Really loved this book, more for Banville's prose than for the plot. His characters are always eccentrics, unreliable, and fascinating.

I read this book many years ago, and since I could not remember a thing about it, I decided to re-read it. But alas, I found out why it was not worth remembering. While the plot here is paper-thin, the narrator is so unreliable that most of the story remains completely opaque and surreal. Once more, Banville gives us the solipsistic musings of a middle-aged man in rapture, tangled up in an affair with a woman decidedly not of his age group.

To understand the plot a bit better, it helps to know that Morrow, the narrator, formerly known as Freddie Montgomery, was the main character of the first and second book in what is actually a trilogy, namely "The Book of Evidence" and "Ghosts", which I haven't read, but this time I did some research. (Banville likes to publish his books in the form of a triptych.) So, the narrator is an art expert and a thief, who in the first instalment felt compelled to kill a house maid in the country estate he broke in to steal a painting. Apparently he has served his prison term and now makes a shady living with commissional work.

Concerning the plot, there is a labyrinthine house wherein Morrow is accommodated, where he evaluates art and becomes utterly captivated by an inscrutable young woman. His perception of his surroundings is, however, completely out of sync, and his narration and its chronology cannot be trusted. There is an obscure employer, his fiendish sidekick and a formidable black dog. Outside of the boundary of the abandoned house, there is a whimsical old lady who is dying - who might be Morrow's aunt or not - it's difficult to tell as each character has adopted a shadow identity. Also, there is a serial killer on the lose, and a cop pesters Morrow with questions about his past and his current work. In the end, the woman mysteriously disappears, as do the paintings and his commissioner. Morrow is left behind, bewildered and bereft.

It is unclear what the purpose of this story is. It's not a murder mystery, it is not a crime novel, it is not a tragic love story. For me, it is yet another Banville book: lots of erudite vocabulary, allusions to Greek mythology, impressive intellectual treatises (all those art reviews), sexual obsessions with occasional lewd explicitness, claustrophobic notions inside the head of a confused pundit - in short, a glimpse into the intellectual maze of an obsessive mind BUT no plot to speak of.
It's not that there isn't any actual plot, but Banville doesn't explore it. He is too caught up in the internal, poetic and self-absorbed voice of his unreliable narrator. Which makes it a tiresome and perplexing read.

By the way. The commissioner's name is Max Morden. Here, he seems to be an art forger. He will reappear as the central character of "The Sea", without a hint of a criminal past, at least as far as I recall.

All this is just too pretentious and too artificially structured to win me over. I just don't buy it.

Almost inevitably a disappointment, given my fascination with The Book of Evidence. I haven't read Ghosts, the middle title in this loose trilogy, nor am I particularly inclined to, after this slight failing. It felt to me like a sketch for a book, rather than a finished project. Freddie's voice in TBOE is so hideously seductive, I feel drunk and debauched every time I pick that novel up. But here, it is wan and slightly out-of-focus. Still a good book, because you can always count on Banville for a fancy prose style. But a disappointment, nevertheless.

While missing the sustained atmospherics of The Sea, this book still showed off Banville's marvelous prosody to the degree that this was still quite a worthwhile read.

Dnf

The ending was mind-blowing. Totally did justice to the trilogy, it's a must read for all the art aficionados.

Another typical Banville novel; not a lot of plot, but great with wordsmithing. His novels read as almost stream of consciousness, but they're not. This is the third novel in what Banvill calls his "tryptich", and follows the musings of Morrow (an ex-con from earlier novels) as he gets involved with a shady cast of characters, and falls in love with"A", a mysterious woman who occupies most of his time (and a large part of the novel). If you're already a Banville fan, you'll probably like this book. If not, then you'll probably hate it. I'm giving it 3 1/2 stars upgraded to 4* for its lyrical prose.

The last of my current set of library books, this is the final part of a loose trilogy that started with one of Banville's most memorable creations The Book of Evidence. Banville never quite confirms that the narrator of this one is the same Freddie Montgomery, but this book's narrator admits that he has changed his name to Morrow by deed poll, and the clues are there. His new first name is never stated, but all of his rejected options are names starting with the letter F.

Morrow finds himself called in by the shady Morden as an art expert, to authenticate a set of paintings that may be fakes, or may be the spoils of a recent burglary. The narrative chapters are interrupted by two or three page descriptions of these paintings. There is also a strong love story element, though the mysterious woman at its centre is never named.

Reading this book after Anita Brookner, it is clear that both share a love of language and use unusual words with great precision - I found myself looking up a lot of definitions. It is a very visual book, strong on atmosphere.

