Critical Essay | Critical Review by Erica Abeel

SOURCE: "He Killed Her Because He Could," in New York Times Book Review, April 15, 1990, p. 11.

In the following review, Abeel asserts that in The Book of Evidence "Mr. Banville has gambled that he could write a mesmerizing tale about a monster—and he has won."

Here is an astonishing, disturbing little novel [The Book of Evidence] that might have been coughed up from hell. A first-person narrator confesses to a murder. It's soon apparent, though, that the crime was not inspired by greed, revenge or any other discernible motive. The narrator is a sort of accidental killer—Everyman as monster.

Freddie Montgomery, a gifted scientist, presents his confession as he sits in jail awaiting trial. He imagines his ruminations as a courtroom statement and posits his readers as judge and jury. John Banville, the author of Doctor Copernicus, Kepler and other novels, has made his Freddie a thoroughly bad...
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