The Book of Evidence by John Banville
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Hangover with a Vengeance

Is it possible to explain a crime without rationalising and therefore justifying it; that is, understanding it as reasonable while recognising it as immoral? This is the issue posed in The Book of Evidence. And it is an important issue in criminal law not just in moral theory. There is probably no living writer in the English language who could better find the words to explore this question. Banville's particular skill in two domains, alcohol poisoning and the subtleties of Irish snobbery, provides the framework for exploration.

Drink and drunkenness play a big role in Banville's Quirke mysteries, but in Evidence he really does turn alcoholism into a literary event. I stopped drinking 40 years ago, but could feel the pull of the beast forcefully in his acute descriptions of the man desperate for relief from his life through more or less continuous self-medication. The fact that this man doesn't really know what he wants release from is captured just as concisely in his 'Castle Catholic' disdain for most people everywhere and for all people rural and Catholic in post WW II Ireland. "This is a wonderful country," the protagonist says, "A man with a decent accent can do almost anything."

Colm Toibin's introduction in my edition, however, seems somewhat off the mark. Toibin thinks that the key to the story is a sort of dual identity in the protagonist, in the manner of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. I can't see it. Yes, Frederick Montgomery's actions are inexplicable to himself after the fact; he even compares himself to Dr. Jekyll while waiting for his arrest. And he is certainly a different person after his crime, both psychologically and existentially. But this difference in in the manner of Kafka or Dostoevsky not Stevenson. The 'selves' involved appear to be the quite normal acting self and reflecting self, not two separate personalities.

When Frederick attempts to analyse himself, he sounds much more like St. Paul than Dr. Jekyll: "It's hard to describe. I felt that I was utterly unlike myself. That is to say... it was as if I - the real, thinking, sentient I - had somehow got myself trapped inside a body not my own, ...the person that was inside me was also strange to me." Given his Catholic/Calvinist bloodline, his confusion is more likely to be down to his religious background rather than anything more demonic.

By his own admission Frederick has 'drifted' into his situation. He does not believe he is insane. Nor does he perceive himself or the human species as inherently evil given the acts of gratuitous kindness he has given as well as received. But the accumulated effects of otherwise insignificant choices have been a fatal if 'slow subsidence'.

Whatever remnant of his Christian upbringing there is, it is also not sufficient to provide an explanation. Original sin just isn't a satisfying theory: "I ask myself if perhaps the thing itself - badness - does not exist at all, if these strangely vague and imprecise words are only a kind of ruse, a kind of elaborate cover for the fact that there is nothing there?" His crime has provoked a crisis in the self that would not occurred without it: an existential emptiness that is even more frightening than religious evil.

When we, we as civilised persons as well as we of civilisation, can't find the words for a thing, this emptiness has terrifying substance. Could this be the punishment that obviates the need for explanation? The very lack of explanation is excruciating for Frederick. The peace that passeth all understanding eludes him. It is "...hangover time with a vengeance." And he gets to share it with precisely the class of folk he has despised all of his life. Could this be hell?

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