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Friday, April 01, 2022

April in Spain (2021) by John Banville


Book Review
April in Spain (2021)
by John Banville

   For me, Irish Booker Prize winner John Banville has the most interesting trajectory in literary fiction.  For many years in he carried on a double life under the nom de plume Benjamin Black, where he was modestly successful with his line of Detective Fiction starring Dublin pathologist Quirke.  Then, in 2020 he released Snow, a very Banvillian work of detective fiction.  Finally, last year he released April in Spain, which was the eighth book in the Quirke line, but the first published his own name, abandoning Benjamin Black to his fate. 

   The way I read the sequence of events,  Snow drops in 2020 and becomes, by far, his biggest hit ever- the Amazon listing has 6600 reviews vs. 1100 for the next most popular Banville title.  His editors are like, "You know John, it is ok for you to write genre fiction under your real name, this isn't the 19th century, detective fiction has its own legitimate place in the literary canon."  And Banville is like, "Do I?" and then he starts getting the checks from Snow and he's like, "Yup."

  Which brings us to April in Spain which is, as I said, a very conventional work of mystery-fiction about a young woman who goes missing, reported dead, under sordid family circumstances (think Chinatown,) only to be discovered by a drunken Quirke on holiday in San Sebastian in northern Spain.   It is certainly enjoyable, and certainly well written.  I enjoyed the San Sebastian location, having travelled there myself about a decade or so ago.  And it's written by Booker prize winning author John Banville, so it made me feel like I was reading a work of literary fiction rather than a genre title.

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