A hero of our time?
Laurence Lerner
THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE What has Freddie Montgomery done? There he sits in prison, writing his story in the form of a letter to the judge, and though it is clear that this aimless drifter must have committed a peculiarly nasty crime, we do not find out what it was until almost half-way through the book. This is the one truly effective element of suspense in John Banville's novel. When the crime comes it is indeed vicious — and pointless: we find out just what he did, but never, really, why, for it is almost an acte gratuit. This makes Freddie a hero of our time: I kept comparing him with Camus' Meur- sault, who also commits a pointless mur- der, feels no remorse, is alienated from his mother, and tells his own story in the same flat prose, sometimes lapidary in its sim- plicity, and lit up (Mr Banville is no mean stylist) by occasional sharp, memorable images. Freddie wonders whether he felt remorse or grief after his crime, and like Meursault he will not lie about his feelings: `I can't remember feeling anything, except that sense of strangeness, of being in a place I knew but did not recognise.' This novel could indeed be called L'Etranger though Freddie is a more complex figure than Meursault (he had after all been a talented mathematician before he gave it up for drifting) and is capable, after he looks up and sees a cloud — 'the merest smear of grey against the summer blue' of adding 'I thought: I am not human'.
Freddie takes no decisions, never helps anyone, and loves only one person: the imagined subject of Portrait of a Woman with Gloves, the 17th-century Dutch por- trait he so fecklessly tries to steal. The biography he makes up for her, the account of her sittings with the painter who is not Rembrandt or Hals after all, was for me the most powerful part of the book. It is not exactly an escape from the present, for Freddie finds in her some of the same futility he feels himself, yet observed with the clarity of compassion.
There is a good deal of clarity in this book, which tells its cheerless story with vivid observation and occasionally with comic effect (though it is not possible to laugh for long in this sordid world). Auto- biographical novels are normally thought of as quests, and the blurb makes a gallant attempt to tell us that Freddie is 'trying to make sense' of his crime, to 'come to terms with' his pointless life: but he does not begin to succeed in these worthy efforts. The only meaning we are offered comes in images, the most convincing feeling that emerges is shame. Yes, a hero of our time, and a book of our time, well written: but not designed to make one love the time.
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