John Banville has arrived at a crossroads in his literary career. In one direction lies the sequence of unapologetically “highbrow” novels he has published over the past half-century, all preoccupied with the same philosophical concerns: the elusiveness of the past, the inauthenticity of the self and the enigmas of desire. Last year’s The Singularities (2022), however, felt like something of a swan song, bringing together a host of characters from his previous works and retracing familiar themes. While exhibiting the playful, richly evocative prose for which Banville is justly celebrated, this rather self-indulgent work left the impression of a writer in need of fresh ideas.
Yet over the past four years Banville’s sideline in crime writing has given him a new lease of life. He has now published three police procedurals under his own name, rather than his Benjamin Black nom de plume, in a series that – like the Black novels – is set in 1950s Dublin and stars the state pathologist Doctor Quirke, but also includes a new investigator, Detective Strafford, a “Big House” Protestant in Ireland’s predominantly Catholic police force, first introduced in Snow (2020). The latest novel in this series, The Lock-Up, finds Quirke and Strafford struggling to solve the murder of a young Jewish woman who has been found dead in a parking garage on the outskirts of the city. Before long they become ensnared in a conspiracy that stretches from the Nazi concentration camps to the defence forces of the newly formed Israeli state, and is seemingly aided by the quiet complicity of Ireland’s Catholic institutions.
The Lock-Up’s unembarrassed literary ambition is evident from the opening epigraph: lines from the Renaissance poet Thomas Wyatt’s “They Flee from Me”, which are deftly woven through the novel and resound in its closing pages. Compared to the Black novels, there is an unmistakable uptick in the lyricism of the prose. Banville has hardly made a secret of the fact that he is more interested in the composition of a sentence than of a plot. Yet the detective genre, with its repertoire of familiar narratives and stop-start pacing, has, somewhat surprisingly, emerged as an ideal vehicle for his idiosyncratic stylistic flair.
This isn’t to say that The Lock-Up is not propulsive; and few readers will anticipate the twist that arrives in the epilogue. But this is also a novel of great sensory description, whether John Banville is capturing the pungency of a pub at closing time or the shrieking cacophony of a kitchen manned by a flustered cook.
Doug Battersby is author of Troubling Late Modernism: Ethics, feeling, and the novel form, 2022
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