Originally published in 1970 and newly reprinted, Troubles, the story of Ireland's fight for independence from 1919 - 1922, illuminates the attitudes and insensitivities which made revolution a necessity for the Irish people. Farrell also, however, focuses on the personal, human costs to the residential Anglo-Irish aristocracy as they find themselves being driven out of their "homes."

Edward Spencer, a conservative Protestant loyalist, runs a decaying 300-room hotel on the coast of County Wexford. Regarding himself as a benevolent landowner, he nevertheless demands total submission of his tenants and the signing of a loyalty oath to the King. His ironically named Majestic Hotel, lacking maintenance during the war and its aftermath, is now too costly to repair. When British Major Brendan Archer, newly released from hospital, arrives at the Majestic to reintroduce himself to his fiancée Angela, daughter of the proprietor, the reader quickly sees the Majestic as the symbol of a faded aristocracy which has outlived its usefulness. The windows are broken, the roof is leaking, and decorative gewgaws and balconies are hanging loosely, threatening to crash. Walls, floors, and even ceilings, are swelling and cracking from vegetation run wild, and the hotel's ironically named Imperial Bar is "boiling with cats," some of which live inside upholstered chairs and all of which subsist on a diet of rats and mice. Irish rebels live just outside the hotel's perimeter.

With wry humor and a formidable talent for description, Farrell conjures up nightmarish images of life in the hotel, selecting small, vivid details to make the larger thematic picture more real. Homely details enlarge his canvas and bring his symbolism home to the reader as the rebellion by the Irish poor continues to grow and affect life within the microcosm of the Majestic. The reader's feeling of claustrophobia and the need to escape builds, and one is not surprised when violence strikes.

By injecting small news stories throughout the narrative, Farrell informs the reader about the progress of the rebellion. He also sets up global parallels, widening his scope by reporting problems in India, South Africa, and other parts of the Empire, along with the Chicago Riots and the Bolshevist attacks in Kiev. Humor and sometimes satire leaven even the most emotional moments, and Farrell paints his characters with a broad brush which makes one constantly aware of their absurdity. Clearly delineating the emotional issues behind the drive for Irish independence, Farrell makes the reader see both sides with empathy. When Edward and the Major finally begin to shoot the Majestic's cats in preparation for a large ball, the reader is prepared for a final round of violence at the Majestic and almost welcomes it. Mary Whipple

Imagine Henry James collaborating with the macabre cartoonist Charles Addams, with a droller version of Joseph Heller serving as war consultant, and you begin to get an idea of the tone of this captivating novel. Through the first 100 pgs or so it can seem like nothing more than a well-written novel of manners covering familiar territory of upperclass, "the quality," holding on to pretense of gentility(though the discovery of a rotting sheep's head in nightstand drawer early on is a pretty good tip of what's to come), but stay with it because Farrell uses this potentially well-worn setting brilliantly to develop a bizarre but moving story that covers everything from unrequited love to political assassination to existentialism, all with a lyrical prose and bewitching tone that never raises its voice above that of bemused and befuddled exasperation. Farrell creates menace the old-fashioned way, by leaving much of it offstage, described after the fact or reported 2nd and 3rd hand, including newspaper clippings, a la Dos Passos, in the USA Trilogy, or by having it creep up on you unexpectedly like a cold draft from one of the many cracks and darkened, musty corners of the Majestic Hotel, where the ghosts are still alive but unable, or unwilling, to comprehend that the world as they knew it is inexorably disappearing one roof shingle, floor board, and beloved pet at a time. Farrell is masterful at lulling you into a false sense of security with a patient detailing of the minutiae of domestic life in the hotel -- the petty jealousies among the ancient "guests" (who really have no where else to go); the dedication to dull routine and tradition to fill up empty hours -- before reminding you with a stealthy jerk just when you're about to doze off after tea time that violence laps at the gates and untended gardens of the Majestic as inevitably as the ocean tides some of the resentful locals use for revenge against those who oppose their rebellion. For all the vivid eccentricity of the other characters, it is Major Brendan Archer, British gentleman of wealth and traumatized WWI veteran (though Farrell, again, skillfully reminds of his war experiences only when you least expect it), who best reveals the confusion and frustration of attempting to reclaim a former world gone corrupt and obselete, and move into a new world without sacrificing the values and codes that once served him so well. That is his dilemma, and it is part of Farrell's brilliance that he never offers his main character, or his audience, any pat answers. Instead, Archer stumbles his way trough this chaotic, crumbling life with an outdated sense of honor and duty he knows has become futile but can't figure out how to replace. If all this sounds a bit heavy, fear not, for if you like your humor on the dark side, this book is filled with marvelous moments, including a gala ballroom scene that would make Flaubert applaud. (And you'll never look at your cat the same way after reading the conflagration scene!) My only criticism is that the political views of some characters tend to sound, at times, not always, like set speeches intended to provide audience with summaries of Irish nationalism and British imperialism in the 20s, but that may be only because I've read much of this history elsewhere, and so it sounded a bit canned. For readers unfamiliar with the period, however, this dialogue may prove helpful, (and keep in mind that Farrell wrote this novel some 50 years after the events, when most American readers would not have such knowledge). Near the end of the novel, one character, when all seems to be falling apart, observes, "All this fuss, it's all fuss about nothing. We're here for awhile and then we're gone. People are insubstantial. They never last at all." While this morose thought may sum up one of Farrell's themes, rest assured that his characters are anything but "insubstantial" and that this superb novel should last a long time, even longer than it takes the Majestic Hotel to fall apart.