“Amor mío. Si las palabras pueden llegar a cualquiera que sea el mundo en el que quizá estés sufriendo, entonces escucha. Tengo cosas que contarte. Ahora que concluye en silencio un año más, merodeo por las calles sombrías de nuestro barrio contigo en la cabeza.”

Con estas palabras da inicio la ultima novela de la Trilogía Freddie Montgomery del escritor John Banville. Un texto con una buena redacción, pero a la vez con muchas interrogantes sobre la naturaleza de la verdad y la fiabilidad de la memoria. Una historia, donde el narrador incursiona o se ve involucrado en pinturas robadas y una historia de amor que a todas luces es Freddie Montgomery , el protagonista de El libro de la evidencia y el narrador de Fantasma. El protagonista rinde un homenaje a su amor, que ha desaparecido, pero a medida que va transitado se ve visitando una casa, que podríamos decir mal alienta o podrida y siniestra en la avenida que llama Rue Street.
Como expresé anteriormente, es un transitar entre el reino del arte y el inframundo criminal. “Tengo —lo reconozco— una lamentable debilidad por la mala vida. Algo en mi interior se aferra a lo turbio y lo desvencijado, hay una grieta en mi constitución que disfruta llenándose de suciedad. Me digo que esta predilección vulgar se da en todos los auténticos entendidos de la cultura, pero no acabo de convencerme. ” esas son las palabras de Morrow, un tipo de una sensibilidad contradictoria, el cual sigue a una mujer llamativa, la cual se le conoce con el nombre de A, que lo invita a su habitación, y esto da lugar a un romance. Este romance desencadena el examinar unas pinturas, que ese ir de su casa a la casa de la mujer, n se entera que ha sido robadas.

Indiscutiblemente, la culminación de este trilogía, no solo amplifica la trama, desarrolla con temas cruciales para cada obra, pero Atenea tampoco esta a la altura de El libro de la evidencia, pero si la colocaría en segundo lugar por encima de Fantasma, pues su prosa es mas rica, atractiva. Combinando los tres libros, si algo nos invita es a convertirnos en los personajes para ir con ello el proceso narrativo, que es lo propio de la ficción de Banville de mantener su compromiso inquebrantable con un arte técnicamente de complejidad.

A difficult, frustrating book that I was relieved to finish. Banville always works close to the boundary between daring stylistic originality and Martin Amis-esque pretentiousness but Athena unfortunately falls on the wrong side. Feels as though it may have been as painful to write as it was to read. It would be interesting to know whether there was any correlation between the writing of this book and Banville’s diversification into the more direct, narrative-driven style of his alter-ego Benjamin Black.

Glutton for punishment that I am, I finally broke down and picked up the third of the Freddie Montgomery novels. (Don't be so damn coy, Banville and "Morrow": We all know it's Freddie from about page 1.) Oh well, Mommy always did make me finish everything on my plate.

This entry is somewhat more palatable than the previous two simply because we're somewhat less confronted by the fact that Freddie is far from being equal to his crimes (participating in art fraud is somewhat more in character than wimping his way through a murder): he's a total nebbish or, better (as I will argue) a wanker, although admittedly one with an unusual gift for not only words but self-reflection. In fact, one's appreciation of the novel hinges entirely on the degree to which one is charmed by those words and that self-reflection. Or perhaps one's appreciation of Banville's literary production hinges on this: having also read his *Untouchable*, I begin to wonder whether all of his protagonists are art-loving wankers. Those who are intrigued by a Humbert Humbert and charmed by his words and thoughts will be pleased here too, although Freddie's prose, although eloquent to a fault, lacks Humbert Nabokov's extravagant musicality.

The object of the Freddie's erotic obsession is, unlike Humbert Nabokov's, of legal age, for which I guess we should be thankful. Unfortunately, it's here that, in my opinion at least, the novel overplays its hand. For the object of the obsession is nothing more than a collection of visual stimuli (which of course eventually get translated into tactile stimuli) and is, as a character, a cipher. (Well, okay, she ends up displaying a masochistic streak. Let's not act all surprised now.) As with every erotic obsession since man started to walk on two (and a half) legs, the obsession tells us nothing about its object and always everything about its subject. Thus she ends up being (even) less interesting than the paintings Freddie Montgomery ("Morrow") has agreed to examine, although his descriptions of the paintings themselves, which intersperse the narrative, become increasingly preoccupied with her -- or rather, his obsession with her. Add to this the frequent apostrophizing to someone who doesn't even have a name (she's simply "A"), and the result is one obsessive but ultimately masturbatory fantasy. To his credit, Freddie does seem to realize this at some level of consciousness.

