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John Banville's most recent novel follows Quirke and Stafford as they try to find who killed Rosa Jacobs. This entangled novel has no shortage of red herrings, and so the reader may be left guessing whodunit until the very end.
Dramatis personae: Det. Insp. St. John Strafford, Irish Garda, Protestant Ascendancy, who has a gramophone, whose wife has left him, and who falls for Quirke's daughter; Unknown Man, liberated from Dachau, fleeing through the Dolomites in April in the twilight of World War II; Rosa Jacobs, a Jew, dead of asphyxiation, late historian at Trinity University; Dr. Quirke, Pathologist, deeply grieving husband of a murdered woman, lives with Phoebe, falls for Molly; Phoebe, Quirke's daughter, who, in the shadow of her grieving father, has trouble creating her own life; Rosa's mourning father from County Cork; Prof. Armitage, head of the History Dept, Trinity, Englishman, who does not seem so terribly sad about Rosa's death; Herr Kessler, weaponry supplier, operating out of Israel, whose wealth was "liberated" from Jews during World War II; Franz Kessler, despised son of Herr Kessler (he is gay); Teddy Katz, Jewish businessman in Israel, connections with Herr Kessler, whose money is from his mother's real estate holdings of now- decimated European Jewry; Shula Lieberman, run down by a car, journalist in Israel looking to expose the Jewish state's interest in atomic weapons; Molly Jacobs, Rosa's sister and a journalist, who lives in London (and who escaped from Ireland); Bishop Tommy McEvoy, a powerful churchman who is not above a spot (or perhaps more than a spot) of blackmail.
John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black, has plenty of practice—ten works—in the genre of the detective novel. Although his 2021 APRIL IN SPAIN is masterful, I find THE LOCK-UP to thrash around quite a bit until, finally, pages before the end, The Truth comes barrelling out of left field, having very little to do with the pages which preceded it.
So if this novel is not really "about" Rosa and how she died (in a garage called a lock-up that she rented by the month, and in which she kept a prized car), here are thematic roads that one may follow in Ireland, and in Europe, places where, one is reminded, the soil, made of all who died before us, stands monument to our hates. In Banville's novel full of tawdry apartments and unfulfilled lives, I do not know if there are monuments to love.
Here are some road signs. Ireland, as James Joyce reminded us, was settled by Jews fleeing Spain. With those people comes a long, long history of fleeing Christian tormenters, their only home the traditions that each Jew carries as luggage. Ireland is another crossroads, that of the Protestant Ascendency's thirst for land and wealth, and the Catholic Irish's hold on Irish soil, Irish-ness. There are crossroads of being men and women, or fathers and daughters, whose signage has long faded, but which everyone recognizes for what they are.
However, in a novelist of Banville's standing, if "crossroads," signed or not, are the central story, I would like to point out, there is plenty of atmosphere, pages of it, slow moving, loving, detailed, detailed, but the details are not signs or maps to meaning. Details are litter along our paths to understanding, interesting, perhaps, as modern detritus, or as symbol of what the present does with the past. If the 'lock-up' of the title is a garage, then metaphorically, what does it protect? Something cherished, a beautiful car that we rarely use? It is in the front seat of this car that Rosa, a Jew, died.
If I were to address Mr. Banville, Dear John (I might begin), what is it all about?
§ Cathy Downs, Prof. Emerita at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, keeps a garden, designs quilts, and enjoys good books of the mysterious sort
Reviewed by Cathy Downs, March 2023
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