This novel predates Farrell's Booker Prize-winning novel The Siege of Krishnapur by several years, but it's nearly as good. Set during "the Troubles" in Ireland in the early 1920s, it tells the story of a failing resort hotel, run by a dotty Anglo-Irish family, as seen through the eyes of a veteran of World War I, a shell-shocked British major. Most of violence of the Irish Rebellion takes place offstage, as the family scheme and intrigue against each other, and as the Major hopelessly woos an ironic Irish girl. Troubles is one of those rare books with a successful central metaphor: the hotel itself--leaking, nearly empty, infested with cats--standing in for the decaying Anglo-Irish ascendancy, as forces the Anglo-Irish barely understand creep in from outside to destroy their way of life. Nabokov was a big influence on Farrell, and the prose is elegant and clear-eyed and compassionate all at once. The book is funny, slyly satirical, suspenseful, and even a bit rueful for the loss of this silly way of life. Troubles is a wonderful book.

The poet Yeats compiled this collection and tried to point out a new direction for Irish poetry in the process: Book Of Irish Verse republishes the original 1900 work, presenting lesser-known but still significant poets in an excellent collection.

John Banville's, "Dr. Copernicus", was excellent in its entirety, and sections of the work were exceptional. "Kepler" which is a sequel in a Historical sense, may not match the former for its consistency of excellence, however it is still a very good novel, it takes the work of Copernicus another step, and is a piece of work that is 5 star material when compared to much of contemporary writing. The four star ranking is only relative to, "Dr. Copernicus".

The idea of whether these early stargazers believed their work documented truth or merely supported what they observed is taken a step further with Kepler and his work. When Kepler and his peers were working, mathematical proof was becoming the essence of what they would eventually publish. Work that appeared to explain what was seen was no longer enough, proving it to oneself and one's peers was the new test. One of the great enigmas that Kepler sought to solve was the orbit of Mercury. His findings were to change the Copernican view of the Universe, while Galileo was extending the very reach of it.

The science, and the math employed are raised a couple of steps from the previous novel, and are part of why I liked this work less. Understanding complex ideas should not be brought down to such simplistic levels so that no effort to understand is required, and whatever is learned is of little use as it relates to the true and complete idea. I always enjoy a writer that can explain complex theory in a manner that allows an inquisitive mind to be challenged, and the science enjoyed. In "Kepler", this did not happen the majority of the time. So the reader must just take on faith what is said, or study some pretty advanced geometry.

"Kepler" also does not have characters that gain your empathy, and at times you may struggle to find them interesting. Money, position, prestige, all conspire to intrude upon the greater goals, and I found them distracting. However the treatment of the Church and the Schism, and the effect on Kepler and his work, was very well done, interesting, and demonstrated the Church's constant interference with the scientists they were terrified of, for their work would undermine the Church's long taught fictions.

Mr. Banville is a writer of remarkable skill. I am reading the fourth of his books, and the quality of writing, his skill with a pen is never an issue. How he presents his story may or may not be enjoyable to a given reader, but all will appreciate the skill with which he writes.

John Banville takes his astonomical fiction "Doctor Copernicus" to the next stage in "Kepler." Both books are powerful feats of the imagination, in which Banville attempts to re-create that curious and pregnant stage in history when the medieval world was giving way to the first stirrings of modernity. Amid the tumult of the Thirty Years War, which would have have such a large impact on the future of Europe and indeed the entire world, an equally momentous change was taking place in the sciences. Alchemy and astrology still rule, but the natural sciences and astronomy are gradually coming into their own. Johannes Kepler builds on the insights of Copernicus and the observations of Tycho Brahe to create new theories of planetary motion that reinforce and are themselves strengthened by the work of Galileo. Banville has created a multi-dimensioned work, part picaresque, part epistolary novel, part flashback, in which Kepler struggles past politics, religious discord, family distractions and war to seek out the celestial harmonies that he is convinced are there for the discovering. "Kepler" is not the greatest of Banville's novels, but that still makes it a very good one indeed.

I love this book from start to finish. It is a little know book about Kepler and the trials and tribulations he had to endure in his dogmatic era. The workings of brilliance shine forth in this novel. A must for history lovers also.

