Content note: this review will discuss child sexual abuse, which is central to the plot of the novel as well as to the history of the Catholic Church in Ireland (which is also at the center of the novel).
A lady has not been able to catch a damned break so far in 2022, so this is the first moment I’ve had to sit down and write a review, of the most recent book that I’ve finished, and goddamn was it a bleak and tough one to make the first. Oh well.
If you’re not familiar with John Banville, well, he’s not as well known in America as he is the UK, where I remember him being near inescapable: he’s produced at least 29 novels in 50 years (though over half a dozen were published under his crime writer pseudonym Benjamin Black). I first encountered him via his novel Birchwood when I was an undergrad, and it was weird and haunting and brilliant, so I’ve dipped back into his work here and there when time allows. His most recent mystery novel, Snow, I checked out from the library as an audiobook, figuring it’d be a diverting way to pass some dog walks and drives.
Snow is set in 1950s Wexford (where Banville himself grew up). Detective St John Strafford (not Stafford, as he keeps having to remind people) has been summoned out just before Christmas to investigate the murder of a Catholic priest, Father Tom, at the estate of the wealthy (and Protestant) Osborne family, who are as privileged and neurotic as one might expect. Father Tom was not just killed, but castrated, and both Strafford’s superior and the Archbishop are keen to have this case wrapped up quickly and quietly.
Strafford, who is polite, a little awkward, and deeply professional, is slow to realize the implications behind Father Tom’s death, but we twenty-first century readers, well aware of the abuse scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church, catch on much quicker, and Strafford’s gradual awareness of the truth heightens our sense of dread in a novel that otherwise feels a lot like a Masterpiece Mystery country house piece, just a bit too seedy to be Poirot, a bit too arch to be Dalgliesh. It was all too clear to me very early on that the jovial and “popular” Father Tom has very clearly molested numerous boys; the moment you realize he was a chaplain at an orphanage, the connection to his posthumous mutilation is quite clear. Banville interrupts Strafford’s investigation here and there with interludes from secondary characters such as the Osborne daughter and then, finally, near Strafford’s solving of the crime, Father Tom himself, in which the priest (some five years before his death) both admits to his sexual sins and attempts to excuse them under the guise of some kind of tenderness, though his description of the deeds fill us with too much horror to be taken in (though one can see, through the revulsion, the kind of charm a predator can exercise). (This sequence has enough detail to be thoroughly nauseating and horrifying and I feel obliged to warn readers of its presence; I was unprepared.)
The title is apt, and not just because of the weather that dominates the three days of the book, as Banville presents to us a world that is frozen in more ways than one: an Ireland frozen in the grips of a Catholic Church that looks the other way when it comes to a pedophilic priest; an Ireland trembling on the precipice of violent sectarian conflict; characters who are trapped in repeating cycles of behavior even when they know the fruitlessness of their actions (made bleakly clear in the novel’s deceptively sunny final chapter, if you’re paying attention).
Banville has said Henry James is one of his most significant influences, and on reading Snow, that might almost be hard to fathom if we’re thinking of the mannered environment of Portrait of a Lady. But consider the James who wrote The Turn of the Screw, pointing as well at evils that no one can bring themselves to name, and you can see indeed how these two writers, working a century apart, are connected, and how Banville takes advantage of his historical moment to name the evils that James could only gesture to. But also if you’re too horrified to appreciate the parallel, well, that’s fair, too. If I was rating this purely on technical merits, it’d probably be a 4; since I am also considering my own experience of the material (also affected, admittedly, by having covid while I was working through it), I’m going to knock it down a bit. Banville is brilliant and I never want to read this book again.