book Of Evidence has a strong plot, but one that is revealed only piecemeal in the form of what seem at first sight to be the random recollections of an imprisoned man. A potential reader would not want a listing of these details here, since the manner of their revelation is one of the most absorbing aspects of this beautifully crafted book.

As Freddie reveals his story, just a little at a time, we learn his motives and discover precisely what he has done to warrant his incarceration and trial. This jigsaw of history eventually fits together to reveal a series of events and relationships that were perhaps always confused. That’s life. Suffice it to say that there is a family history, an art collection, the theft of a painting and a murder, nothing less than the smashing of a woman’s head with a hammer. Piece that together with a gay bar, snippets of Ireland, police and prison and there is the basic framework of John Banville’s novel. 

t is the author’s use of language, however, that creates most of this book’s effect. Though never aspiring to difficulty for its own sake, the style is often complex, often employs convoluted sentences that meander their way to places their openings seem unable even to conceive. Their colour and effect make The Book Of Evidence a delight to read from beginning to end. But some time before the end, their effect may also be likened to the surface of a busy canvas whose almost fanatical attention to detail eventually drags attention away from the overall design. For some, the style might begin to grate.

Thus, by the end of the book, I felt that the stylistic invention had begun to dominate, to confuse, even obfuscate. There were powerful points to make about the character of Freddie, but the parts that adhered – sometimes randomly – to his outline rather confused the impression he made. There again, that might just have been the point, since he also eventually managed to convey a peculiarly individual, a strangely distant and detached relationship with his own actions and motives. In the end, we know just as much about Freddie as he wanted us to know.

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The Line Of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

It can be no coincidence that Nick, the Oxford graduate who comes to stay, has the surname Guest. The Feddes invite him into their London home, Kensington Park Gardens, no less, because he has been a pal of their son, Toby, at university. Head of household, Gerald, is a Tory MP, elected by the good people of Barwick in Northamptonshire to represent their interests. It’s a county that always elects Tories, even when they close down the local steelworks, even when they candidates might appear unelectable.

Gerald, like everyone else in The Line Of Beauty, however, seems to be interested only in representing himself, a pursuit he achieves, again like everyone else, with partial competence. And then there’s Catherine, the Feddens’ unstable daughter who is on lithium, consistently referred to as librium within the family. Wani Ouradi, Antoine to officialdom, is the son of a Lord of Lebanese origin. The family owns a chain of supermarkets. Wani eventually has sufficient resources to buy up a piece of central London so that it can be redeveloped into premises to house a magazine venture destined from the start to sell no more than a copy or two. But then it will be something for Nick Guest to do with his spare time.

The characters in Nick Hollinghust’s book never really seem to be required to worry about the consequences of their actions. Leo is something different. He’s a council worker, and black, and not rich. An odd man out? He plays a significant role in the early part of the book, and later reappears when his family report he has dies of AIDS. The core of the book, it seems, is its sexuality. Nick Guest, along with several other characters, is gay. These people are not just homosexuals, however. They project an air of public display, men who wear their sexuality like a school tie. Perhaps they are not alone in that. So Nick has his fling with Leo. He has clearly flung with Toby and flings far and wide with Wani. The image of these rich young men having it off in smelly, locked lavs will live on after the book, but not for long. Nick regularly refers to Henry James, the quotations appearing like commentaries to the action.

Personally, the setting and characters reminded me more of Anthony Powell, who often inhabited similar social echelons. Powell’s characters can be every bit as devious, selfish, self-obsessed, fickle and ignorant as anyone in The Line Of Beauty. The difference, however, is that Powell’s upper crust speaks of misdemeanours in hushed tones. His is still an era of closets and his characters at least try to lock their skeletons therein. Alan Hollinghurst’s desirables, however, apparently want their skeletons in the shop window, mobile and, apparently, bent double before them.

And it’s not just the gay sex that’s traded, since cocaine and dope figure large as well, for the book inhabits the 1980s, the era when, we were told, wealth and riches flowed in the direction of merit, thus auto-confirming its sense of superiority and right. Eventually each of the intellectually muscled, self-seeking morons that populate The Line Of Beauty comes up against limitations. Some of these are personal, others beyond control. Scandal emerges and AIDS takes its toll of gay abandon. Nick’s guest status is questioned. He seems to take the blame for everyone else’s shortcomings. He seems to walk away saying, “Good while it lasted”, a motto that might have applied to the book, but it didn’t. The characters and their rarefied lives were eventually interesting, finally engaging.