Infamy, death, darkness, desire, self loathing, knowledge, art, and most importantly, words. An astounding book with all the elements of life. Wuthering Hieghts was my identifying novel at sixteen. This is the mascot for the mid-twenties. Perhaps at thirty I'll look back recognizing my silliness??

This is the 4th work by Mr. John Banville that I have read, and I am nearly finished with his fifth. There is much that is factual about this writer, amongst these would be, his intellect, his range as a writer, and the competency he writes with while ranging through very different subject matter and material. As others have noted he is adept with metaphor. I feel his talent is not that he uses the device so frequently, but does so with such a subtle touch, it is more akin to absorbing his thoughts, as opposed to checking them off, or making a list.

This is easily the most difficult of his works that I have been through. This is not because he is vague, or style overrides substance. He is clear in what he says; placing it all into proper context and order is another matter. I do not suggest this book is an exercise in chaos. I do feel it is a reading experience that is in fact as far from definitive as the book jacket suggests it to be. Another reader has suggested that prior to reading this book that, "Ghosts", and "Book Of Evidence", should be read first. I am sufficiently unsure that I came away from the book with the Author's entire message, so if you can read the other two first, it may help.

Primarily written in the first person in the voice of, "Morrow", a new name to distance himself from a past, allows the reader to listen in as he recounts his period of time with, "A". At times we witness events in the present, but more frequently we are told of what has already taken place, what decisions were made and why. Just the explanation of how Morrow arrived at his new name will either bore you, or entice you into Mr. Banville's narrative style. For Morrow nearly everything is the result of, or likened to another, be it an event, a person, a name, or a moment in time. The relationships he devises are indicative not of a man who was an unsuccessful felon, but more of a mind bordering on that of an Oxford Don.

Regardless of how well educated our narrator is, he is also willing to engage in a relationship with "A" that evolves into what some may compare to Nabokov, although this time age is not the issue. And then there are the balance of the cast all that are creatures that might be termed, "Banvillian", just as Marley and Drood are classified Dickensian. Dickens players had their kinks just as Banville's do, although Banville's are closer to seriously bent than kinked.

The plot line that is sketched on the jacket of our Morrow and some paintings of dubious status together with a mention of "A" does not begin to explore the depths of this work. As has been the case with all the books I have read, his writing is so well constructed, his characters so well detailed, that even if the surface storyline is as far as you choose to go, you will be rewarded. However, to do so would cheat you, of all that is there to be interpreted, and all that is almost there, or almost definitively referred to.

This Author's more existential work may be more of an acquired taste, than, "Doctor Copernicus", or, "Kepler". In any event any reader who enjoys talented writing will find time well used that is spent with Mr. Banville's work.

Banville writes exquisitely. Athena should be read slowly, like a fine meal. Interested readers might be advised to read his Book of Evidence, then Ghosts, before turning to this one.

Until I read John Banville (Kepler, Book of Evidence, and now Ghosts) I would have been skeptical that any writer could pull off a book with essentially no plot and still keep me hooked.

The man quite simply suprasses Edgar Allan Poe at his best. There isn't a character anywhere in Banville's fiction who isn't sick, but can tell us about their inner darkness with such admirable prose...

Little do people know that Ghosts (1993) is the second installment of John Banville's Freddie Montgomery trilogy. The Book of Evidence (1989) begins the sequence, which consists of Freddie's grim and gruesome confession of the brutal murder of a maidservant who interrupted his escapade of stealing a painting. Serving ten years in jail, the ex-con came to a secluded island to accommodate life and live in solitude. Professor Kreutzner, an eminent historian, was the world's most prestigious authority on the painter Vaublin, whose works were abound with strange and eerily pleasing asymmetry of misplaced figures. The paintings generated inevitably over and above it an air of mystery of what it was that happened. Along with the sulky butler and assistant Licht, who cooked and typed up manuscripts, Freddie assisted the professor in his manuscripts. The work represented for Freddie the last outpost at the border of his life.

Readers who haven't read The Book of Evidence will find the narrator and the narrative ambiguous, surreptitious, and turbid. Not only did Freddie incessantly recount on events that led to his imprisonment, he delved on philosophical issues like the redemption and the accommodation of self and the conscience. Out of guilt for his crime, the narrator professed this many-world theory that a multiplicity of worlds existed in a mirrored regression in which the dead were not dead. The notion of dreams recurred throughout the narrative and thrusted the main plot. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether he was recalling some riotous tumble of events in his dreams or simply telling the truth. Until the narrator officially identified him as the man who stole the painting he was fatally obsessed with, I had an idea that he, the narrator, was a ghost hovering over the professor's house and spying on its inhabitants as well as the unexpected castaways.

The plot is simple-it is nothing short of an account of a day in the island when a group of strangers boarded on a chartered boat stuck fast on the sandbank and ran ashore. The story slowly and mysteriously unraveled when the professor, taciturn and somewhat disgruntled by the intrusion, took the seven castaways in while they rested and waited for the skipper. Three of the castaways were kids (Pound, Hatch, and Alice). The adults were their sulky caretaker Sophie who was a photographer, dapper old Cooke, elegant Flora, and the leering Felix who claimed to know the professor.

