- Paperback: 600 pages
- Publisher: Picador (20 July 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 033037348X
- ISBN-13: 978-0330373487
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.6 x 4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 944,353 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
A contemporary trilogy of unerring brilliance and power that tells the whole story of Freddie Montgomery, murderer.
Book Description
THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE: Freddie Montgomery has committed two crimes. He stole a small Dutch master from a wealthy family friend, and he murdered a chambermaid who caught him in the act. This is a remarkable crime novel, unlike any other in its flawlessly flowing prose, its irony, its aching sense of loss. GHOSTS: An unnamed murderer has served his time in prison and now lives on a sparsely populated island with the enigmatic Professor Kreutznaer and his eery companion, Licht. Their uneasy calm is disturbed one day with the arrival of a party of castaways. A beautiful and beguiling novel full of resonances that continue to sound long after you have turned the final page, this is also one of Banville's funniest books. ATHENA: Morrow is at a loose end when, separately, two people beckon him up the stairs of an empty Dublin house. One offers work of a dubious kind; the other offers a sort of love. Banville's sleek, beautiful, breathtakingly cunning prose will leave the reader longing for more from this consummately skilled novelist. 'Banville writes a dangerous and clear-running prose and has a grim gift for seeing people's souls' Don De Lillo (on The Book of Evidence)
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
John Banville's 'Frames' trilogy is centred around the charmingly unlikeable Freddie Montgomery. No, unlikeable is too strong - for, while he is not likeable in any conventional sense, it's hard not to be drawn to him. In 'The Book of Evidence', our Freddie steals a painting & kills a chambermaid; in 'Ghosts' he is released from prision and moves to a small island; and in 'Athena' he, well, falls in love. Perhaps. The first two are gorgeously rendered pieces, haunting (sorry, awful but unavoidable pun) yet compulsively readable despite their non-reliance on plot. I found 'Athena' harder to get into, perhaps because in the early parts Freddie (by this point living under another name) seems less present than the earlier two, even though he narrates all three. Still, the second half works better and it remains a worthy companion, and I suspect it will improve with re-reading.
Banville, in content, reminds me of Paul Auster & Milan Kundera, with the constant refractions of identity, art & the near-solitude of the main characters (though without the contemporary cultural references of either - Banville's characters always seem to live in a void in which the past exists but the present does not). In style, though, he is closest, as others have observed, to Vladimir Nabokov (though perhaps without as much a sense of playful puzzle-building). Most obviously this is manifest in his 'confessional narrative', unreliable narrators using their writing not so much to tell a story as to secure their own futures, allowing things to be remembered 'their' way. But I would also note that Nabokov and Banville are the two best users of brackets of any authors I have read - read any of the novels in this trilogy and Nabokov's 'Transparent Things', for instance, if you have ever doubted that a pair of brackets can be devastatingly employed. Anyone who has enjoyed any of these three authors' work would do well to investigate Banville, and this trilogy is as good a place as any to start.
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