'Snow,' by John Banville, uses the tools of mystery perfected by his alter ego, Benjamin Black, only to overturn them in fascinating ways.
that he shut Black “in a room with a pistol, a phial of sleeping pills and a bottle of Scotch, and that was the end of him.” “Snow” is his first mystery written under his own name.
What we get, then, is a salubrious hybrid. While the setup might resemble a Black novel, the prose reflects Banville at his best, especially when he’s describing the titular weather: The tops of trees have strips of snow “that glistened like granulated sugar”; snow on the landscape looks “unreally neat and picturesque, like a decorative scene on a Christmas cake”; the snow has ceased, “but from the big-bellied look of the sky it was certain that there was more to come.
Joyce is hardly the only literary reference; they come fast and furious — T.S. Eliot, Chaucer and Shakespeare, among others.
When we return to Christmas morning, we’ve seen the rough beast born, and so has Strafford. Although he’s lain in a room at an inn, plied with gifts and a full breakfast, the clues he’s carefully followed point to a chain of deaths stemming from the original bloodshed. Is it all predictable? Perhaps. If you’re expecting a razor-sharp fair-play mystery, you’re in the wrong place. Banville has written that type of narrative successfully. He didn’t kill off Black in order to write Black’s books.
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