Biography
William John Banville was born December 8, 1945 to Agnes and Martin Banville, a garage clerk, in Wexford, Ireland. He is the youngest of three siblings; his older brother Vincent is also a novelist and has written under the name Vincent Lawrence as well as his own. His sister Anne Veronica "Vonnie" Banville-Evans has written both a children's novel and a memoir of growing up in Wexford. In his teens, Banville stole a collection of Dylan Thomas's poetry from Wexford County Library.
Banville was educated at CBS Primary, Wexford, a Christian Brothers school, and at St Peter's College, Wexford. Although he intended to be a painter and an architect, he did not attend university, which he described as "A great mistake. I should have gone. I regret not taking that four years of getting drunk and falling in love. But I wanted to get away from my family. I wanted to be free."
On the other hand, he's said that college would have had little benefit for him: "I don't think I would have learned much more, and I don't think I would have had the nerve to tackle some of the things I tackled as a young writer if I had been to university—I would have been beaten into submission by my lecturers."
Biography
After school, Banville worked as a clerk at Aer Lingus, which allowed him to travel at deeply discounted rates. He took advantage of these rates to travel to Greece and Italy.
On his return to Ireland, he became a sub-editor at The Irish Press, eventually becoming chief sub-editor. Before The Irish Press collapsed in 1995, Banville became a sub-editor at The Irish Times. He was appointed literary editor in 1998. The Irish Times, too, endured financial troubles, and Banville was offered the choice of taking a redundancy package or working as a features department sub-editor. He left.
Although he has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov," Banville himself maintains that W. B. Yeats and Henry James are the two real influences on his work.
Banville has two sons from a marriage to the American textile artist Janet Dunham, whom he met in the United States during the 1960s.
Biography
Banville published his first book, a collection of short stories titled Long Lankin, in 1970. He has disowned his first published novel, Nightspawn, describing it as "crotchety, posturing, absurdly pretentious."
As an unknown writer in the 1980s, he toured Dublin's bookshops—"and we had a lot of bookshops back then"—around the time of the publication of his novel Kepler "and there wasn't a single one of any of my books anywhere." But, he noted in 2012, "I didn't feel badly about it because I was writing the kinds of books I wanted to write. And I had no one but myself to blame if I wasn't making money, that wasn't anybody's fault. Nobody was obliged to buy my books."
Since 1990, Banville has been a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.
Banville has written three trilogies: the first, The Revolutions Trilogy, focused on great men of science and consisted of Doctor Copernicus (1976), Kepler (1981), and The Newton Letter (1982). He said he became interested in Kepler and other men of science after reading Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers. He realized that, like him, scientists were trying to impose order in their work.
The second trilogy, sometimes referred to collectively as The Frames Trilogy, consists of The Book of Evidence (1989), with several of its characters being featured in Ghosts (1993); Athena (1995) is the third to feature an unreliable narrator and explore the power of works of art.
Biography
The third trilogy consists of Eclipse, Shroud and Ancient Light, all of which concern the characters Alexander and Cass Cleave.
In a July 2008 interview with Juan José Delaney in the Argentine newspaper La Nación, Banville was asked if his books had been translated into Irish. He replied that nobody would translate them and that he was often referred to pejoratively as a West Brit.
He wrote an account of Caravaggio's 1602 painting The Taking of Christ for the book Lines of Vision, released in 2014 to mark the 150th anniversary of the National Gallery of Ireland.
He contributed to Sons+Fathers, a book published in 2015 to provide funds for the Irish Hospice Foundation's efforts to give care to terminally ill patients within their own homes.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007. Italy made him a Cavaliere of the Ordine della Stella d'Italia (essentially a knighthood) in 2017. He is a former member of Aosdána, having voluntarily relinquished the financial stipend in 2001 to another, more impoverished, writer.
Banville has won the 1976 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the 2003 International Nonino Prize, the 2005 Booker Prize, the 2011 Franz Kafka Prize, the 2013 Austrian State Prize for European Literature and the 2014 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. He is considered a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He lives in Dublin.
