Winner of Ireland's largest literary award for the best book of
1989, Banville's latest is an elegantly written, often darkly comic
meditation upon evil and guilt - and a great imaginative leap
beyond his previous efforts (Kepler, 1983, etc.). Frederick Charles
St. John Vandveld Montgomery has returned to Ireland in a desperate
search for money. Earlier, living with his wife on a Mediterranean
island with no visible means of support, he blackmailed a
drug-pusher into giving him a loan. When Frederick welshed on the
debt, the man behind the pusher, Senor Aguirre, prevented the wife
from leaving the island and threatened to kill her if Frederick
didn't come up with the payment. Frederick, having come to Ireland,
visits his mother in the countryside, where she is raising
Connemara ponies, but there is no money to be had. Then Frederick
kidnaps a young woman - a housemaid - in the course of a robbery
and kills her ("It's not easy to wield a hammer in a motor car").
On the run, he falls in with a wise old family friend, Charlie
French, who puts him up in his house unaware of the murder.
Eventually, Frederick is spotted by a shopgirl and denounced to the
police. While on remand awaiting trial, haunted by moral ambiguity,
he writes this book of evidence, grappling with his life itself.
("Does the court realize, I wonder, what this confession is costing
me?") Frederick begins to see that Charlie's well-meaning placing
of him in a sinecure was the beginning of his downfall: always
taking the easy way out has left him defenseless against the
temptations of the world. There are still those who would help him
get off - Charlie supplies him with the best defense lawyer in
Ireland - but Frederick struggles to find meaningful guilt for his
awful deed. A novel of high moral seriousness, gracefully written -
one that lingers on in the mind long after it is read. (Kirkus
Reviews)
The first in a trilogy with "Ghosts" and "Athena". Freddie Montgomery is a gentleman first and a murderer second. He committed two crimes - he stole a painting from a wealthy family friend and he killed a chambermaid who caught him in the act. Here he tells his story.
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