Snow by John Banville

Snow by John Banville

Genre: Mystery

Publication: Harlequin: Hanover Square Press, 6 October 2020

The incomparable Booker Prize winner’s next great crime novel—the story of a family whose secrets resurface when a parish priest is found murdered in their ancestral home

Detective Inspector St. John Strafford has been summoned to County Wexford to investigate a murder. A parish priest has been found dead in Ballyglass House, the family seat of the aristocratic, secretive Osborne family.

The year is 1957 and the Catholic Church rules Ireland with an iron fist. Strafford—flinty, visibly Protestant and determined to identify the murderer—faces obstruction at every turn, from the heavily accumulating snow to the culture of silence in the tight-knit community he begins to investigate.

As he delves further, he learns the Osbornes are not at all what they seem. And when his own deputy goes missing, Strafford must work to unravel the ever-expanding mystery before the community’s secrets, like the snowfall itself, threaten to obliterate everything.

Beautifully crafted, darkly evocative and pulsing with suspense, Snow is “the Irish master” (New Yorker) John Banville at his page-turning best. (from Goodreads)

My thoughts

I had never read any of the work of John Banville before, so I had no idea what to expect. But the book swirled me into its vortex and completely absorbed my attention with its evocative, haunting prose and wry-voiced Detective Inspector St. John Strafford.

I really enjoyed Banville’s voice. The wry tone works well for this type of police procedural, with its slow, almost leisurely pace, and rich characterizations. It is by turns humorous and bitter, and its bitterness is savage. But it’s always clear-eyed and sharply observant of details, both those of the physical world and those of human foibles and quirks.

Characters

His detective, Inspector Strafford, isn’t good at solving puzzles. His chief characterizes him as a “trudger”, and an unimaginative one at that. This is an interesting and unusual choice for a detective novel’s protagonist. The character is hampered not only by external forces (the snow, the secrecy of the Osbornes) but by himself.

Despite this, he’s a winning character. I enjoyed how his mind works. He might not enjoy his work. He might not be suited to finding a priest’s killer. But he still desires to do his duty. The truth matters to him. Though he knows the facts will be buried, thanks to the long reach of the Church, it’s only a matter of how deeply they are buried. And he still must try to keep them buried them.

And so he trudges on.

When he arrives at the country manor, he finds that the priest’s body has been “tidied up” by the estate owner, Colonel Osborne. Crime scene integrity be damned, certain points of decorum must be observed. I almost heard the voice of the collective dead Osborne ancestors saying, Leaving a murder victim the way it was found, why, that wouldn’t be proper, my dear. That this hinders the investigation and aids the murderer matters not one whit.

Other Characters

The other characters are, as Strafford observes, all certain “types.” There’s the ex-military Colonel, all stiff-upper lip and decorum, fussing about the untidy crime scene. His rather pathetic, possibly “mad” second wife, Sylvia, doped up on sedatives. The unhappy son Dominick, dutifully studying medicine when he’d rather do anything else. The equally unhappy daughter Lettie with her cutting, vicious remarks, hiding her expulsion from school from her father. The black sheep, fast-talking, flashy brother-in-law, banned from the Colonel’s house. The country doctor, stopping by to visit his patient each day. And so on.

It’s as though each of them is playing a role in a play. But each is playing their part too well, too convincingly to truly be convincing.

Plot

While Banville sprinkles in a few red herrings, the mystery isn’t full of twists. The motive is fairly transparent (to readers, at least), and after a while, the list of possible killers narrows down to certain characters.

It’s easy to grow impatient with Strafford’s blindness to what seems obvious to us in the 21st century. But I think the time period might have something to do with this. It’s almost impossible for someone living in 2020 to realize how things were in 1957 Ireland, back before certain horrible truths tumbled out into the daylight, never completely swept back into darkness again. But before? Strafford wasn’t alone in his almost-intentional blindness.

Banville held my interest throughout the mystery. Everything flows beautifully: the characters and setting and story are integrated seamlessly, the sign of a masterful writer. Throughout the novel, I took notes on the prose.

Trigger alert

Spoiler alert: Toward the end, there is a chapter with some explicit sexual violence. While Banville handles it well, using insinuations more than graphic description, it is a stomach churning few pages to read. The author crawls into the mind of a predator and shows us all too well how such a person justifies their actions, and how complicit those around them are in hiding the abuse. It’s horrifying. For those triggered by sexual violence, this might be too hard to handle.

5 Stars

The book isn’t for everyone–what book is?–but Snow is a mystery for long winter nights, curled up by a crackling fire while the fictional Inspector Strafford braves the cold and snow to find the killer. This won’t be the last book by John Banville that I read.

Note: I received a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I was not required to write a positive review. All opinions are my own.

Like this? Read that!

If 1950s Ireland intrigues you, try the historical mystery Blackwatertown by Paul Waters.