The Book of Evidence, the Sea: Introduction by Adam Phillips (Everyman's Library, 367, Band 367) - Hardcover

Banville, John

9780375712722: The Book of Evidence, the Sea: Introduction by Adam Phillips (Everyman's Library, 367, Band 367)

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ISBN 10: 0375712720 ISBN 13: 9780375712722

Verlag: EVERYMANS LIB, 2015

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Two essential novels from one of the most imaginative writers of our time: a Booker Prize winner about the unpredictable power of memory and an unforgettable literary mystery short-listed for the Booker prize.

The Book of Evidence is a brilliantly disturbing portrait of an improbable murderer. Freddie Montgomery is an aimless, eccentric, and highly cultured man whose arrest for the murder of a servant girl prompts him to offer the reader an extended testimony. However, the evidence Freddie offers is not of his innocence, but of his life—of the circumstances that led to and (in his chillingly amoral mind) justified his grisly crime. Hauntingly reminiscent of Camus, Dostoevsky, and Nabokov, The Book of Evidence is among the most darkly compelling novels in international literature.

The Sea follows retired art historian Max Morden to the seaside town where he spent his childhood summers. Max is grieving the loss of his wife, Anna, but returning to the seaside brings back intense memories of the wealthy and mysterious family in whose presence he had first learned about love and loss. Banville’s exploration of the unpredictable power of memory—a force as treacherous as the sea that pulses through the story. What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him—is at the center of this elegiac, vividly dramatic, beautifully written novel.

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�ber die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JOHN BANVILLE, the author of fifteen previous novels, has been the recipient of the Man Booker Prize, the Jame Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Award, the Franz Kafka Prize and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. He lives in Dublin.

ADAM PHILLIPS is a psychoanalyst and essayist, whose books include Houdini's Box, Missing Out, and One Way and Another. He is a regular contributor to The London Review of Books and is general editor of the Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud.

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Excerpted from the Introduction

‘From childhood onwards’, John Banville wrote in a piece on Raymond Chandler, ‘I had been keen on crime fiction: like many boys I was fascinated by puzzles, eager to find out everything I could about adult passions, and unslakeably bloodthirsty.’ ‘Although’, he acknowledges, ‘I would hardly have been able to articulate the thought at the time, what I found most attractive in Chandler’s work was the sumptuousness of the prose style.’ As a portrait of the artist as a young man and as an older man – it is from childhood ‘onwards’ that he has been fascinated by these things – it is a remarkably succinct account. Many of Banville’s characters are vampyric; all of them are radically puzzled by adult passions, their own and other people’s, whether they know it or not; and all his narrators are trying to work something out, fascinated by the puzzle their lives have turned into.

But it is the pathos of people trying to solve things that they know to be insoluble – who they really are, what they are doing, why they want what they want – that Banville is obsessed by in his fiction. And that The Book of Evidence and The Sea are so eloquent about. His narrators are doomed investigators of things they know to be beyond them. They crave revelations that they fear and distrust, and they mock their ambitions. The drama of these novels, then, is the drama of self-exposure, referred to in The Book of Evidence as ‘that constant, hot, excitement, like a fever in the blood, that was half the fear of being unmasked and half the longing for it’. His protagonists – ‘if that is the word’, as Banville once remarked of Beckett’s characters – are a strange compound of the criminal, his victim, and the detective on the case. These are the different voices we need to listen for in these two compelling artful monologues.

Both books are about men interested in paintings (Banville himself wanted to be a painter as a young man), and fascinated by women. Of antic disposition, they are men confounded by their own seriousness; or rather, men not quite sure how, if at all, to take themselves seriously. Full of a riddling self-conscious evasiveness – ‘everything for me is something else,’ the narrator of The Sea remarks, ‘it is a thing I notice increasingly’ – we never quite know where we are with these characters (if everything is something else, what is the thing he notices increasingly?). We never know quite how to take what they are saying. It is almost as if they want us to do something with what they are saying, other than just believing them, or disbelieving them. In the strange soliloquies that are these two novels there is an uncanny sense in which, as readers, something is being asked of us that we can’t work out. They engage us by puzzling us. Banville, that is to say, is the great modern novelist of just how baffled people are about what they want from each other. And so suspicion is his theme (as if to say: one is more suspicious of oneself than of anyone else; or, seeing is never believing). Each of these novels then, in its own way, trades in mistrust, in the trickiness of character.

