The Book of Evidence by John Banville: book review

The Book of Evidence (1989, this edition 2001) is set in Coolgrange, Ireland. The narrator, 38-year-old Frederick Montgomery, is in prison as a remand prisoner, awaiting his trial due in a month’s time.

Montgomery says he is not seeking to excuse his actions, but to explain them. It started in the Mediterranean when he borrowed money from an American guy called Randolph. He can’t pay it back. He says he would have to go home to ask his friends and family to help him out. He knows though that he is ‘running away’ from his responsibilities.

Back home, he hopes to sell his mother’s paintings, but Dorothy (Dolly) has sold all of them to Binkie Behrens. Frederick is not happy about this and goes to Whitewater to visit Anna Behrens – whom he loved briefly, 15 years ago. But she turns him away. He then tries to steal a painting, bludgeons a girl (Josie Bell) to death, evades the police, and implicates his 60ish-year-old friend, Charlie French.

Montgomery has been in prison for two months. He is writing his explanation of what happened in Whitewater. His wife, Daphne, visits him once a week.

He describes himself as having bad (black) moods, an itinerant, a deserter, and a weeper. ‘I am afraid to think what I have done’ he says, and tries hard not to cry. He’s looking at the possibility of 30 years in prison.

His counsel, Maolseachlainn (Mac) Gunna, was ‘hinting at the possibility of an arrangement’ whereby if he pleads guilty, no evidence will be heard. The Book of Evidence is his evidence. What does Montgomery plead?

Whether you empathize with Freddie or not (I did not), he is an articulate, educated man with the gift of a turn of phrase. For example, his description of Daphne throughout his account of his life is touching, beautiful, and full of longing and regret. For example – ‘She was not nice, she was not good. She suited me’ and ‘I could have hung back in the shadows and painted her, down to the tiniest, tenderest detail, on the blank inner wall of my heart, where she would be still, vivid as in that dawn, my dark, mysterious darling.’ Even Anna Behrens he describes ‘like one of Klimt’s gem-encrusted lovers.’

There is some fine writing, but the topic and plot didn’t interest me enough to want to find out why Montgomery committed the crime. It was too self-absorbed, and, in the end, an excuse for his actions. Therefore the plot is not as riveting as his descriptions.

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