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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Don't give up your day job Mr Banville, 2 Nov 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
As it says on the cover, this book is by 'John Banville writing as Benjamin Black'. John Banville has written a string of ambitious and successful novels, characterised by prose of great beauty and almost poetic intensity. Complex storylines with multilayered illusions and metaphors are other 'trademarks'. I have read all his novels and thoroughly enjoyed every one. His idea of writing under the alter ego of Benjamin Black was discussed in a recent radio interview (BBC Radio 4 Open Book September 2009) where Banville suggested that after winning the Booker Prize in 2005 for 'The Sea' he felt a need to "...reinvent himself...". Well, he certainly did that with this book.
Set in modern day New York, the plot is based on the happenings when a filthy rich ex-CIA businessman commissions his Irish-American son-in-law to write his biography. Just about everything goes wrong, but although there are a few twists and turns here and there, the plot and storyline are so weak that the novel barely limps from chapter to chapter. The characterisation of the people in the story is very poor and the characters are therefore not truly credible. But, knowing who the author really is, by far the biggest disappointment in the book, to me, is the language, which is a strange mish-mash of Irish-inflected English and colloquial, multiethnic 'New York speak', with the occasional lapse into the eloquent English we have come to expect of Banville. It is a cringe-inducing mixture that fails disastrously and makes a lame story even worse. I find it puzzling why a multi-award winning author, who has consistently written novels that have been rightly acclaimed as true works of art, should wish to assume an alter ego writing a book of such mediocrity.
This is not a book I enjoyed or would recommend, and after this I will certainly give other 'Benjamin Black' titles a miss.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
You what? , 17 Oct 2008
Read this last night in one sitting - it's a slim volume. I can't help feeling extremely bemused and disappointed. The beautiful prose of the other Black books (which featured Quirke, the 1950s Dublin pathologist) has vanished, leaving a trail of cringey cliches. Set in contemporary New York, it felt like Black trotted out every rotten phrase that could go in a detective novel. (It's about a journalist commissioned to write the biography of his incredibly rich former CIA father-in-law, who immediately gets into trouble doing so.) There were three of the most ill-conceived characters of non-Caucasian origin I've read in a 21st century novel, including an African American journalist of epic-ly distasteful proportions; AND the plot was... lame.
I love everything else I've ever read by John Banville / Benjamin Black, so I can only assume that this is an experiment in genre fiction gone horribly wrong. (Perhaps he was trying to create for today something like the hard-boiled style of noir American thriller writers?) The best bit about the book is the title, which refers to one of the characters, and which really made me remember why I like his writing usually.
Anyway, I didn't like it, and I wouldn't recommend it!
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7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"Aristotle was right: he that holds a secret holds power.", 25 Jun 2008
Set in New York, not Dublin, this novella by Benjamin Black (the pen name used by Booker Prize-winning author John Banville for his mystery novels) follows the attempts by John Glass, a former journalist from Ireland, to write the biography of his American father-in-law. Big Bill Mulholland, described as "South Boston Irish," is a legend. Recruited for the CIA upon his graduation from Boston College, he was a specialist in electronic surveillance in Korea, Latin America, Europe, and Vietnam. Later he went into the communications business, set up Mulholland Cable, became a millionaire many times over.
Now Mulholland lives the good life, having set up a charitable trust, which is run by Glass's wife Louise, who is also a UN Special Ambassador for Culture, and he wants Glass to write his biography. "Not a hagiography--I don't merit one, I'm no saint," he insists. "What I want is the truth."
Glass, who has covered Northern Ireland, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and the Rwandan genocide, fears that writing this biography may undermine any journalistic credibility he ever earned, but he has no choice. He secretly hires a young man, Dylan Riley, to gather information for him, and Riley soon discovers something--something so secret that he tries to blackmail Glass into giving him half of the money Mulholland is paying Glass, or he will reveal his information publicly. Before Riley can meet Glass to talk, however, Riley turns up dead, shot through the eye. John Glass turns detective, fearing that his own affair with a young artist may be the damaging secret. When a journalist injects himself into the story of Riley's death, the backgrounds of the various Mulholland family members are gradually revealed.
As always, author John Banville (writing as Black) writes with powerful descriptive skills, and his sense of narrative pacing is unerring. This novella, however, is too short to allow for much development of mood or atmosphere, and there is little opportunity for him to develop the kinds of complications which make mystery stories challenging. His characters, too, are sketches, rather than fully developed human beings, and they remain stereotypes, their behavior fairly predictable. As a result, the kind of last minute revelations and dramatic tours de force which sometimes make short mysteries such a delight to read never occur here. Ultimately, the book feels like the outline for a much longer and more complex novel. Mary Whipple
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