Shroud

It looks like the period of my reading books I enjoy will be short lived.  To be fair, I read The Sea by John Banville previously and wasn’t that impressed, so my expectations were quite low coming into Shroud.  It doesn’t help particularly that there’s a ludicrous author’s photograph on the dust jacket.  It’s hard to take someone who screams fusty 1920s Oxbridge professor so loudly seriously.  But it’s not just that.  The main character in the book is just as fusty and dry as Banville’s photo appears and, in short, I just don’t like him.

Within the first twenty or so pages Axel Vander, hero of the novel, has managed to complain incessantly about being old, tell a less than hilarious anecdote in which he demeans his now dead wife, and make any number of those xenophobic slurs only the elderly can expect to get away with.  How this is meant to endear anyone, other than old xenophobic widowers, to him is beyond me.  And this isn’t one of those Jane Austen Emma type things.  You’re not meant to hate Axel Vander.  In fact, for all her precociousness, I prefer Emma Woodhouse.

Again, though, the book isn’t quite so easily written off.  It’s divided into three sections, the first and last being set in Vander’s old age and the middle one his secret filled and scandalous youth.  Naturally, the middle section’s really good.  I’ll try not to go too overboard with the spoilers, but it’s so difficult to see how the character develops from a pretty awesome refugee who hooks up with and subsequently steals from a member of the British nobility to a gnarled and embittered old bigot.  The blurb claims the book is about a young woman blackmailing Vander, but this is soon forgotten as would be blackmailer is easily seduced by the old coot.  To be quite frank, it feels like some kind of grotesque wish fulfilment for Banville’s assumed male audience rather than a feasible plot.

Another of my issues with the book is the sense of anti-climax.  Early on in the tale we establish that Vander lives in lies, hence the inevitable blackmail.  When would be blackmailer Cass Cleave is introduced she is a wonderfully mysterious femme fatale.  Her power comes from the supposed knowledge of Vander’s secrets.  Naturally it turns out that she doesn’t know them all, any power she has is just an illusion.  She can’t outsmart Vander.  Again, throughout the entire book women just aren’t treated with respect.  The whole thing has a rather cloying air of triumphant misogyny.

I think what is at the root of all why I don’t like the book is the sense of entitlement that goes along with Vander.  He acts as though the world owes him a debt.  And it works for him; he’s a magnificently successful man of letters, who gets away with his secrets intact.  He’s not destroyed by the blackmail, in fact, he gains from it.  It’s just immensely frustrating to read about a character who is loathsome and yet loved by all and who doesn’t get his comeuppance. 

I’m currently reading Around the World in Eighty Days.  It’s fantastic.