Publications
He published his first novel, Nightspawn, in 1971.
A second, Birchwood, followed two years later.
The Revolutions Trilogy, published between 1976 and 1982, comprises three works, each named in reference to a renowned scientist: Doctor Copernicus, Kepler and The Newton Letter.
His next work, Mefisto, had a mathematical theme, and, in combination with the three books from the aforementioned The Revolutions Trilogy, is the fourth book from the Scientific Tetralogy.
His 1989 novel The Book of Evidence, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of that year's Guinness Peat Aviation award, heralded a second trilogy, three works which deal in common with the work of art.
The Frames Trilogy is completed by Ghosts and Athena, both published during the 1990s.
Banville's thirteenth novel, The Sea, won the Booker Prize in 2005. In addition, he publishes crime novels as Benjamin Black: most of these feature the character of Quirke, an Irish pathologist based in 1950s Dublin. His alternative history novel The Secret Guests (2020) was published under the name B. W. Black.
Publications—Crime fiction
Beginning with Christine Falls, published in 2006, Banville has written crime fiction under the pen name Benjamin Black. He writes his Benjamin Black crime fiction much more quickly than he composes his literary novels. He appreciates his work as Black as a craft, while as Banville he is an artist. He considers crime writing, in his own words, as being "cheap fiction."
The main character in Banville's Quirke series is a Dublin pathologist in the 1950s. The first three novels, Christine Falls (2006), The Silver Swan (2007), and Elegy for April (2011) were made into a crime drama television series, Quirke.
Subsequent novels in the series are:
A Death in Summer (2011),
Vengeance (2012),
Holy Orders (2013),
Even the Dead (2016),
April in Spain (2021),
The Lock-Up (2023) and
The Drowned (2024).
Publications—Crime fiction
The last three of these were published under Banville's own name. A related book (also published under Banville's own name) is Snow (2020), featuring the character of Detective Inspector St. John Strafford, who subsequently appeared in April in Spain and The Lock-Up.
Other crime novels, written under the name Benjamin Black, include
The Lemur (2008),
The Black-Eyed Blonde (2014), and
Prague Nights (2017).
The Secret Guests (2020) is an alternative history/crime novel, centered on a scenario in which the young British princesses Elizabeth and Margaret are evacuated to County Tipperary in 1940 to escape the threats of the London Blitz and a possible German invasion of Britain. This was published under the name B. W. Black. It again features the character of St. John Strafford.
Style
Banville is highly scathing of all of his work, stating of his books: "I hate them all . . . I loathe them. They're all a standing embarrassment." Instead of dwelling on the past he is continually looking forward, "You have to crank yourself up every morning and think about all the awful stuff you did yesterday, and how you can compensate for that by doing better today." He does not read reviews of his work as he already knows—"better than any reviewer"—the places in which its faults lie.
Sometimes, in the middle of the afternoon if I'm feeling a little bit sleepy, Black will sort of lean in over Banville's shoulder and start writing. Or Banville will lean over Black's shoulder and say, "Oh that's an interesting sentence, let's play with that." I can see sometimes, revising the work, the points at which one crept in or the two sides seeped into each other.
Style
His typical writing day begins with a drive from his home in Dublin to his office by the river. He writes from 9 a.m. until lunch. He then dines on bread, cheese and tea and resumes working until 6 p.m., at which time he returns home. He writes on two desks at right angles to each other, one facing a wall and the other facing a window through which he has no view and never cleans. He advises against young writers approaching him for advice: "I remind them as gently as I can, that they are on their own, with no help available anywhere." He has compared writing to the life of an athlete:
"It's asking an awful lot of one's self. Every day you have to do your absolute best—it's a bit like being a sportsman. You have to perform at the absolute top of your game, six, seven, eight hours a day—that's very, very wearing."
Themes
Banville is considered by critics as a master stylist of English, and his writing has been described as perfectly crafted, beautiful, and dazzling. He is known for his dark humour and sharp wit.
