Benjamin Black is the pen name of Booker Prize winning novelist John Banville. What’s slightly odd about this is that the disguise is made plain by being highlighted on the front cover. Banville says that the reason for this is that he wanted to write genre fiction, but didn’t want his literary readers to be disappointed when they realised that the books were not literary ones.
Fair enough, I suppose, only Banville wants not only to have his cake, but to eat it too. He claims that there is no such thing as genre fiction, and that the only worthwhile distinction to make in literature is between good writing and bad writing. If this is true, then there’s no need to write under a pen name, and readers shouldn’t feel aggrieved to find that they’re reading a thriller.
The real problem is that Banville’s claim that there is no such thing as genre fiction is let down by the fact that The Lemur is a cliché from start to finish. Thankfully it’s a short book.
It’s a theme of my reading at the moment that all of a book’s characters are unsympathetic, and The Lemur is no exception. It’s set in New York, among the financial elite. John Glass, erstwhile world-famous journalist for the ‘Sunday Times of London’ is afraid of heights, but sits in his office way up in his father-in-law’s skyscraper preparing to write the old man’s authorised biography. And here comes the cliché: he’s afraid of heights, but really he’s out of his depth.
He hires an investigator to help him probe his father-in-law’s past, but almost immediately the investigator turns up dead. We’re treated to Banville’s riff on the New York police precinct, and the hard boiled cop in search of coffee, then to Glass’s unhappy affair with a local artist, to his even less happy marriage and to his strained relationship with his hawkish, ex-CIA father-in-law Bill Mulholland who is now some kind of Bill Gates figure (Banville tries to deflect this comparison by having ‘Big Bill’ say that he’s bigger than any other philanthropist, Bill and Melinda Gates included).
Despite being set in New York, there’s very little sense of place, the real place rather than the celluloid view of it we’re used to seeing in the cinema. The Lemur is a deeply disappointing book. Let’s hope that Banville’s forthcoming The Infinities marks a return to the form of his brilliant Booker winning The Sea.
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4 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.God, James, that sounds abysmal. Have you read Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis? The Lemur sounds like it’s the same flavour of rubbish.
I have read Cosmopolis, and I’m still angry that I’ll never get those hours of my life back. Unlike Shane I loved Underworld, but Cosmopolis was just embarrassing (although I seem to have said that DeLillo’s “every word is worth reading” in my post on The Fallen Man – which was a mistake).
By the time the main character was having his prostate examined in the back of a limo, I was stabbing my eyes out with rusty forks.
A few people have told me that Underworld’s very good, I’m just wary of devoting so much reading time to someone who could write such godawful tripe.
Sorry this title did not work out for you. I have not read this author yet but do have one book by him.