Pun Salad

I put this book, by Booker Prize winner John Banville, on my get-at-library list thanks to its inclusion on the WSJ's Best Mystery Books of 2023. I get that: it's very literary! The reviews are uniformly positive! But it just wasn't my cup of tea.

(I previously read Banville's The Black-Eyed Blonde, a Philip Marlowe novel commissioned by Raymond Chandler's estate. I thought it was OK.)

Part of my problem (and it is my problem) is exemplified by sentences like this (page 89):

She was wearing too much makeup, and specks of face powder clung to the tips of the tiny, colorless hairs on her upper lip.

Banville is describing a flight attendant on a plane about to land in Dublin, who has just denied a request for a brandy from an arriving passenger, one of the main characters. It is an irrelevant and uninteresting detail. It doesn't have anything to do with anything. We never see the lady again.

Banville does a lot of this.

One of the protagonists here, Dr. Quirke, is a long-running Banville character. This is the third book that also involves Detective Inspector John Strafford. Some references to events in previous books are made.

But anyway: the book opens with a sad Nazi at the end of World War II, trying to escape, well, justice at the hands of the Allies. He succeeds with the help of the head of a local Catholic monastery in the Italian Alps. Then we are taken to 1950s Ireland, where the cops are looking at Rosa Jacobs, who has been found in her car in the titular "lock-up" rented garage, dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. An obvious suicide? Not so fast, says pathologist Dr. Quirke; he's detected indications that it was actually murder.

Eventually, we find out the perpetrator. At the very end of the book.

But along the way, the characters have a pretty miserable time of it. Everyone has rocky relationships with each other, due to loads of psychological dysfunction. Strafford and Quirke are not a classic detective duo; in fact, they don't like each other very much. The crime investigation seems half-hearted at best; instead we get a lot of damaged people fumbling their relationships. Nobody here is that interesting or likeable.

No spoilers, but if you prefer the kind of mysteries where diligent detective work finally uncovers the evil-doers, you may find this book disappointing.