Don DeLillo describes Banville's prose as "dangerous and clear-running,"
David Mehegan of The Boston Globe calls him "one of the great stylists writing in English today,"
Val Nolan in The Sunday Business Post calls his style "lyrical, fastidious, and occasionally hilarious";
The Observer described The Book of Evidence as "flawlessly flowing prose whose lyricism, patrician irony and aching sense of loss are reminiscent of Lolita."
Gerry Dukes, reviewing The Sea in the Irish Independent, hailed Banville as a "lord of language."
Michael Ross has stated that Banville is "perhaps the only living writer capable of advancing fiction beyond the point reached by Beckett."
Banville has said that he is "trying to blend poetry and fiction into some new form." He writes in the Hiberno-English dialect and dreads this being lost if he were to move abroad as other Irish writers have done.
Literary Influences
Banville said in an interview with The Paris Review that he liked Vladimir Nabokov's style; however, he went on, "But I always thought there was something odd about it that I couldn't quite put my finger on. Then I read an interview in which he admitted he was tone deaf."
Banville has said that he imitated James Joyce as a boy:
"After I'd read Dubliners, and was struck at the way Joyce wrote about real life, I immediately started writing bad imitations of Dubliners."
The Guardian reports: "Banville himself has acknowledged that all Irish writers are followers of either Joyce or Beckett—and he places himself in the Beckett camp."
He has also acknowledged other influences. During a 2011 interview on the program Charlie Rose, Rose asked, "The guiding light has always been Henry James?" and Banville replied, "I think so, I mean people say, you know, I've been influenced by Beckett or Nabokov but it's always been Henry James . . . so I would follow him, I would be a Jamesian."
Meanwhile, in a 2012 interview with Noah Charney, Banville cited W. B. Yeats and Henry James as the two real influences on his work. Responding to the suggestion that Dostoevsky and Camus were worthy comparisons, Banville said: "Dostoyevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously . . . Ditto Camus."
Philosophy
He considers himself to be "incurably terrified of air travel," fearing "the plane going down amid the terrible shrieking of engines and passengers." [Note, Banville and Richard Osman]
Women--Banville has often spoken and written of his admiration for women. He is in favor of women's rights and has welcomed the gradual freedom that has come about in his native land during his lifetime, over the course of which Ireland changed from a country dominated by Roman Catholic ideology, where women were trapped in the home with little career opportunities and subject to restrictions on the availability of contraception, to a country where the position of women became more valued and where one woman could succeed another woman as the country's President, a role previously the exclusive preserve of men. On women in his own writing, Banville told Niamh Horan of the Sunday Independent in 2012: "I don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people." Horan herself noted Banville's "special flair for writing about women and delving into the female psyche."
Banville contributed the introduction to the fifty-year retrospective of Edna O'Brien's work, The Love Object: Selected Stories, praising her as "one of the most sophisticated writers now at work" and noting how it was "hard to think of any contemporary writer who could match [O'Brien's] combination of immediacy and sympathetic recall." He called her characters "striking" and acknowledged that all her characters "are in some way damaged by the world, and specifically by the world of men." He described her as "simply one of the finest writers of our time."
Booker Prize
Banville wrote a letter in 1981 to The Guardian suggesting that the Booker Prize, for which he was "runner-up to the shortlist of contenders," be given to him so that he could use the money to buy every copy of the longlisted books in Ireland and donate them to libraries, "thus ensuring that the books not only are bought but also read – surely a unique occurrence."
Banville was not shortlisted for the Booker Prize again until 2005 when his novel The Sea was selected. The Sea was in contention with novels written by Julian Barnes, Sebastian Barry, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ali Smith and Zadie Smith. The chairman of the judges was John Sutherland.
Earlier that year Sutherland had written approvingly of Ian McEwan's novel Saturday. Banville, however, dismissed the work in The New York Review of Books and expressed his dismay that McEwan was increasingly showing "a disturbing tendency toward mellowness." Sutherland sent a letter (signed with the title "Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus") in response to Banville's review, a letter in which he took Banville to task over his misreading of a game of squash in the novel.