Those things that Anthony Powell’s characters would have hidden are not only in the open but are flouted. And then, when comeuppance comes up, it seems that nothing will stick, nothing will damage any of them. And so this particular reader felt that their contribution to humanity might not reach the positive. Thus the story leaves a question. Is it voyeuristic, satirical, or merely horribly descriptive?

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Love, etc by Julian Barnes

It’s hard to imagine a more perfect marriage of form and content than Love, etc, in which Julian Barnes continues the story of characters that came to life in Talking It Over. If, however, this marriage is fine, then equally the marriage of Gillian and Oliver is not. And neither, for that matter, was the previous one that temporarily joined Gillian and Stuart.  

Julian Barnes tells the story of this love triangle entirely in the first person. Gillian, Oliver and Stuart appear like talking heads on a screen to relate their own side of things. Since we left them at the end of Talking It Over, Stuart has moved to the States, where he has become a successful businessman and has found a new partner. Oliver, meanwhile, having won the hand of fair Gillian, has started his family but has fallen on hard times, an experience he seems to regard merely as a passing phase, except that it’s clearly not a phase and neither does it pass.

Re-enter Stuart, and thus the situation progresses. Occasionally, especially when the principal actors mention them, minor characters appear to have their often substantial say. There is an ex, a new girlfriend, an occasional mother. Also, the children have their say, their naiveté as confused as it is innocent, their vagueness inherited, perhaps, from their personal environment.

And so a story unfolds. Oliver is as full of theatre and bravura as he was throughout Talking It Over, but now it rings more of a bluff, a screen erected for self-protection rather than an extrovert’s sheen. Unemployment and illness seem to have exhausted him. Stuart, having made his fortune, is on an up and begins to reassert his desire to occupy the position he has always coveted, the space by Gillian’s side.

There are surprises in store, surprises for the characters and for the reader. But what Julian Barnes communicates with such subtlety, skill and ease are the inconsistencies of human character, the incongruities of events, the contradictions and deceptions of behaviour, and the illusions these confusions create. These people all act primarily out of self-interest. But then who doesn’t? That’s the point. And thus the process takes all of us to places we have all been, but have often failed to notice or acknowledge, even if we have admitted and recognised our motives, which most of us have not.

Love, etc is a brilliant book, brilliantly conceived and brilliantly executed with a lightness of touch that leaves us wholly surprised when we encounter a fundamentally serious point. The plot? Who cares?

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Istanbul: Memories And The City by Orhan Pamuk

Near the opening of Istanbul: Memories And The City, Orhan Pamuk suggests that “at least once in a lifetime, self-reflection leads us to an examine the circumstances of our birth”, to examine family, identity and origins, perhaps to find if we might have deserved better. Thus this master prose applies his art, his skill to weave an intricate and detailed tapestry of a city with its history, customs, architecture and feel embroidered around the story of the writer’s early years, spent in a domesticity somehow short of bliss. 

The book, no doubt, is an instalment, since it ends with the young Orhan Pamuk out of college declaring he wants to be a writer. There remains, therefore, a lot of story yet to be told. There is a crucial concept, Pamuk tells us, needed to inform our experience of this place. It provides a clarifying lens that not only magnifies and intensifies, but also interprets. In Turkish it’s called hüzün, which roughly translates as melancholy. But it is not the melancholy of melancholia. It is not unhappiness, and is far removed from depression or anything else clinical. Orhan Pamuk returns to this word and its meaning throughout the text, but usually to skirt around its core, to illustrate rather than define. 

As I read Istanbul, the more I was convinced I was dealing with an idea that spanned both humanity and humility along one axis, married with reflection and mortality along another. The concept explains why this city, when seen through foreigner’s eyes, has been either a comment on history, a judgment on squalor, or a romance on the exotic. Whether it’s the engravings of Melling or the words of Flaubert, Western visitors have tended to exaggerate, to concentrate on things the locals take for granted, whilst ignoring those that fire them. Compared to local writers whose views are no less partial, it seems, the visitors tend to concentrate more on the picturesque, what can be observed and recorded rather than what can be felt or interpreted. Those born or living in the city are in contrast part of its fabric, conscious of its design, more able to follow a thread of meaning. Pamuk follows such a political thread through his book. 

