MRS OSMOND

Viking, 376pp, £14.99

Mrs Osmond is John Banville’s sequel to Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, the story of the heiress Isabel Archer who departs Albany, New York, for England, where she is besieged by suitors and ends up marrying the wrong one. Whether or not she leaves the scheming Gilbert Osmond has tortured readers since its publication in 1881.

Banville has painstakingly reproduced James’s style, and reviewers were divided as to whether this worked or not. Edmund White in the Guardian described it as ‘a remarkable novel in its own right and a superb pastiche’, while Jeffrey Eugenides, in the New York Times, thought Banville’s ‘homage reduces the object it venerates’. Banville, he felt, had deliberately placed himself in a double-bind: ‘The more longueurs [he] provides in order to reinforce the Jamesian mood and manner, the more tedious the novel becomes… And yet, without these longueurs, there would be a reduction in fidelity to the original. It’s a no-win situation.’ Lucy Scholes in the Independent assured readers that those who didn’t know the original would not be confused as Banville ‘conscientiously provides all the details first-time readers need to know to understand the story’.

Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman left no doubt as to his views on whether Banville’s central conceit had paid off: ‘To even contemplate the thereafters of the story is a kind of awful affront to James’s perfect lack of closure,’ he snarled. ‘The continuation of the story is almost pre-programmed to disappoint. I doubt it will make anyone read The Portrait of a Lady who has not read it; and it will infuriate those who have.’

‘The continuation of the story is almost pre-programmed to disappoint’