BOOK REVIEW : A Skimpy Outline of a Murderer’s Mind

THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE by John Banville SCRIBNERS $17.95, 220 pages

About the housemaid he killed in a fumbling attempt to steal a painting from an Irish country house, the narrator of “The Book of Evidence” tells us:

“This is the worst, the essential sin, I think, the one for which there will be no forgiveness: That I never imagined her vividly enough, that I never made her be there sufficiently, that I did not make her live.”

The reflection comes at the end of Freddie Montgomery’s account, written while waiting in jail for the trial where he intends to plead guilty. It is the one moment of firm sentience, of moral imagination, in John Banville’s deliberately blank and uninflected novel about a murderer’s mind. Freddie, who, right after the killing, noticed he was weeping--as if the weeper were someone else--suddenly feels shame. Not for killing the maid, but for not seeing her.

Murder is so much the antithesis of human nature, perhaps, that to commit it, the murderer must become momentarily blind, not only to the victim’s reality but to his own. Banville takes this possibility and expands it into the story of a man who, except for this final moment, is as blind looking in, as he is looking out.

His entire life, it seems, has been spent in solitary confinement inside himself. The prison, with its tense but oddly easy male society of rules but no demands, its stink of semen, its moral fug, is a sensory feast, by comparison.

Freddie, petulant, overweight and in his late 30s, is a loathsome ruin of a man. He would be loathsome, that is, if there were enough revelation or unconscious self-revelation in his account of himself to evoke such a feeling. He gives us the facts about his crime. About the criminal, we get a random assortment of details.

Freddie is Irish. His parents lived in comfortable circumstances; since his father’s death, his mother has scraped for a living in their ramshackle country house, breeding ponies and selling off their paintings. He had been a promising scientist and studied at Berkeley, where he married his wife, Dianne. For some unknown reason, he abandoned his career, moved with Dianne and their subnormal son to Ibiza or Mallorca--we don’t know which--and lived there as a seedy expatriate.

Freddie extorts money from an acquaintance. It turns out that he must repay it not to the friend, but to a local criminal. Under threat he returns to Ireland to raise the money. His mother, almost penniless, is unwelcoming. There is no explanation; throughout, the story is full of blanks.

Visiting a rich family friend and neighbor, who collects French and Dutch painting, Freddie is struck by the portrait of a young Dutch woman, and lifts it off the wall. When a maid comes in, he forces her into his car, drives off and, when she claws at his back, turns and beats her to death with a hammer. The police trace him and he is jailed.

Although there is more to the story, there is not a lot more. What is important is what is not there. On the outside, the narrative is starved and disjointed. The actual killing is told briefly but with vivid horror. On the inside, the emotion and the self-awareness are equally disjointed and sporadic. At one point, the narrator will speak of the killing as an act of liberation through meaninglessness: “To do the worst, the very worst thing, that’s the way to be free.” At another moment, he hints at life-long rage: “Now I have struck a blow for the inner man, that guffawing, fat foulmouth who had been telling me all along that I was living a lie.” He tells a detective: “I killed her because I could.”

Absence--human, moral, emotional--is the key. The void as the emblem of modern mankind is familiar enough. Banville, a fine and intelligent writer, is attempting more: Emptiness without a boundary.

“The Book of Evidence” is at once too bare and too wordy to succeed. There are brilliant passages in it; among them, the beautifully imagined life of the subject of the stolen Dutch painting. But with so hidden and self-hidden a narrator, his long discourses on his state of mind have nothing to attach to.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “A Cloud on Sand” by Gabriella De Ferrari (Knopf).