Snow

No, Strafford thought, there was no sense to it. The thing was entirely implausible, and yet there it was, the deed was done, the man was dead. He felt as if he were stumbling through a snowstorm, the snow dense and blindingly white. There were others around him, also moving, dim grey ghosts, and when he reached out to touch them he grasped only an icy emptiness.

Snow begins like a straightforward murder mystery (“The body is in the library,” Colonel Osborne said. “Come this way.”), and if one were to read it as a straightforward murder mystery, one might be disappointed; the whodunnit and whydunnits are rather easily solved, and as social commentary, this doesn't really break new ground. So I was forced to ruminate on why a Booker-winning novelist like John Banville put this together (and I especially wondered why he wrote it under his own name instead of the pen name, Benjamin Black, he uses for his Quirke series of mysteries), and I came to a satisfying conclusion: This is a very self-aware and ironic piece of post-modernist writing, and while it may not serve to expose something new about the social constructs of 1950s Ireland (even if this storyline would have been absolutely explosive had it been written in the day), Banville creatively employs the tropes of mystery fiction to provide the ultimate overview of those times. Line-by-line, the writing is just exquisite, and in the large picture, something important is achieved; just don't expect a satisfying murder mystery because I honestly don't believe that was Banville's intent. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Was he imagining it all? There was always the danger, in his job, of seeing things that weren't there, of making a pattern where there wasn't one. The policeman insists that there be a plot. However, life itself is plotless.

Detective Inspector St John Strafford is called to Ballyglass House – the Co. Wexford family seat of the aristocratic Osborne family – to investigate the death, and perhaps murder, of family friend, Fr Tom Lawless. Like the Osbornes, Strafford is from Ireland's mouldering aristocratic class – his posh boarding school accent, tailored (if shabby) clothes, and Protestant upbringing serve to distance the young detective from the locals during his investigation – and the ironic tension of this particular detective investigating the death of a Catholic priest (who happens to have been the son of a notoriously fierce fighter for independence during Ireland's recent Civil War) makes for interesting commentary on the times (I don't think I've ever read a book from this particular POV and I did find it fascinating). Add in the fact that Strafford is practically immune to the Catholic Church's efforts to control the investigation, and this does feel like an original slant on recent Irish history.

In addition to that last passage quoted, characters are forever noting that their situation feels fictional:

• Will you look at this place? Next thing Poirot himself will appear on the scene.

• Another player steps on stage, Stafford thought grimly, though this one would know his part to the last aside.

• You poor man – what you must think of us all! We must seem like the characters in one of those novels about mad people in country houses.

In addition to referencing Agatha Christie (more than once) and Banville's own character Dr Quirke (apparently away from Dublin on his honeymoon), characters freely quote from Joyce and Beckett and Shakespeare (or is that Chaucer?); the effect being a postmodern acknowledgement that we are reading a work of fiction and we are to understand that the specifics matter less than the overall effort. What Snow captures about class and power in 1950s Ireland is interesting enough to have been explored through fiction and important enough to employ these ironic effects to remind the reader that it's also the truth.

And in addition to all that, the small details in Banville's writing are so pleasurable. I especially liked the way he introduces us to characters:

The first thing everyone noticed about Sergeant Jenkins was the flatness of his head. It looked as if the top of it had been sliced clean off, like the big end of a boiled egg. How, people wondered, was there room for a brain of any size at all in such a shallow space? He tried to hide the disfigurement by slathering his hair with Brylcreem and forcing it into a sort of bouffant style on top, but no one was fooled. The story was that the midwife had dropped him on his head when he was born, but it seemed too far-fetched to be true. Oddly, he never wore a hat, perhaps on the principle that a hat would flatten his carefully fluffed-up hair and spoil the attempted camouflage.

Or:

Her skin was pinkly pale, the colour of skimmed milk into which had been mixed a single drop of blood. Her face was like that of a Madonna by one of the lesser Old Masters, with dark eyes and a long sharp nose with a little bump at the tip. She wore a beige cardigan and a calf-length grey skirt that hung a little crookedly on her hips, which were no broader than a boy's. She wasn't beautiful, Strafford thought, but all the same something in her frail, melancholy looks pressed a bell deep within him that made a soundless, sad little ping.

(In a later scene, Strafford thinks of this character, “Her skin had two shades, milk, and strawberries crushed in milk.” Love that.) Again, I wasn't captivated by the murder mystery elements (the solution is telegraphed fairly early on); but again, I don't think I was meant to be – in the end, I'm actually happy to have been underwhelmed by that aspect because it made me stop and really think about what Banville was trying to say. Turns out: it was quite a lot and it all worked for me.