The ominous and vaguely menacing mood persisted though the castaways found comfort and solitude in their transient stay on the island. Something about Flora and the room where stayed in (previously occupied by the narrator who hid from the castaways at their first arrival) always haunted me and tucked my mind. Flora threw herself in dreams and she woke from which feeling shivery and damp. What did she have to do with the Pierrot figures that gracefully drifted in ambiguous landscapes?

By the time I was a little less than halfway through the book, I realized nothing much would happen (as far as what would happen to the castaways) except for more haunting, lyrical, and imaginary prose that required readers to practice patience of a connoisseur. What the narrator said might be real or illusions, but the inclusion of a single chapter on Vaublin the painter toward the end drove the book to a tantalizing climax-and I will leave that that pleasure to the readers, of course. The painting (and Freddie's scholarly interest in it) would seamlessly sew all the threads together and the realization that it brought would only haunt the readers even more.

Ghosts is so much more engrossing than its predecessor in the series. While The Book of Evidence portrayed Freddie like Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita-the morbid sensation and the insouciance, in Ghosts Banville tells a tale through Freddie and some of his allusions that actually might have become real. His presence in the house, though hidden from the castaways, were nothing short of immanent. It is through his perspective just so we know about the professor's secret scheme of painting and his not liking Felix for the same reason. 4.7 stars.

"Ghosts" is one of the truly great novels -- brilliantly conceived and executed; deeply insightful; sculpted by a poet's hand. Oh, to be sure, John Banville's language can be absurd and pretentious, and I found the occasional mundane vulgarity startling, jarring, and gratuitous... but hardly ruinous. I heartily recommend this book.

"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.

"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.

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

At one point in "Mefisto in Onyx" Harlan Ellison relates an old Japanese saying: "Do not fall into the error of the artisan who boasts of twenty years experience in his craft while in fact he has had only one year of experience--twenty times." The thought seems quite apropro of Ellison as a writer, once you completely reverse the thought and change the point entirely. This jumbled thought applies to "Mefisto in Onyx" because he will have Harlan Ellison taking his turn at that old chesnut about the man on Death Row about to be executed who really may be innocent. Chief Deputy D.A. Allison Roche believes condemed murderer Henry Lake Spanning is really innocent, so she asks her friend Rudy Paris to check out Spanning. Rudy can do this because he is a rather special person who can go "jaunting" through a person's mind and read all their thoughts. Rudy will do it because Allison thinks she is in love with Spanning.

That is the basic premise for this short story (I do not think it is long enough to be called a novella), but knowing that "Mefisto in Onyx" was written by Ellison (come on; who else could get away with a title like that?) should be the main reason for checking it out if you have yet to do so by this point in the history of the universe. Ellison was an executive producer on that first revitalized edition of the "The Twilight Zone" they did many years aback and certainly this story is that grand tradition of playing with your mind. The cover art by Frank Miller, who also pens the introduction, is a simple but effective black and white drawing that helps set the mood for the telling of the tale. This is not one of those classic Ellision stories that will work its way into the pantheon of speculative fiction, but it is worth reading as is pretty much everything written by one of America's greatest living gadflies.

Banville is certainly one of the most exciting writers of the last 30 years, and this is a mesmerising display of his talents. On one level this is a book bristling with symbols, wherein a young man attempts to reconcile the opposing forces of chaos and order in which he finds himself. Working within and alongside this is the puzzle of the book itself. Themes are repeated, mutated and re-presented...the truth (of events and motives, of the world itself)always lying just out of reach for the narrator.

As ever Banville is passionately in love with language. His glittering, post-modern premise is rendered with such a rich landscape of imagery and description that literally every paragraph of the book soars and the reader is left reeling in wonder.

But Banville is also spare and wonderfully witty: "In the midst of wind-shivered foliage a deer would silently materialize - a glossy eye and a glistening tear-track, a stump of a tail, a unicorns dainty hoof" The poetic prose feels pared down, as if he's considered the cleanest, sharpest approach to each detail.

So, in short, if you love language, if you love literature then surrender to Banville!

The partial list of Authors who have put their talents to this tale include giants in literature, J.W. Goethe, Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Mann. "Mefisto" is John Banville's entry into this legend and into the company of those who have interpreted it. This story of "Faust" can be read in prose form like, "Mefisto", or as a play by Goethe. I enjoyed this version, as the message remains the same, the challenge to the Author is to make it relevant to now, and to make it his or her own. For any who have read another Author's version the changes required to make the tale more contemporary cannot be simple and make the version worthy. This is not about changing period costume and taking the work from The Medieval, to the Renaissance, to the 20th century.