Booker Prize
Banville issued a written reply with the opening line: "Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the Department of Trivia," before begging Sutherland's pardon for his "sluggish comprehension" after managing to make his way through "all seventeen pages" of the game. Banville later admitted that, upon reading Sutherland's letter, he had thought: "[W]ell, I can kiss the Booker goodbye."
In the end, the judges' vote was split between Banville and Ishiguro. It fell to Sutherland to cast the winning vote; he did so in favor of Banville. Banville later said: "I have not been the most popular person in London literary circles over the past half-year. And I think it was very large of Sutherland to cast the winning vote in my favor."
When the prize rules later changed to allow entries by American writers, Banville welcomed the idea. However, he later expressed regret over the decision: "The prize was unique in its original form, but has lost that uniqueness. It is now just another prize among prizes. I am convinced the administrators should take the bold step of conceding the change was wrong, and revert."
Publications
Nightspawn. 1971
Birchwood. 1973
The Revolutions Trilogy:
Doctor Copernicus. 1976
Kepler. London. 1981
The Newton Letter. 1982
Mefisto. 1986
The Frames Trilogy
The Book of Evidence. 1989
Ghosts. London: 1993
Athena. London: 1995
The Untouchable. 1997
Publications
The Alexander and Cass Cleave Trilogy
Eclipse. 2000
Shroud. 2002
Ancient Light. 2012
The Sea. 2005
The Infinities. 2009
The Blue Guitar. 2015
Mrs. Osmond. 2017
Snow. London: 2020
The Secret Guests. 2020
April in Spain. 2021
The Singularities. 2022
The Lock-up. 2023 (Quirke #9, Strafford #4)
The Drowned. 2024
Cast of characters
Detective Inspector St. John (Sinjun) Strafford:
He is a “big house” Protestant in Ireland’s predominantly Catholic police force, Garda, first introduced in Snow (2020). [see Tana French also for the Irish Garda]
Spent 3 years studying law at Trinity, but left to join the Garda.
Now, nearly a quarter of a century later, he still found it surprising that he had opted to become a policeman. It had never been his ambition as a young man. He had just drifted into it, as he drifted into so many things, marriage included. He was like the autumn leaves, subject to whatever breeze might chance to blow. (p. 64)
Strafford was always surprised to find that when people learned he was a detective, they tended to become either nervous, or truculent, or both. Of course, it wasn’t that they all had cause to feel guilty, or that they were anarchists and objected to a police force on principle. The reason was more subtle than that. The country had been colonized by the English for eight hundred years, give or take—the first gang of Anglo-Norman robber barons had made landfall on these shores in the twelfth century—and the liberated Irish state, now stuck fast in the doldrums of the 1950s, was not much older than Strafford himself. The people had long memories, and bitterness against their former oppressors was corrosive. They had only to hear him speak to know him for a Protestant, and therefore, inevitably, to know he was not one of them. (pp. 24)
Cast of characters
Detective Inspector St. John (Sinjun) Strafford:
After independence, his people, his kind, the so-called Ascendancy, had, with a few exceptions, washed their hands of the new, self-governing Ireland and retreated into their demesnes and the solace of their accustomed, genteel pursuits. The Ireland, or the twenty-six counties of it that constituted the Republic, that had been born of rebellion, and of the subsequent hard fight for freedom and the inevitable civil war that followed, might now be a rougher place, with rougher men in charge, but it was their own place, free and independent, if you didn’t count the controlling power of the Catholic Church, which the majority accepted as right and proper anyway. Rome was the Republic’s second, ultramontane, capital. Or the first, as some would say. (pp. 24-25).