The country’s modernisation under Ataturk is a constant theme. It was an ideology, Pamuk declares, that convinced his family that, as Westernised, positivist property-owners, they had the right to govern over semi-literates, and a mission to prevent them becoming too attached to their superstitions. Such acute and astute observation, laden with irony, is also revealed as having penetrated his own psyche. Elsewhere, he tells us that while he might remain uneasy about religious devotion, he, like the secular bourgeoisie in general, feared not God, but the potential fury of those who believed in Her too much. He also, quite early on, introduces the reader to his suspicion, nay fear, that he himself has a duplicate existence in another place elsewhere in the city, perhaps in the same form, but with a separate, independent identity.

Readers of Pamuk will notice here a theme that seems to pervade his work. The city itself has had at least three separate identities, all played out by different occupants, their origins in a multiplicity of cultures and places. And so it may be with the individual. He did not choose to be born into this identity, this skin, this psyche. By chance he might have a religious fanatic, a merchant, a Sultan, a boatman or a moderniser as a father, and any of the same – less Sultan – plus more as a mother. He might have changed direction in his own life, have become the architect he aimed for, have been a painter, or might have even married the first love who modelled for his portraits.

Throughout, he might have been someone else, or indeed have merely represented a type, a class, a privilege, a poverty. Are we discussing the individual, an individual, the writer, a writer or, as a generality, anyone who might or might have once lived in this place and thus adopted its identity? Thus lives, like places, are to be interpreted, reinvented by the eyes that view them. A writer, perhaps, invents nothing in his fiction, the production of which becomes merely a search for the self who, by accident of history, becomes fixed in an individual that remains, inevitably, in a state of change.

This beautiful, moving book, one hopes, is just the start of an autobiographical project. Like life itself, I anticipate a future whose attainment I possibly might live to regret. Hüzün. 

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When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

In When We Were Orphans Kazuo Ishiguro constructs the life of Christopher Banks via a series of episodes, ostensibly written by the character himself, between 1930 and 1958. We first meet Christopher as a young Cambridge graduate through his own recollections, recorded from a perspective of several years past. We discover how he was introduced to London’s elite society. It appears that he always hovers on the edge of this group, having neither the birthright nor the connections to penetrate its layers. He does have a pedigree, however. We find ourselves convinced of that from the start. He has already become a success in his chosen career. 

It was a Japanese boyhood friend who bought him a magnifying glass when he announced his ambition to be a private investigator, a detective whose individual effort would unearth truths the combined wisdom and talent of armies of police had overlooked. Thankfully, for it could never have succeeded, Kazuo Ishiguro resists the temptation to offer any forensic evidence to support Christopher’s claim of talent in the area. The character’s skill, achievement and eventual fame are therefore taken as read. This, I emphasise, is a strength of the book, not a weakness. 

 Christopher’s background provides the crucial setting for the book’s plot. He was born in the international settlement of Shanghai, his father an employee of one of the grand colonial era corporations. It is an era when fortunes are still being made from the opium trade, a trade Christopher’s mother vehemently and publicly opposes. The unconventional uncle Philip is an influence on the young boy, as is a Japanese friend, Akira, with whom Christopher seems to spend many hours in limited, rather competitive relationship. When Christopher’s father disappears, decisions are made about the boy’s future. 

One day Uncle Philip takes him out and leaves his in the care of strangers, orphaned. He is eventually well catered for, however, is brought up in England and goes to Cambridge. There have been worse fates. Many years later, Christopher Banks returns to a war-torn Shanghai to solve the mystery of his parents’ disappearance, which he does with unconvincing ease. But throughout, Christopher seems removed from, even above any reality that admits him. 

He seems to find precisely and only what he wants to find. He demonstrates a separateness that seems so aloof it even allows him to cross lines of conflict whilst apparently remaining above them. On more than one occasion, Ishiguro suggests that this might be naiveté. An interesting point… When We Were Orphans describes a life that began in an expatriate enclave. Christopher is thus perhaps a cultural orphan as well. He uses his detachment to advantage, but even he cannot fully comprehend the nature of his separation from his parents. When he has discovered all the facts, he realises that he was never less than central in other’s plans, despite remaining ignorant of their motives.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s book is engaging, but ultimately disappointing in that it does not seem able to sustain the momentum or the logic of its own plot. It is beautifully written, but well before the end Christopher Banks seems to retreat into a world of his own, far away from his reader.