I think this legend is particularly valid today although any contemporary reader of another century would say the same. The difference is the lines we stand at, and the lines we cross because we can, with little regard for whether we should, are very real. Superstition still exists. Recall the recent millennial change and all that was feared and did not happen, all the apocalyptic prophesies that never were.

"Mefisto" is, as it has been, about crossing a line, what bargain must be made, what compromises negotiated, and with consequences vicious in their finality. Two scientists this past weekend were featured in a prominent newspaper saying they are moving forward with cloning a human. Others claim the cloning has taken place already. What deal have they made metaphorically speaking, and with whom?

This legend like a select few of others of its kind is always valid, always worth reading. Even if you read the oldest written version it is possible to substitute a situation that exists today. And this is how it should be as this is about the human condition and one of its fundamental flaws. Always has been with us, always will be.

The enjoyment here devolves from an extremely talented man of thought who can then place on paper the wicked and wickedly funny players like Felix that entertain, teach, and horrify. Mr. Banville gets inside your head if you let him, and, "Mefisto", is a carnivorous guest.

So enter his world where nighttime becomes downtime, and bandages are made from aluminum foil. And here it is not just the red or blue pill, but how you receive it, tablet, powder, liquid, or perhaps with a syringe assist?

Imagine my overwhelming surprise when I dug deep into John Banville's "Shroud" and discovered a book oozing with sumptuous prose stylings, beautifully shaped characters, sumptuous scenery, and a plot both wondrous and fulfilling. I really did not think there were writers who could sculpt a book like this anymore. Most modern "literature" consists of shallow characters, banal dialogue, and pedestrian plot lines. Not Banville, or at least not in this stupendous story about a retired university professor and literature critic named Axel Vander. "Shroud" blew away many of my dogmatic conceptions about what literature means in this era of waning attention spans and lazy readers. Perhaps it will do the same for you.

It is extremely difficult to like Axel Vander. He is a mean-spirited, misogynistic, malicious, petty jerk. Moreover, Vander would be the first to admit that he is a jerk. He simply doesn't care what other people think about him, at least not on the surface. And he lies, oh how he lies. He describes himself as a "virtuoso of lies" and admits he spent his entire career as an academic attacking others while building his own career on superficiality. He rarely read the things he attacked and read less of those things on which he built his reputation. Everyone in Vander's life suffered through his unbearable presence, especially his late wife Magda. Vander ignored Magda until a bout with Alzheimer's disease finally forced him to deal with her. Although Vander may be the biggest jerk in the history of literature, occasional phrases or thoughts he has hint at someone greater than the sum of his parts.

When we meet Vander, he is in a great dilemma. He recently received a letter from a young woman in Europe who discovered a grim secret in Vander's past, a secret that threatens to expose him and bring disgrace to his vaunted career. Vander feels he must meet this danger head on, so he goes to Turin, Italy, home of the sacred Shroud of Turin, to meet Cass Cleave. Vander is determined to savage this young rube in his characteristic way until he realizes that he is falling in love with the young Irish girl. In a deeply affecting sequence of events, Vander falls ill and relates the story of how he came to be who he is to Cass. Banville concludes "Shroud" with one surprise after another, keeping the reader constantly on his or her toes right to the very end.

There isn't one character in "Shroud" who is not deeply flawed or suffering in some grand way. Vander is an old, embittered alcoholic with no one left in the world but his own snarling rage. Cass Cleave suffers from a severe form of mental illness that induces seizures, makes her hear voices, and brings on thoughts of suicide. Vander's colleague and former flame Kristina Kovacs is slowly and painfully dying. Amongst all of these bleak valleys, Banville does hold out redemption to Vander, but it is a redemption fraught with immense peril for himself and those around him.

The backgrounds and situations painted by Banville here are simply marvelous. The first part of the book contains many symbolic scenes that emphasize the alienation and separation between people and how difficult it can be to overcome these vast differences. The author settles down a bit in the second and third parts of the story while managing to keep the story moving at a fevered pace. I have never been to Europe, but I feel like I have after reading this book. Yes, Banville's descriptive powers are that good.

The prose here is phenomenal. When I think of this book now, I keep returning to Banville's descriptions of pigeons. At one point, a flight of these birds taking off makes a sound like "derisive applause." Another bird flying through the air looks like (paraphrase here) "a constantly shifting series of inkblots." Who writes like this anymore? Well, apparently Axel Vander in his scholarly works, where he spent much time bending over dictionaries and other writing guides in order to shape his articles and books. One suspects this is a thinly veiled reference to Banville huddling around an Oxford English Dictionary while writing "Shroud." Oddly enough, this is the second book I have read in the past month or so that uses the word "matutinal," meaning something related to, or occurring, in the morning. The other author who freely bandied this word about was Nathaniel Hawthorne. Now if you are familiar with Hawthorne's work, you know his prose is fabulous. Banville's prose is just as spectacular as Hawthorne and his fellow 19th century authors.

