![]() ![]() It's time I tried some of Banville's booker-worthy prose. Hopeless nostalgia was the curse of his steadily dwindling caste. Only someone who had been born and brought up in a place like this, as he had, could know the particular, piercing fondness he felt before the sad spectacle of such decay and decrepitude. A warm wave of nostalgia washed over him. When he looked up, craning his neck, he saw how the gutters sagged, and the way the protruding edges of roof slates had been splintered and left jagged by countless winter storms. The frames of the big windows were decayed and their putty was crumbling and there were cracks running up the walls where growths of buddleia were lodged, their branches leafless now. ![]() The place in general was seriously in need of repair and renovation. I have a bad habit of skimming over descriptive passages, but this paragraph about the old house in which the crime occurs woke me up: Banville, who has been mentioned as a possible Novel laureate, certainly has a way with words. He thinks at one point that he is falling in love with one of the suspects, a woman it is impossible for the reader to like. He spends much of the book wandering about County Wexford seemingly clueless. ![]() I figured out about the third time it happened in the first 65 pages that the people in this story were not listening carefully or showing much respect to this detective and that perhaps I had better stay more alert.ĭetective Inspector Strafford is a man of subtle charm who employs frequent irony and mild sarcasm that are lost on most of the people around him. This book begins a new mystery series set in 1957, with a detective named St John Strafford (mention is made in passing to Quirke, a previous Banville protagonist, found in books written pseudonymously by Benjamin Black.) He spends much of the novel sighing wearily each time he has to correction the pronunciation of his first name or the spelling of his last. It's Snowby John Banville, the winner of the Booker Prize for his 2005 novel, The Sea. The first book I've finished reading in 2021 is one of the best contemporary mysteries I've read in this millennium. I haven't seen such a book, but I'll bet some scholar has written an academic interpretation of this 1908 story of revolution and restoration, of the foolishness of the governing class, and the importance of solidarity among the proletariat.īut it's much more fun to read it as the story of little animals who are sometimes wise and sometimes not, who work together to rescue one of their own despite his many and egregious character faults, and of course, who "mess about with boats." His adventures include crashing numerous new cars, which he can afford to buy because he is a very wealthy toad indeed, stealing somebody else's car (twice), disguising himself as a washerwoman, stealing a horse, and eventually joining his friends, Badger, Water Rat, and Mole, to storm Toad Hall, which in his absence has been taken over by the animals from the Wild Wood, ferrets, weasels, and stoats, wicked creatures who have posted lookouts with guns to protect their newly-acquired fortress. Mr Toad of Toad Hall is an outrageous, short-cycle bipolar amphibian with an ego unrivaled in literature. It was only in 2013 that I got around to reading this children's classic (written by Kenneth Grahame) and once again I'm stifling giggles. In his Christmas sermon years ago our priest referred to " The Wind in the Willows by Graham Greene." At the end of the pew, a bookish friend, Gary Carter, leaned forward to look at me just as I leaned forward to look at him and for much of the rest of the service we had trouble stifling our giggles. This book is known in our house as Our Man in the Willows.
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