Detective Inspector St. John Strafford was an anomaly, as he well knew, and if for an instant he should chance to forget that fact, there was no lack of those ready and eager to remind him, by a cold stare or a sardonic word, of precisely who and what he was. (p.25)
Cast of characters
Detective Inspector St. John (Sinjun) Strafford:
As a boy, he had had a dog, Patch, he called it. It had been the runt of the litter, and highly strung and lacking in stamina. It wouldn’t have survived, if he hadn’t rescued it. His father mocked what he considered his son’s sentimental attachment to the poor, shivering creature. The boy had been determined, though—where had it gone to, the grown-up Strafford wondered, all that boyhood resolution? (p. 123)
Strafford rarely gave way to anger, and when he did, he made sure not to show it. This equanimity, if such it was, he knew to be due less to a tranquil spirit than to simple indifference. It was another of the things he had inherited. Like his father, the son declined to engage to any large degree with the majority of the people he encountered in the course of his life. The contrast between the two Straffords was that Strafford senior was almost passionate in his disdain, while his son was merely detached. Or so it seemed to him. He supposed that was why Marguerite had left him, that lack of affect. (p. 110)
Cast of characters
Detective Inspector St. John (Sinjun) Strafford:
During the course of the novel, Strafford begins an affair with Phoebe, Quirke's daughter.
"He suspected that behind the demure aspect that she affected, a far livelier spirit was at play. Besides, if by visiting her he annoyed her father, that would be all to the better. (p. 132).
Quirke objects and, in drunken anger, attempts to slug Strafford as he's leaving the house.
Yet why was he so angry? In his heart, he knew the reason and wished he didn’t. . . . He was jealous, jealous of Strafford’s easy presence in his daughter’s flat. Suddenly, the possibility that he might lose her, might lose his daughter, his only child, was starkly real. And he would lose her, of course he would. Not today, not tomorrow perhaps, yet sooner or later. But please, let it not be Strafford! (p. 203)
Cast of characters
Marguerite—Strafford's wife
Was the marriage at an end? If it was, Strafford felt no guilt, and of course this made him feel guilty. But the present arrangement, or absence of one, was fine with him, better indeed than he dared to admit, even to himself. He had always been a solitary soul, and was content to be so. Solitude, as he would tell you, is not at all the same thing as loneliness, and was certainly not so in his case. In general, then, he was content. (p. 37)
She has gone to visit her mother and has not come back:
"It wasn’t really an estate, more a farm, but Marguerite’s people had pretensions."
Cast of characters
Quirke: a Dublin-based pathologist, known for his intellect and troubled personal life, obsessed with the smell of vanilla from the pastry shop below his daughter's flat.
According to one reviewer, Quirke sees things others miss; he looks at a crime scene and its victims through the eyes of a pathologist rather than a detective. It's what makes him valuable, and tolerable, to Chief Inspector Hackett. He's the one who pronounces Rosa's death a murder, not a suicide.
In April in Spain, his second wife Evelyn, a psychiatrist, is killed, by mistake. Although Banville shoots the assassin, he does so only after Evelyn is dead; Quirke irrationally blames Banville.
After the death of his first wife, in childbirth, he gives his daughter Phoebe to his half brother and his wife to raise. He didn't see Phoebe for 19 years.
He was ashamed. Yet still he could happily have lashed out at Strafford. That watch chain across his belly—was there even a watch at the end of it? If so, Quirke had never seen him consult it. And then there was that wing-shaped lock of fine, almost colorless hair that kept flopping over his forehead, and the stiff four-fingered gesture with which he pushed it back into place . . . Phoebe was talking to her guest about some book she had read. Needless to say, Strafford had read it too, and even knew some scraps of gossip about the author. Quirke excused himself and left the table. (p. 204).
Cast of characters
A reviewer:
It’s the interactions between Quirke and Strafford that make The Lock-Up such a compelling read because it’s the little jibes and subtle digs between them that reveal their personalities and prejudices.
Both men are deeply flawed characters and carry out extra-curricular activities that might raise eyebrows. Strafford lacks the backbone to ask if his wife, who has seemingly left him, is ever coming back but has the courage to ask Quirke’s adult daughter, Phoebe, out on a date; Quirke, newly bereaved (April in Spain), is hitting the bottle one minute and hitting on women the next.