"Shroud" is more than eye candy. It is an insightful gaze into the deepest recesses of what it means to be human. I must say I had a sinking feeling as I closed the book after finishing the final page, a feeling that told me I missed many of Banville's intricately crafted subplots. This thought was quickly followed by another: it doesn't matter if I missed some points of the story. What I got out of it was enough to justify a thousand times over the choice I made to read this gorgeous work of art.

Axel Vander, the narrator of John Banville's "Shroud," is the latest and, according to Banville, will be the last of his "self-hating, murderous" central characters, the kind that careen drunkenly through polite society. Vander is an anti-hero with nothing going for him. He is a liar, a thief, a charlatan, an academic in-fighter, an exploiter of women. He is even a critic. "Professor Vander," mocks his Italian host, "holds that every text conceals a shameful secret, the hidden understains left behind by the author in his necessarily bad faith, and which it is the critic's task to nose out. Is that not so, Axel?" (222-23)

The reviewer who seeks to parse "Shroud," to expose the secret of its architecture, thus risks sounding painfully, ironically silly. Here goes anyway. Set in Turin, where Nietzsche became mad, and the Ligurian coast, where Shelley drowned, "Shroud" is a character study of Vander, a Jewish refugee who assumes the identity of a dead partisan in pre-War Belgium, rises to fame on the faculty of an American university, and at the end of his life confronts, and is confronted by, a dreamy young woman who threatens to unmask him. Told mostly in first-person from Vander's point of view and in third-person from his accuser's, "Shroud" is a meditation on death, truth, identity and self, good and evil, social covenants, and spirit, in which Nietsche's Zoroaster, Christ's resurrection, commedia dell'arte, and a rejection of rationalism are all somehow conflated. (Am I sounding silly yet?)

As a character, Vander lacks the comedic, self-deprecating charm of, say, Freddie Montgomery, the anti-hero of Banville's "The Book of Evidence," so there is little lightness in his voyage of discovery ending in death. (On the other hand, I suppose, neither is there much lightness in "Moby Dick" or "Crime and Punishment," to which "Shroud" self-consciously refers.) Vander is not the sort of character Graham Greene would invite to dinner. However, his voice is always full and multi-layered, in a nineteenth-century prose style, and the novel's minor characters - an Italian academic and his family, a former lover dying of cancer, hotel employees, and caffè patrons - are quirky and memorable.

Words, even words that no one else has ever heard of or used, seem to spill out of Banville's brain effortlessly, and like Faulkner or Proust he has a master's ability to connect the dots in long rolling rhythms. I recommend this book. Robert E. Olsen

Axel Vander tells us from the opening of this sensitive and tension-filled study of identity that he is not who he says he is. A respected scholar and professor at a California college, Vander is recognized for his thoughtful philosophical papers and books, especially his ironically entitled The Alias as Salient Fact: The Nominative Case in the Quest for Identity. Just before he leaves for a conference on Nietzsche in Turin, however, he receives a letter from a young woman in Antwerp, questioning his own identity and asking to meet with him. As the novel unfolds, we come to know more about the "real" Axel Vander and more about his mysterious correspondent, the emotionally disturbed Cass Cleave.

Like Banville's narrators in other novels, the elderly Axel Vander of Shroud is unreliable and often dishonest, self-concerned but not self-aware. Consummately venal (though beautifully realized), he is a character who blithely takes advantage of whatever circumstances arise, with no concern for the consequences, except to himself. Cass Cleave, the daughter of Alexander Cleave, the narrator of Banville's previous novel, Eclipse, has visions and seizures, and Vander regards her as mad, but she and Vander develop a relationship of almost religious significance. He is a depraved and amoral old man living a life of personal un-truth, while she is a sick, avenging angel, striving to connect the disjunctions in her life so that she can become an integrated, whole person.

In Turin, where she joins Axel, Cass sees religious symbolism in common events, finding an ordinary breakfast a form of communion. Artworks, especially crucifixion scenes by artists from the various settings in which the novel takes place (Cranach, Bosch, Memling, and Van Eyck in the Low Countries; and Tintoretto, Mantegna, and Bellini in Italy) further develop the symbolism. Always present in the background, of course, is the Shroud of Turin, which may be the real burial cloth of Jesus--or may not be. Parallels and contrasts between Vander and Jesus abound.

Banville's novel is intense, highly compressed in its development of overlapping themes, and filled with suspense, both real and intellectual. Every plot detail expands his themes of identity and selfhood, the relationships we create with the outside world, and our desire to be remembered after our deaths. Banville's prose is exquisite, creating mystery by introducing details at a snail's pace, conveying attitude, and acutely observing sensuous details and physical reactions. He juxtaposes unlikely events from different times to convey information, providing voluptuous descriptions which contain both an idea and its antithesis simultaneously. Major surprises occur in the final five pages, not inserted as literary tricks, but generated naturally out of the action and interactions. This is a challenging and fascinating novel, beautifully crafted and rewarding on every level. Mary Whipple

John Banville's Eclipse is, I think, his best novel yet. There is a qualification to this claim. Banville is a quiet, introspective and eloquently descriptive writer. Most of his novels largely avoid plot and instead pay attention not so much to the characters but to the world around them. As such the more you read this author the more you understand and appreciate him.
Eclipse itself is simple. A middle age actor has had enough of life and the stage and retreats to his old family home. However things are not what he expects. Instead of longed for tranquility old problems with life and family persist. And new problems emerge. The actor does not seem able to discern between what is and what is not real.
Are the ghosts and images real or just troubled imaginations? At the end the unreal is something different again. It's a great twist to a ghost story.
Once again Banville's powers of description impress. Few writers, through their prose, can paint the world so well. Eclipse succeeds on many levels.

