Athena is the third book in John Banville’s loose ‘Frames’ trilogy, which begins with The Book of Evidence and is followed by Ghosts, which I reviewed last month.
The focus, once again, is Freddie Montgomery, although in this iteration he no longer goes by that name but has assumed the moniker Morrow. Following his release from prison (for the crimes detailed in The Book of Evidence), Morrow is attempting to reinstate himself in mainstream society by offering his services as an art expert. He is approached to authenticate a series of oil paintings by a shadowy businessman called Morden. While working on the paintings, he meets a young and beautiful woman he calls A. and falls madly in love. They begin an unlikely, but passionate affair, which distracts Morrow from the potential crime that he has found himself mired in.
It is what I call my life. It is what I imagine I lead, when all the time it is leading me, like an ox to the shambles.
For Morrow, with his fake name and his murderous past, is dangerously out of his depth. He has stumbled into a den of thieves, and those thieves seem to know more about Freddie’s past than is comfortable and may well have stolen their cache of famous paintings from Whitewater House, the scene of the murder for which Freddie went to jail. As Morrow and A.’s relationship grows increasingly warped and intense and the police start sniffing around Morden’s house, the events of the novel become progressively ambiguous.
Are the artworks that Freddie is appraising real or fake? Is A. Morden’s wife and if so, what game is she playing with Freddie? Who is the Da, the thuggish gangster who sometimes dresses as a woman and sometimes dresses as a priest? And what is the connection with of a series of brutal murders terrorising the city?
As always with Banville, concrete answers are hard to come by, but evidently Morrow is, to some extent, being played. The world that Banville creates is cinematic and dreamlike, with an undercurrent of unease always permeating the narrative, an unease that may be driven by Morrow’s own guilt.
Woven through the plot is the story of Morrow’s dying Aunt Corky, resident of a nursing home and creator of myth about her own life. Corky brings much needed moments of humour to the narrative and becomes Morrow’s saviour when she leaves him her fortune in his will. Corky joins all the characters in this novel, who are living a falsehood whether they realise it or not. Fake names and fake pasts abound, terrain is constantly shifting, morality is murky and nothing is guaranteed.
I’m sure none of this is as it really happened…the things she told me (as distinct from the things she did not) I think of not as lies but inventions, rather, improvisations, true fictions.
For all intents and purposes, Athena is a love story, but that love story was, for me, the least interesting aspect of the novel. It is, as you would expect, beautifully written and crammed with debate about the elusive nature of truth, the stories we tell ourselves and the unreliability of memoir, but it didn’t feel as compelling or as focused as the previous two books in the series.
What I did enjoy was Banville’s sense of playfulness, which manifests in the descriptions of both Aunt Corky and the enjoyably wacky antics of Da. The whole novel is conceived as a letter or essay written by Morrow to A. after the events have occurred and as such allows Banville to question the very nature of novel writing (and reading) itself:
I went into the shop. It smelled of cat and stewed tea. Do we really need all this, these touches of local colour and so on? Yes, we do…
Banville also contrives a whole alternate history of visual art, by peppering the narrative with descriptions of the paintings that Morrow is evaluating, all of which have been painted by artists whose names are anagrams of John Banville himself (like Johann Livelb and Job van Hellin).
It’s no spoiler to say that the paintings turn out to be fakes, which adds a cheeky delight to the notion of mock essays on the veracity of forged paintings. This clashing of truth and lies, authenticity and counterfeit, seems to me to be at the heart of Banville’s writing and the core of his mysterious and appealing worlds.
If the love story wears thin at times, the dazzling writing keeps you enthralled. I’ve never looked up the meaning of so many words or highlighted so many passages as I have when reading Banville and yet he wears this intellectual brilliance lightly, even as you might feel you are nowhere close to excavating every meaning he has coded into his sentences. As A. is only ever talked about, I never felt her come alive as a character, as others do in the novel, but that may well be Banville’s point. The lost love becomes archetype, forever fixed in the mind of the one who has been spurned. A. is the idea of unrequited love personified rather than a person in her own right.
I knew I must not give in to self-pity. . . . She had been mine for a time, and now she was gone. Gone, but alive, in whatever form life might have taken for her, and from the start that was supposed to be my task: to give her life.
Athena may be, for me at least, the weakest of the trilogy, but it is by no means a weak book. Were Banville to write another three books centred on the morally dubious but strangely vulnerable Freddie Montgomery, I would race to read them. Banville’s world is not a conventional one and in many ways, he is not even trying to create any semblance of reality.
His is a world of complexity and ambiguity, centred on the power of art to elevate our inconsequential lives.
Next month for my Year of John Banville, I will be reading his 1997 novel The Untouchable and Kim will be reading Ghosts.