To see these men fumble around, looking for ways to make meaningful human contact, to quell their loneliness and the stresses of the job, makes for an authentic read.
NOTE: Strafford is "big house" and Protestant, Quirke is Catholic and a foundling
Cast of characters
Phoebe: Quirke's daughter
She had used some of the money she had inherited from her grandfather to purchase a long lease. But she had done so somewhat to her own surprise. Did it mean she was thinking of settling down? She hoped not. It would be all too easy to become a sad old spinster like the ones to be seen about the streets here of a morning, with their woolly hats and zippered black felt bootees, gripping their umbrellas and their shapeless handbags. (p. 41).
She was young still, or youngish at least, and while she had suffered more than her share of injuries and misfortunes, it seemed to her that she had achieved a newfound equilibrium, by what means she wasn’t sure. She felt compassion for her grieving father, and mourned with him his lost wife, whom she too had loved, at some level. But in her deepest heart she was convinced, for no good reason, that a change was coming, that it would come soon, and that it would be for the better. (pp. 41-42)
Cast of characters
Phoebe: Quirke's daughter
"He has moved out of what had been his home, and was staying, temporarily, at his daughter’s flat in Lower Mount Street. It was not an entirely convenient or relaxed arrangement, although they both did their best to adjust to each other’s ways and moods. Quirke loved his daughter, in his fashion, and he believed she loved him, in her fashion, despite the injustices he had inflicted on her when she was young. For the first nineteen years of her life, he had maintained the fiction that he was not her father but her uncle. Still, if she resented his presence, or found it, and him, irksome, she kept up a convincing pretense. She could hardly have refused him shelter, after the events in Spain the previous spring that had left him a widower for the second time. Since his return, he hadn’t spoken of his wife’s death to Phoebe, or to anyone else. It was, as he gave people to understand, a forbidden topic. Phoebe didn’t even dare to mention her stepmother’s name. Someday they would talk about the tragedy, perhaps, but not now, not yet." (p. 41)
"Phoebe was good to him [Quirke], and for him. He wished he could show how much he appreciated her care and protectiveness, but he had always been shy of her, and always would be. The thought of the years when he had kept up the charade of being her uncle stood ever between them, unmentioned, but as unavoidable as a tree trunk fallen across a path." (p. 78).
Cast of characters
Rosa Jacobs: history professor at Trinity College (for Prods and other persuasions, University College Dublin for Catholics) . She was doing a doctorate on the Jews in Ireland.
Young Jewish woman from Cork, found dead in her car, presumed suicide, but later identified as murder by Quirke. She had been gagged, knocked unconscious, and put in the car. Hers is the case Strafford and Quirke investigate. Phoebe knew her.
She had been good friends with Frank Kessler, and with David Sinclair; Molly describes her as a "man-eater."
Molly Jacobs:
Rosa's older sister, a journalist, based in London, who returns to Dublin to help with the murder investigation.
She calls a fellow journalist in Israel to find out more about Shula.
Begins an affair with Quirke, but ends it by telling him she has a boyfriend, Adrian, her boss.
Cast of characters
Shula Lieberman, an Israeli reporter who has been monitoring Israel's nuclear weapons program.
Her specific focus was to find out how near the country’s military scientists were to producing an atomic bomb. This was . . . extremely sensitive territory. The Defense Force, and Mossad, the intelligence agency, devoted a very great deal of their energies to keeping the nuclear arms project secret, not only from the world but from the Israeli people also. (p. 240).
Fearing that she will expose his chicanery--selling to Israel, passing intel to the Egyptians--Kessler senior has her killed.
Cast of characters
Wolfgang Kessler, Graf von Kessler, Baron, a wealthy German industrialist who trains racehorses in County Wicklow, and his son Franz (Frank). He emigrated to Ireland just after the war.