This is the first novel by John Banville I read and after finishing it I immediately ordered "The book of Evidence" and "Ghost", so you can safely bet that this is going to be glowing review.

The story is moving but unspectacular: Alexander Cleave is an aging actor who has suddenly lost it. For no reason that he can think of he unexpectedly finds himself in cinemas crying his heart out during the afternoon showings and he forgets his lines when he is on stage. He retreats to his late mother's house, hoping to get some peace of mind there and somehow find himself again. But instead of peace and quiet he finds that ghosts and living people have taken up residence with him. He is also beset by memories of his troubled daughter. Hoever, it is not so much the outcome of all this that matters as the processes in Cleave's mind, his dreams, his perplexities, his realizations, his fears.

Banville writes beautifully, exquisitely. His prose is a blend of evocativeness and precision, his metaphors are just right. An example: "Memory is peculiar in the fierce hold with which it will fix the most insignificant-seeming scenes. Whole tracts of my life have fallen away like a cliff in the sea, yet I cling to seeming trivia with pop-eyed tenacity (p. 74)." And another one: "It has always seemed to me a disgrace that the embarrasments of early life should continue to smart throughout adulthood with undiminshed intensity. Is it not enough that our youthful blunders made us cringe at the time, when we were at our tenderest, but must stay with us beyond cure, burn marks ready to flare up painfully at the merest touch (p. 83)?"

This is not a novel of plot and action, but a gently moving, meditative, introspective story, where a lot is left unsaid and merely hinted at and for the reader to find out. Only very good writers can pull that off succesfully. John Banville is such a very good writer.

John Banville has an almost scary insight into the psychology of the lie. Word by painstaking word, he creates a subtle and nuanced portrait of characters who, despite all evidence to the contrary, cannot or will not see the immense flaws in their souls which wreak havoc to all those close to them. In this novel, Eclipse, Banville undertakes on of these subtle portraits to create a story of haunting insight, literally and figuratively.

Alex Cleave is a moderately successful stage actor. In his mind he is terribly successful, but there are many hints throughout the book that all is not the way he paints it, either in his life or his career. Midperformance, Cleave suffers a nervous breakdown and retreats to his haunted boyhood home to recover, much to the dismay of his estranged wife. There, Cleave struggles with ghosts, real and imagined, which bring him to terms with the realities of his ruined life, the shambles of his marriage, and his tense relationship with his emotionally disturbed daughter Cass. Banville uses this rather thin plot, with it's reminiscences of the Victorian ghost story to shape a narrative that is poetic and ultimately tragic.

This novel is short on action or even plot. Rather it is a subtly drawn character study, rendered in some of the most exquisite prose since Henry James. Banville has an uncanny sense of the inner workings of his character. Cleave is an actor, and as such has the touch of the liar about him. As his mind drifts from present events to the remembered past you watch as Cleave's mind skirts around the real problems of his life. He engages in self-aggrandizement, rationalizations and most especially avoidance when faced with anything unpleasant. He admits to lesser failings readily to avoid confrontation with his greater failings. His observations of the other characters in the novel are well drawn, but slanted. Banville's brilliance is shown particularly in the life of these peripheral characters. Lydia, Cleave's wife, seems on the surface to be a shrew...and yet, you leave the novel with the sense that her complaints against her husband are more than justified. Lilly, the daughter of Cleave's rather odious caretaker, is a mysterious cypher, by turns superficial and yet possessing glimpses of a very complicated inner life that Cleave only barely understands.

The central haunting figure in the novel, Cleave's daughter Cass, is not even physically present throughout, and yet she haunts the book more fully than the ghosts in Cleave's house. Cass is brilliant but mentally troubled. She hears voices and has a tendency to self-destruction. Her specter comes between Cleave and his wife and even haunts Cleave's strange and unsettling relationship with Lilly. She troubles Cleave's conscience and yet we never know quite why. Much is left unstated in the novel about the relationship. At heart you feel there is a secret underlying it all, a secret that Banville will never fully reveal. At every moment when you think something is going to finally break in this tenuous story, the characters look away....and don't say what they are actually feeling. Even the final climax of the book is ultimately an enigma...like the eclipse of the title, most of the important events in Cleave's life are obscured by clouds, and even when they aren't he looks away.

