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April In Spain is an oddly compelling novel
Book Review
By Derryll White
Banville, John (2021). April In Spain.
“Pleasure is most intense when you don’t understand the source of it.” – John Banville
John Banville lulls the reader with a comfortable rhythmic language and a huge vocabulary. The comfort is spiked with “emetic,” “torpic,” “opportenances” and the like. He builds intricate scenes and plots in an evolutionary way, slowly, as the characters and settings respond to new information and ideas.
Banville does carry a big cast in this novel. Many are doing tasks that seem disconnected but he gives the reader the feeling that all will be solved, all will come together. Well into the story Detective St. John Strafford appears and the pace quickens. Pathologist Quirke, an obvious holdover from other novels, always seems to loom up from afar, often mentioned but seldom seen.
John Banville is deeper than the story he writes. His characters quote Kafka and read Tacitus. The characters, particularly Evelyn the psychiatrist, are philosophic with penetrating observations on life.
‘April In Spain’ is an oddly compelling novel. The writing is excellent and moves the reader through to the end. The end, however, feels contrived and at odds with the rest of the story. Events occur which can only seem to be resolved in a future book, not something that completes the present novel.
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Excerpts from the novel:
CONVINCING – It was spring, she said, the best season of all, and they were going to Spain on a holiday, even if she had to handcuff him and push him up the steps and on to the airplane.
HOTELS – How was it, he wondered, not for the first time, that people seemed oblivious to the brazen confidence trick that was played on them in hotels? Did it never occur to them to think how many greasy holidaymakers, leaky honeymooners, how many oldsters with unpredictable bladders and flaking skin, had slept already in the very bed in which they were themselves just now reclining?
REFLECTIONS – … and even Germans, who were once again posing as the happy wanderers they used to imagine themselves to be, before the years of madness and their aftermath taught them they were nothing of the kind.
SNUB-NOSED POLICE SPECIAL – What impressed him most strongly was how serious a thing the weapon was. Most of the objects that passed through one’s hands were trivial, so that one hardly registered them. The little gun was weighty far beyond what it weighed. It was a thing of dark intent, secret and essential.
QUIRKE – He looked cross. There were moments, not many, when Phoebe was a little afraid of her father. Something lay coiled in him that at the slightest pretext might rise up and strike. His past was the serpent and it never slept.
THE MIND – “The mind has a mind of its own, you know. It does things of which we are not aware. It makes connections, invents fantasies. This is the secret world we move in when we dream.”
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