He lives up in the mountains, at a place called Roundwood—a big old house, St. Fiachra House it had been, on lots of grassland—where he breeds horses, particularly Arabians.
Chief Inspector Hackett sends Strafford to interview him, although he should have done it himself.
Hackett had a keen sense of social status, and was afraid of being looked down on by the German grandee. Kessler was a count, no less, even if he had renounced the title—a fact he took care to make as widely known as possible. (p. 110)
Kessler has business interests in Israel—machinery, tools, spare parts—and a factory in southern Germany. Shula and then Rosa believe he's selling parts to the Israelis for an atomic bomb.
He is, and therefore has Shula killed.
Cast of characters
Frank Kessler: son; he had a relationship with Rosa.
Phoebe says to Strafford:
Frank Kessler [and David Sinclair] are oddly alike, in some ways. They have that self-assurance that’s an inch away from arrogance. Or maybe it is arrogance, only disguised. (p. 137)
At the end of the novel, he calls Strafford at 2 a.m. and confesses that he killed his father:
“He went to his friends in Mossad. I can hear him talking to them in his commandant’s voice. ‘She’s going to destroy everything, you’ll have to shut her up, you’ll have to get rid of her.’” “Are you saying the Israeli secret service assassinated Shulamith Lieberman?” “Oh, they wouldn’t do it themselves, just as my father would not do it. There are always people who can be hired, gangsters, murderers, petty thieves . . . (p. 277)
“She had learned,” he said slowly, “that my father was supplying Israel with important components for the manufacture of an atomic bomb.” (p. 277)
Cast of characters
Frank Kessler:
“My father was a very wicked man. Very wicked—more than you could imagine.” He stopped, and gave yet another little snort of laughter. “Even his name was false, did you know that? (p. 279) ‘Graf von Kessler’ liked to pretend he was an aristocrat from the Bavarian Alps. The truth is, he was born in a Munich slum. As a child he was sent to work for nothing for an uncle, up in the mountains. He lived in a shed, like one of the farm animals.” (p. 279)
Frank tried to run down Molly, his father told him to, because she was talking to journalists; so he didn't kill Rosa, but thinks maybe his father did.
Frank had to kill his father because:
“I learned, during my recent time in Israel,” he went on, “that my father was conspiring with them, with Nasser’s spies. This was told to me by my father’s partner in crime out there.” “Teddy Katz?”
Even as he was selling parts to the Israelis for their bomb, he was betraying their atomic program to the Egyptians. You see, he hated the Jews, would have them exterminated. In the war”—he swallowed, making a gulping sound—“in the war he—” He put his fists together and pounded them slowly on his knees. “I can’t,” he whispered. “I can’t say it.” (p. 282)
After this confession, he puts the gun to his head and shoots himself.
Cast of characters
Chief Inspector Hackett: Strafford's boss, waiting for retirement
He meets with Bishop McEvoy after talking with Kessler, and is warned to "back off."
Tommy McEvoy—priest/bishop
Tommy was a champion footballer, though he had a reputation as a dirty player. If you got tripped up in the tunnel when the teams were going through, you’d look up from where you had fallen and there would be Tommy, trotting on with a big smile on his big red face. He always got away with it . . . (p. 211)
When you got a call out of the blue from Bishop McEvoy, you would do well to prepare yourself for some sort of trouble. (p. 212)
So the Church had got Wolfgang Kessler out of Germany. Hackett wasn’t surprised. There had been rumors for years about Pope Pius, . . . and his connections with Hitler’s crowd. Then at this end, no doubt the Knights of Saint Patrick had sprung into action. (p. 220)
There was no limit to the power of the Church in this country. Of course a pension could be stopped. It would take nothing more than one of the Archbishop’s famous late-night phone calls. The Garda Commissioner was an active member of the Knights of Saint Patrick—the Paddy Mafia, as the pub wits had it. (p. 222)
Cast of characters
David Sinclair: Quirke’s former assistant in the Pathology Department at Holy Family hospital, went to work in Israel, but has returned.