This is not a book for "light reading" or for those who's interest is most heavily in plot or dialogue. In fact, the passages of dialogue in the work could probably be fit on ten pages. It is rather a long, internal monologue rendered in breathtaking turns of phrase. If you love haunting, slow and powerfully tragic novels though, Banville is for you. His is a world that I will be entering again soon.

I never read anything by John Banville until about a year ago, when I picked up a remaindered copy of "The Untouchable". The simplest way to express my reaction to this book is to say that, after finishing it, I promptly went out and bought several more of Banville's novels, realizing that he is one of a small handful of truly outstanding contemporary English writers.

"The Untouchable" is the first person narrative of Victor Maskell, Royalist and Marxist, art curator for the English monarchy and spy for the Soviet Union. Maskell's narrative begins in the 1980s, when he is in his seventies, sick with cancer. It is then that his past is suddenly and unexpectedly made public, the prominent, seemingly conservative intellectual revealed to be a man leading a double life, a traitor to his country. The reality, of course, is much more complex, for Maskell's motives, beliefs and actions, like those of all humans, are uncertain, clouded by conflicting memories, versions and perspectives. Married and the father of two children, Maskell is a homosexual. Ostensibly a Marxist and supporter of the great Soviet experiment, he is deeply attached to England and, in very personal ways, to the Royal family. Presumably acting for many years as a spy for the Soviets, the practical value of his activities is largely confined to being a symbolic trophy for his spymasters in the Kremlin, someone who rubs elbows with the highest levels of the British government while providing little in the way of truly useful information.

Drawing on the historical facts surrounding the Cambridge spies, "The Untouchable" is a brilliantly imagined, vividly realistic fictional memoir of the complex and often perplexing life of such a spy. Banville's prose is flawless, his narrative voice is always at perfect pitch, and his characters and story are a masterpiece of verisimilitude.

I never read anything by John Banville until recently, when I picked up a remaindered copy of "The Untouchable". The simplest way to express my reaction to this book is to say that, after finishing it, I promptly went out and bought several more of Banville's novels, realizing that he is one of a small handful of truly outstanding contemporary English writers.

"The Untouchable" is the first person narrative of Victor Maskell, Royalist and Marxist, art curator for the English monarchy and spy for the Soviet Union. Maskell's narrative begins in the 1980s, when he is in his seventies, sick with cancer. It is then that his past is suddenly and unexpectedly made public, the prominent, seemingly conservative intellectual revealed to be a man leading a double life, a traitor to his country. The reality, of course, is much more complex, for Maskell's motives, beliefs and actions, like those of all humans, are uncertain, clouded by conflicting memories, versions and perspectives. Married and the father of two children, Maskell is a homosexual. Ostensibly a Marxist and supporter of the great Soviet experiment, he is deeply attached to England and, in very personal ways, to the Royal family. Presumably acting for many years as a spy for the Soviets, the practical value of his activities is largely confined to being a symbolic trophy for his spymasters in the Kremlin, someone who rubs elbows with the highest levels of the British government while providing little in the way of truly useful information.

Drawing on the historical facts surrounding the Cambridge spies, "The Untouchable" is a brilliantly imagined, vividly realistic fictional memoir of the complex and often perplexing life of such a spy. Banville's prose is flawless, his narrative voice is always at perfect pitch, and his characters and story are a masterpiece of verisimilitude.

John Banville, the Dublin author whose fiction is at once literary and accessible, funny and mordant, informed by history but rooted in subjective reality, is one of best writers in English today. "The Untouchable," his 1997 novel based on the life of Sir Anthony Blount, the Fourth Man in the Cambridge Spy Scandal, is extraordinarily good.

"Who am I?" art historian Victor Maskell asks himself in this first-person narrative, crafted ostensibly for the benefit of an ersatz amanuensis in a leather skirt. "What do I know? What matters?"

Maskell, an essential outsider, has spent a lifetime using his studied charm, suppressed emotions, closeted homosexuality, and distant family connections to winnow a place for himself in the English establishment. It matters not that his marriage is a failure, that he is estranged from his children. Art, he concludes at one point - even the prized painting, attributed to Poussin, which has hung on his wall for 50 years - has no meaning; it simply is. The same, in his view, might be said of existence itself.

This passive and unexamined life comes apart after Maskell, once an amateur intelligence operative, is publicly disgraced for having passed information of questionable value ("state secrets," the press calls it) to wartime ally the Soviet Union (the "enemy"). Why did he do it? Certainly not for money. Was it for the cause of worldwide socialism? For personal amusement? To put on the mask of a man of action? To avenge the underclass? Or was it simply another form of casual duplicity, no different is substance from the duplicity of proper gentlemen who take mistresses or of friendly governments which destroy villages in order to save them?

Nothing is as it seems in this ambiguous, allusion-stocked, politically savvy, richly imagined life of Victor Maskell and his times. Robert E. Olsen