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Résumé
Résumé
When John Glass's billionaire father-in-law hires him to write his biography, he feels he can't refuse. Then his research assistant on the book discovers some very sensitive information about John's in-laws, and is murdered before he can tell anyone what he knows. John is on his own to find out the young man's secret, before the murderer finds him.
Résumé
John Glass receives the offer of a lifetime when his incredibly wealthy father-in-law asks John for help writing a biography. When John's shady research assistant, the Lemur, goes digging for information, a troubling secret is uncovered. Before the Lemur can tell anyone what he has found, he is murdered. Now John must try to figure out what the secret is before the killer makes John the next victim.
Critiques (3)
Critique du Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Black (aka Irish novelist John Banville) offers this stunningly dark and mysterious tale in which journalist John Glass hires a man he deems the Lemur to research his father-in-law, of whom he is writing a biography. John Keating is simply marvelous here. His strong Irish accent does wonders when combined with Black's prose, creating a dark, brooding, and occasionally funny atmosphere that will surely draw listeners into the tale. As the Lemur, Keating reads with an American dialect that bears no hint of his heritage. As a result, the characters are, in their own way, unique and captivating--as is Keating's knack for storytelling and performance. A Picador paperback (Reviews, May 26). (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
Critique du Guardian
Speaking about the less than surprising revelations at the end of Our Mutual Friend , Charles Dickens made this ruefully exasperated comment: "I foresaw the likelihood that a class of readers and commentators would suppose that I was at great pains to conceal exactly what I was at great pains to suggest." I imagine Benjamin Black (aka John Banville) might have foreseen a similar reaction to his first two mysteries, Christine Falls and The Silver Swan . In each, the solution to the various puzzles facing Quirke, their majestically gloomy protagonist, is fairly obvious, fairly early on, and intentionally so. The point, as in Greek tragedy, isn't to floor the audience with some stunning twist, but to charge the foreknown with powerful meanings that release correspondingly powerful emotions. The disclosures at the end of Christine Falls may not surprise exactly, but through them the force of the book's portrayal of 1950s Dublin, squatted over by an alliance of ruthless businessmen and sleazy clerics, is brought into final, devastating focus. The same goes for The Silver Swan , where the murder plot is less an occasion for clever sleuthing or cliffhanger suspense than the armature for a series of swift, often brilliant sketches of Dublin lowlifes trapped and warped in that decade's (the 50s again) peculiar aspic of boredom and repression. Both books leave one with the sense of a highly skilled literary novelist using the mystery format on his own terms and shaping it to his own purposes. The Lemur , Banville/Black's latest, forsakes the pathologist Quirke and his seedy postwar Dublin for John Glass, a once-celebrated journalist now married to money and idling in a glittering present-day Manhattan. Appointed by his autocratic father-in-law, Bill Mulholland, to write his official biography, Glass hires a researcher, who appears to discover something unsavoury in the old man's past. Before he can pass on this dark secret, however, the researcher is found dead: shot through the eye with a bullet fired from a Beretta - just as a former colleague of Mulholland's was, years earlier . . . It's a slimmer, much slighter book than its predecessors, and in this case it's very much the genre that seems to be shaping the narrative rather than vice versa, with all the contrivance that the convention calls for - false leads, surprise twists, bursts of B-movie dialogue ("'You look to me,' he said, 'like a man about to cause an awful lot of trouble . . . '"). This would be fine if it were done with conviction, but that seems only intermittently the case. The book was commissioned for serial publication by the New York Times Magazine, which no doubt presented an interesting challenge, but the excitement seems to have worn off quickly in the execution. You can practically hear the author yawning as he bangs out the off-the-peg CIA background for his menacing patriarch (the old judge in Christina Falls is a masterpiece of morally equivocal portraiture by comparison), or the equally thinly imagined crusading career of his burned-out journalist. A