There are a few pointless teases in the plot, wouldn't you know, no doubt the dues Banville has to pay to be a member of good standing in the PoMo Lit club. But since they're teases, I guess I shouldn't spoil them for you.

Awfully fine writing though -- rather a necessity in a novel in which the only real action is inaction, namely, the main character's self-examination -- and the workings of Freddie's mind are fascinating, although perhaps only in small doses. Five stars for Banville's intellect; four for his clever inhabiting of the Nabokovian mindset -- but only three for this novel.

In Athena, the narrator—Freddy Montgomery from The Book of Evidence—gets involved with some shady people who have acquired some minor 17th Dutch masters; they want Freddie (now "Morrow", he changed his name after getting out of prison to "Morrow", for—of course—tomorrow) to assess the paintings, give his opinion on whether they are in fact genuine. The main fellow, who is very creepy, almost gangster-ish, is named Morden (no first name); he's supposedly a real estate developer, bought this 18th Century town house in Dublin, which is where he discovered the paintings, apparently by chance. He has a driver/henchman (at least that's the way he's portrayed) named Francie; there's also a young woman only identified as "A." Freddie and A. have an intense love affair, that becomes apparent almost immediately, so it's not giving anything away to say so. We don't learn what A.'s relationship is to Morden or how she fits into that scheme of things until the final pages. I assume "Athena" represents A., although probably other things as well.

Now, flash forward to 2005 (in real life, not the story) to Banville's Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea. In that, a retired man moves into a guest house by the seaside in Ireland, near where he stayed as a boy. His wife, Anna, has recently died, and he's sort of lost and floating, not really knowing what to do with himself and how to handle the loss of Anna and memories of his childhood and events that happened at the guest house long, long ago. The man was an art historian. His name is Max Morden.

The Morden of The Sea and the Morden of Athena are not the same character. (Though I looked for clues throughout the reading, frustratingly so.) The Morden of Athena asked Morrow if he had any siblings: neither of them do, apparently. But they're all liars: the "good guys" (Freddie M. is a notoriously unreliable narrator) as well as the gangsters.

Another curious character in Athena (albeit a minor one) is a police inspector named Hackett. We can presume that Athena takes place roughly in "the present" (or at least the time the book was published in the mid-'90s), although no times or dates are mentioned (in fact no location is mentioned either, but from various clues we can safely assume the setting is Dublin). We know from piecing together the clues left throughout this book as well as Ghosts (the second installment in the trilogy), that Freddie served a number of years in prison for the murder of a young housekeeper in the course of stealing a painting from the estate of some wealthy acquaintances (depicted in the original of the trilogy, The Book of Evidence). Thus is the nature of a trilogy: the stories are interrelated, and in this case at least, chronological.

Finding Morden's name is something of a surprise: that this character's name should surface again in the writer's opus a decade later is startling. Hackett though is even more surprising. His name (and career) surfaces in 2008 in Banville's mystery novel The Silver Swan, published under the name of his crime-fiction-writing alter ego, Benjamin Black. That novel is set in Dublin in the grey and stifling 1950s. It is impossible to consider these two detectives are the same person—forty years have passed: pensions and gold watches have been distributed at boozy testimonial dinners surely. Could it be that the Inspector Hackett of Athena is the son of the Inspector Hackett who indulges Black's quirky pathologist Garrett Quirke? Holy intertextuality, Batman.

The book is brilliant, in that "Banville way"—I loved it. Athena is the steamiest thing I've read by Banville: the girl, A., is into transgressive sex. She's slender and not as young as she seems and has dark, blue-black hair. Banville owes at least some nominal debt to Nabokov's Lolita for his portrait of Freddie's self-destruction under the thrall of A. It's the first novel by Banville I can remember having any erotic content: others have had "sex scenes" (Shroud in particular comes to mind) but they were somewhat mechanical, most likely deliberately so.

The chapters, unnumbered and unnamed, alternate with brief (fictional) critiques of the (fictional) paintings by (fictional) artists. This is not Banville writing the critiques, but rather Freddie, which becomes apparent about a third of the way in, when he breaks the scholarly "fourth wall" and addresses A. directly, as "you". Indeed, randomly throughout the book, Freddie's narrative turns away from the "general reader" and he aims his tale of woe, his comments specifically to A., specifically to "you". It's a brilliant conceit. The change in "person" is jarring; it's just subtle enough to constantly catch one every time.

And what of the paintings? Are they real or fake? If real, they are inestimably valuable—and stolen. Stolen from the same collection where Freddie got into trouble originally, in The Book of Evidence. It almost doesn't matter, because the paintings are Banville's MacGuffin, setting off Freddie's ruminative flights of longing and loss.