John Banville's The Book Of Evidence

In the words of Vladimir Nabokov:”You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” (ch.1, 11:1989), John Banville’s character, Freddie Montgomery does just that by bringing forward through his “fancy prose style” a self-reflexive, colorful nonetheless coherent testimony of a brutal crime, to which he offers an aesthetic justification. Banville’s The Book of Evidence, the first of his trilogy, is written in such a manner as to portray the altered self of Freddie and his mischievous and fragmented identity, the gap or better said the preference of art to morality and those haunting presences that give voice to the Irish gothic. It is a work that challenges the principles of ethics and perception of reality and its limits, the character

He is able to connect more with the Woman in the portrait recognizing her otherness, than with the maid he kills, for whom she shows no empathy or remorse: “…his crime, he would have us believe, is the result of his preference for Art over Life, for a woman in a painting whose aesthetic fascination blinded him to the life of the woman he murdered.”(McMinn, 103: 1999). However, it is when the maid starts to attack Freddie that he scarcely sees her, that he acknowledges her existence and his “...obsessively pictorial imagination” (McMinn, 103: 1999) seems to give place to the real and the truth; he succeeds for a moment to imagine her, yet it is not enough and he remains as remote as before to her

The Big House, in this case Coolgrange keeps alive the past, though in a putrefying state, here is where the main character grew up, where he, his mother and father made a family. It was Coolgrange that held him back in the past: “Stuck in the past I was always peering beyond the present towards a limitless future.” (Banville, 38: 1998), that brought him back again. Within the domain of the big house, we come across a building haunted by memories, the image of his aunt Alice is brought back to life through the presence of the armchair she died in, the haunting absence of his father is felt through the bed in which he passed away, the entire house being a memoir to the haunting absences. This estate is also the personification of his Protestant heritage, a heritage which has remained in a state of total stillness undergoing a continuous process of decay, being the embodiment of houses which “are always dying but never dead” (Sage and Smith, 36: 1996) broadening the rupture between present and past. Through the depiction of the Big House and the absences, that Banville tackles the anxieties of the Irish, who have for ever been