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The Yellow Rain by Julio Llamazares

The Yellow Rain by Julio Llamazares is thankfully a short novel that describes life, or rather the end of it, in a Pyrenean village called Ainielle. Andres, the book’s narrator, has lived there all his life in a house he calls Casa Sosas. By the time we meet him, he is reaching the end of his life, as is his village, since it is now almost deserted, abandoned by almost all who used to make a life of sorts there. Its economy has dwindled, its activity ceased. Andres remains there with his memories and shrinking present. 

 Andres relates the salient events in his life story through a series of reflections. These take the form of short monologues that allow neither dialogue nor, even reported, any words or reflections of others. Thus everything is filtered through the narrator’s highly partial, inwardly focused perspective. And through that one learns of suicide, betrayal, rejection, life, death, birth, marriage, estrangement and suffering, and all of these tinged with regret, borne of a feeling of deterioration and abandonment. 

The book’s theme is stated and restated, but it always stays the right side of repetition for repetition’s sake. What emerges is an impressionistic vision of unidirectional change for the worse. Thus the novel does not really have a plot, apart from Andres’s conscious preparation for his own inevitable end. Throughout the tone is desolate, with an occasional lightening as high as despair. 

But having said that, it is not a criticism of the book, since it achieves what is sets out to achieve in describing Ainielle’s and, within it, Andres’s own descent into non-being. Andres goes as far as digging his own grave to ensure an interment alongside his memories, most of which seem to be closely entwined with decay and tragedy. He describes the circumstances that led others to take their own lives, to suffer at the hand of an unforgiving environment. One feels that there were always options, but that the identity people shared in their isolated existence was too strong to reject. 

 The Yellow Rain is not a novel to pick up in search of light relief, but it is an engaging, well written and, in its English version, an especially well translated book. Its point may be quite one dimensional, but this transformation is vividly, sensitively and convincingly portrayed. The book is also succinct, short enough to avoid wallowing in its own slough of despond. Ainielle is now a ghost town, but still one worthy of exploration. 

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Asylum by Patrick McGrath

Asylum by Patrick McGrath is an intense study of self-obsession and self-interest. Narrated by and experienced from the point of view of Peter Cleave, a psychiatrist, we follow the development of a relationship between Stella Raphael and Edgar. Stella is married to Max, who is a clinical colleague of Peter’s in a mental hospital for the criminally insane where Edgar is a patient. 

Unlike Peter, Max finds his career, his marriage and his life somewhat stalled. Stella finds Max, her professionally challenged husband, something of a bore. She sees herself destined for something altogether more exciting, perhaps exclusive, than her husband can provide or inspire. A son, Charlie, seems to make his life in the gaps of his patents’ relationship. When Edgar, a patient committed to the penal psychiatric hospital in whose grounds the Raphael’s reside, responds to Stella’s playful dreams, events pull both of them inexorably towards destruction. The fact that Edgar’s crime was both horrifically violent and perpetrated against his then partner adds both tension and intrigue to the plot. 

 The relationship between Stella and Edgar develops initially via innuendo, but is soon explicitly recognised by both of them. On the face of things, Edgar is not manipulating her, but he would not be Edgar if he did not both see and take his chance. With Stella’s help, unwitting or otherwise, Edgar escapes. She meets up with him in London, encounters that are facilitated by a shadowy character called Nick. Stella is captivated by Edgar’s artistic talent. He is a sculptor, but he has a tendency and a history of destroying the objects he creates, especially those that he apparently holds the dearest. 

But Stella is attracted to him, becomes obsessed with him, moves in with him. Apparently she devotes her entire being to her lover to the extent that that she destroys her own family and herself to pursue her relationship with him. In the later stages of the destruction, she comes under the wing of Peter Cleave, who assists her to confront the unacceptable reality of her actions. Paradoxically, even through this professional association, self-interest comes to dominate in a fascinating and unexpected, if not altogether surprising way. Asylum is a highly concentrated but compelling read. It is a detailed, perhaps forensic analysis of Stella’s descent into an abyss of self-obsession. 

Eventually, this blocks out all reality and gives rise to an outcome which ought to provoke abhorrence, even from her. But in the end all she sees is herself. And, perhaps, in this respect she is not particularly anything special. 

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