The Book of Evidence is in a sense a crime novel, narrated by a man, Freddie Montgomery, who is on trial for stealing a valuable painting by a Dutch master, and murdering the chambermaid who caught him. The book is, apparently, a kind of testament to a court; it is addressed, archly, to ‘My Lord’, but we discover that this is Freddie’s ‘defence’ written, for the trial, from prison. He is writing when he is going to have to speak anyway. It is, therefore, redundant as yet, as evidence, but is nevertheless evidence of something, which it is for the reader to decide. With ‘no explanation, and no excuse’, the more he makes his case the less sure he is of what the case may be, or whether his case is worth the making. ‘[I am] an explorer,’ Freddie writes, ‘that’s what I am, glimpsing a new continent from the prow of a sinking ship.’

The Sea, like The Book of Evidence, is written in the aftermath of a catastrophe, and in anticipation of future catastrophe. It too is a strange mixture of memoir and confession, told by (and about) Max, an academic art historian, who has recently lost his wife (both novels, that is to say, are partly organized around the death of a woman). The stolen painting is Portrait of a Woman with Gloves, of uncertain attribution (the narrators of both novels are exercised, as the reader is, by what they can attribute to themselves and other people by way of motive or character). ‘The picture has been variously attributed to Rembrandt and Frans Hals, even to Vermeer. However, it is safest to regard it as the work of an anonymous master. None of this means anything.’ Banville is fascinated by people’s anonymity, by their being unnameable despite their names (the names in Banville’s novels are always doing a lot of sly work). Sceptical of the faux mastery of naming, he is duly suspicious of masters: of people who can tell us what things really are. And particularly, perhaps, of that fabled master of the nineteenth-century novel, the so-called omniscient narrator (the novelist as God). Indeed, Banville’s novels, whatever else they are, are parodies of omniscience. So we also need to note the deadpan theology of these books, what Max refers to in The Sea as ‘the numerous sly references I have sprinkled through these pages’, with all that ‘sprinkling’ might allude to.

No one, not even the experts, knows who has painted this stolen picture and it supposedly doesn’t matter anyway. What does matter is that when Freddie looks at the painting his ‘heart contracts. There is something in the way the woman regards me, the querulous, mute insistence of her eyes, which I can neither escape nor assuage. I squirm in the grasp of her gaze.’ Looking and being looked at, even by an absent woman, by an image, undoes him. As does his relationship with his wife, but in a different way (the wives in both these novels, it should be noted, are marvellously realized by their monstrously selfabsorbed husbands). It is the always enigmatic, sometimes horrifying demand in looking and being looked at that Freddie and Max, like many of Banville’s characters, are gripped by. What do people want when they look at someone or something, or when they describe – i.e. look with words – which is a looking to make someone see? Being looked at, even by a woman in a painting, makes Freddie feel overexposed, ashamed of himself, or of the self he assumes she has seen. Perhaps looking, Banville intimates – and the looking that is reading and writing – is the wish to expose. And what then is the wish to expose oneself or others a wish to do? This is Banville’s question in these novels. What is someone actually doing when they describe themselves? Or, as novelists do, when they describe themselves by describing others? What are they hoping for?

Max, which is not his real name but the name he gave himself – thereby cancelling his origins, and reinventing himself – is working on his ‘Big Book on Bonnard’, which has in fact ‘got no farther than half of a putative first chapter and a notebook filled with derivative and half-baked would-be aperc �us. Well, it is no matter.’ His book has no real author, and it doesn’t matter (there is, of course, very little matter in a book barely written). But Bonnard was an artist obsessed by painting his wife and Max is a man obsessed by, as it were, painting a picture in words of his...

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