It could be said that John Banville (Wexford, Ireland, 74 years old) is a prolific author, yes, but above all he is a chameleonic being, a cannibal, as he prefers to define himself, a writer who has played with Henry James in The Lady Osmond , who has been Raymond Chandler in The blonde with black eyes (Alfaguara, 2014), who, if he had to choose one of his characters, confesses, would play as Phoebe, the daughter of Quirke, the forensic pathologist created by Benjamin Black, his alter ego , a relief at times, a game at others, a writer without whom Banville would not be Banville. That is why it is to be celebrated that Alfaguara, the publisher that has been publishing and rescuing all of his work in Spanish in recent years, dares with the Freddie Montgomery Trilogy, three works that delve into the author's obsessions around the truth, identity and art. The book of evidence (1989) is the only one of the three that had already been published in Spanish. With this novel he was already a finalist for the Booker that he later won in 2005 with El mar and in it you can already see the virtues that would make him a reference writer and the characteristics that give unity to this trilogy.
The reader finds at the beginning of The Book of Evidence a young Freddie Montgomery already evicted - a state that, in one way or another, will not come out in the entire trilogy - who makes a long written confession before a judge after killing a young and wait drunk for arrest. Through an obsessive voice and an enveloping tone, Banville takes us through the version that Montgomery himself - an educated individual and of a good social class - gives of his crime, a story always told from an amoral narrator, marked by a dark sense of humor and that we know is unreliable. "Oh God, how confusing and dark it is", "the details have never been my forte" or "I am an enthusiastic defender of the trolls" are some of the reflections of the good Freddie to keep the reader out of place during his confession .
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Written in 1993, in Fantasmas the narrator is again Montgomery, who lives after his time in prison deported on an island with a great art theorist and his servant, studying an unknown Flemish master and trying to regain his place in the world. A group of castaways arrive on the island and everything changes. The study of the characters, the loneliness of the narrator, the strange atmosphere and the game of masks that some poisoned Shakespeare characters establish fascinate the reader, who never ends up knowing who this man he is pursuing through more than 700 pages is .
All these games of identity and diffuse relations with the truth reach their peak in Athena (1995). The relationship between the real and the fiction, between the authentic and the imitation that runs throughout the trilogy becomes essential and traces here a direct line with The Untouchable , the novel in which Banville tells the life of Victor Maskell, a transcript of Anthony Blunt, art expert, curator of the Queen's collection and Soviet spy, the Cambridge Circle Room, a traitor. Montgomery is now a certain Morrow and allies himself with some of the most sinister thugs to pass off as good seven paintings by many other authors invented by Banville and who, starting with Johann Livelb (who already appears in Return to Birchwood , 1973) are anagrams of your own name. Do you want more games? The detective chasing them is called Hackett, yes, like Black's, only two decades earlier. Montgomery's somewhat more runaway tone, which does not try to hide that he is still the one who tells everything, is the logical consequence of what has happened and gives the trilogy a whole meaning. The reader, in the end, I do not know if fascinated but certainly uncomfortable may ask, like Freddie himself. What is true, Inspector? All. Nothing. Just shame.
Freddie Montgomery Trilogy
Author: John Banville
Translation: Horacio González Trejo.
Publisher: Alfaguara, 2020.
Format: 752 pages. 26.90 euros.
Find it at your nearest bookstore