He and Phoebe had gone out together for some months, until David decided to move to Israel and work there, as a surgeon.
"There had been no question of her accompanying him, even if she had wanted to. He wrote a couple of times. I didn’t reply [because] There seemed no point. He was full of the idea of Israel, of its future, the challenges it faces, all that—the threats to its very existence. He sounded like a different person to the one I knew—the one I thought I knew. (p. 79)
Rosa knew him as well
Cast of characters
Perry Otway—owner of the garage where Rosa was found
Claridge—Strafford's landlord
Mr. Singh—Strafford's neighbor
Isabel—Quirke's former lover, they accidentally meet in a restaurant where he's taken Molly Jacobs.
Dick FitzMaurice, Minister of Justice: Quirke has lunch with him and asks what he knows about Kessler's business activities in Israel and their potential connection to the deaths of Rosa and Shulman, and the attempted death of Molly. Dick Fitz reminds him that Kessler is well connected in the Catholic Church, and that he entered Ireland with an assumed name.
Ronny Armitage, Lecky Professor of History at Trinity College Dublin, has an affair with Rosa and kills her after she tells him she's pregnant.
He's the diary writer of the Epilogue, fears losing his wife Deirdre's family money, and has killed before—another girl, Doreen, shoved off a train platform to her death.
Questions for discussion
Although one reviewer compared Strafford and Quirke to Holmes and Watson, their relationship is not that congenial. How would you describe their relationship?
What does it represent in the context of the novel and its themes?
Questions for discussion
Chapter 1, set in Alto Adige just after WWII, tells the story of Brother Damian, monk in a monastery in the Alps, who assists a traveler midway on a long journey. It ends with:
The friar stood in the doorway of the inn, waving a lifted hand slowly from side to side in a mechanical-seeming farewell.
“Auf Wiedersehen,” the man called back.
Above the friar’s head, on a wooden sign, a painted goat with huge curled horns stood on its hind legs, lewdly smirking.
Why is this chapter an important beginning?
Questions for discussion
Technically, this novel falls within the mystery genre. It begins with a murder, has a detective inspector and a pathologist as its protagonists, casts suspicion on a couple of likely culprits, provides a motive, and includes other elements of the mystery genre.
Yet, I think it's fair to say this is an unconventional mystery. The detectives don't really solve the crime, although they do discover who committed it, and why.
So, how is this novel different from the usual mystery?
Questions for discussion
In a typical mystery novel, detectives interview characters in close relationships with the victim, trying to uncover character and potential motives.
Yet various scenes in this novel don't work that way. Why, for example, do we get the scene in a restaurant, Quirke and Molly, when Quirke spots an ex-lover.
We also get 2 dreams: one with Quirke, one with Strafford.
In other words, those scenes don't advance the plot, so why are they included?
Questions for discussion
Let's talk about the epilogue. It's a diary entry written by Ronny Armitage, Rosa's colleague, lover, and killer.
He does appear early in the novel, interviewed by Strafford as Rosa's colleague, and throws suspicion on the Kesslers; he's not a nice person, but not a viable suspect.
Why does Banville end the novel this way?
Questions for discussion
Midway into the book, Banville includes a chapter in Bavaria, at the end of the war as Americans are approaching. In his office, the Kommandant converses with a Kapo (leader of prisoners) over a glass of liquor. The commander is Kessler; the kapo is Teddy Katz.
I was part of the greatest human project since the Roman Empire. Am I to relinquish everything I ever believed in and flee for my life? The Jew is accustomed to skulking in a hole, I am not.
You won't kill me, you haven't the stomach for it any more. I can see it in your eyes. You’ve grown weary of death.”
The man lowered the gun. Teddy Katz nodded once, and stood up slowly from the chair, turned, and shuffled out of the room. The man put the gun on the desk and began slowly, almost absentmindedly, to weep. (p. 181)
Why is this chapter included?
Questions for discussion
Why does Kessler breed Arabians?
Next Week
SPRING BREAK