measure of the general perfunctoriness is the growing gap between the book's escalating rhetoric of anxiety - "How had this thing gone wrong, so quickly, so comprehensively?" - and the reader's actual, rather low level of concern for Glass or anyone else. It's like being hustled by a film score into feeling fears that the drama itself hasn't come close to arousing. The intrigue itself turns on the question of the death of Mulholland's former colleague. Suicide or murder? If the latter, by whom? But since almost nothing is done to interest us in this man's life (his name is Varriker, but it might as well be MacGuffin), it's hard to get caught up in the mystery of his death. And the final twist, far from making the villainy seem suddenly larger and more chilling than you ever imagined (which is what twists are supposed to do - isn't it?), has the perverse effect of diminishing it, bringing matters to a close with a decided whimper. Which is all, quite possibly, to take the book more seriously than it wants to be taken. There's a pervasive flavour of the po-mo lark; winking allusions to David Lynch ("Mulholland"), and to Chinatown (John Huston has a walk-on part, as host of the event where Glass first met his wife). There's also enough queasily self-conscious invocation of the generic - "He was a walking cliche", "a couple of caricature Wall Street brokers, loudly discussing hedge funds", "The Police Station . . . looked just as it would have in the movies" - to suggest the enterprise may think of itself as entirely tongue-in-cheek. Whether that makes it any more interesting will depend on your taste. Certainly the pages go by at a good clip. The descriptive filler is, as you'd expect, mostly of a high quality. And there are some memorable observations - "The trouble with smoking was that the desire to smoke was so much greater than the satisfaction afforded by actually smoking . . . " But personally I'd recommend holding tight till the next instalment of the Quirke family saga, which is not only incomparably more gripping, but also, despite its setting, considerably more fresh and original. James Lasdun's novel Seven Lies is published by Vintage. To order The Lemur for pounds 11.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-lasdun.1 It's a slimmer, much slighter book than its predecessors, and in this case it's very much the genre that seems to be shaping the narrative rather than vice versa, with all the contrivance that the convention calls for - false leads, surprise twists, bursts of B-movie dialogue ("'You look to me,' he said, 'like a man about to cause an awful lot of trouble . . . '"). Which is all, quite possibly, to take the book more seriously than it wants to be taken. There's a pervasive flavour of the po-mo lark; winking allusions to David Lynch ("[Bill Mulholland]"), and to Chinatown (John Huston has a walk-on part, as host of the event where Glass first met his wife). There's also enough queasily self-conscious invocation of the generic - "He was a walking cliche", "a couple of caricature Wall Street brokers, loudly discussing hedge funds", "The Police Station . . . looked just as it would have in the movies" - to suggest the enterprise may think of itself as entirely tongue-in-cheek. Whether that makes it any more interesting will depend on your taste. Certainly the pages go by at a good clip. The descriptive filler is, as you'd expect, mostly of a high quality. And there are some memorable observations - "The trouble with smoking was that the desire to smoke was so much greater than the satisfaction afforded by actually smoking . . . " But personally I'd recommend holding tight till the next instalment of the [Quirke] family saga, which is not only incomparably more gripping, but also, despite its setting, considerably more fresh and original. - James Lasdun.
Critique du Library Journal
Burnt-out journalist John Glass is asked to write a biography of his powerful father-in-law but gets more than he bargained for when his researcher is found murdered. This standalone psychological thriller from Black, the pen name of Booker Prize winner John Banville (who also wrote the Edgar Award-nominated Christine Falls under that pseudonym), was originally a New York Times Magazine serial. Though John Keating's (Airman) Irish accent is a pleasure to listen to, it seems wrong for a book set in Manhattan, and some pronunciations will be jarring to North American ears. Recommended only for large fiction collections. [Audio clip available through www.bbcaudiobooksamerica.com; the Picador pb original was recommended "for larger collections," LJ 6/1/08.--Ed.]--Janet Martin, Southern Pines P.L., NC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
