The real crime is the novel

Banville's latest crime story lands with a wooden thud

Snow

John Banville Hanover Square Press

We've all had the experience of feeling as though a room we've entered or a person we've met was “straight out of a novel.” So when Det.-Insp. St. John Strafford, the glum main character of John Banville's latest mystery, Snow, first thinks to himself that the murder case he's investigating feels like something straight out of a mystery novel, we readers think little of it, except to perhaps credit Banville with a taste for metafiction.

The first sentence of this novel, after all, is the announcement that: “The body is in the library,” uttered by a colonel (named Osborne, not “Mustard”), who's the master of Ballyglass House where the murder has taken place. The fourth (or maybe it's the 40th time), however, that Strafford thinks to himself that he's trapped in a creaky, Clue-like game board of a mystery novel, the reader begins to suspect that a crime more foul than murder may have been committed here: namely, that a novelist may be arrogantly denigrating the very form he himself can't seem to bring to life.

Snow is terrible. It's the kind of novel that makes even the most ardent mystery fan reconsider the latent wisdom of critic Edmund Wilson's famous 1945 essay, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” Wilson, who found Agatha Christie's masterpiece — as well as almost all other mystery novels — to be the literary equivalents of crossword puzzles, would find ample support for his contempt in Snow.

Snow is set in 1950s rural Ireland. The murder victim is one of those social-climbing Catholic priests — himself straight out of an Evelyn Waugh novel — who attaches himself to the landed gentry, straggling members of the Protestant landowning class. Father Tom Lawless has been discovered dead — and gruesomely castrated — in the aforementioned library.

Ballyglass House and environs turn out to be chock-a-block with likely suspects, all as fully realized as Miss Scarlet and Professor Plum. There's the highstrung, drug-addicted, much younger second wife of the colonel; his sexually promiscuous daughter and languidly handsome layabout of a son; and, the resentful “oaf” of a stable hand. All enter the novel festooned in clichés.

One wonders what Banville — who won the 2005 Booker Prize for The Sea, and has been writing the marvellous Quirke mystery series under his Benjamin Black pseudonym since 2007 — thought he was doing in writing this ostentatious crypt of a detective novel?

In a recent profile in the New York Times, Banville announced he's abandoned his pseudonym, modestly boasting he found his early mysteries “quite good.” The Benjamin Black books are “quite good.” Perhaps Banville shouldn't have been so quick to jettison that pseudonym.