Dublin-based pathologist Quirke is vacationing, at the insistence of his psychiatrist wife, on the Spanish coast. It’s the 1950s, and this is still Franco’s Spain, but the city of San Sebastian is sedate and quiet and comfortably warm. Quirke isn’t sure he’s made for vacationing and when he spots a familiar face in the crowd, he can’t help but investigate – because that face belongs to a woman named April Latimer, and April Latimer has been dead for years.
Banville is what one might call a highfalutin’ author, winner of the Booker Prize, writer of novels about the Human Condition. I didn’t much care for the one novel of his that I read; it seemed very Well-Read Boomer. Thankfully he’s decided to branch out to a different genre; I’m always on the lookout for well-written thrillers and this one doesn’t disappoint in that regard.
As a thriller, though, I’m not sure I was a huge fan. The central mystery is almost an afterthought. It wasn’t much of a mystery in the preceding novel in the series, Snow, but that book at least focused on the crime it was investigating. I loved that book because it was atmospheric and packed a punch. This one seems relatively tame in comparison.
April in Spain has that same atmospheric touch; Banville is good at painting the scene of a quiet, pre-mass tourism medieval Spanish city used to the totalitarian regime under which it suffers – Franco’s decades-long chokehold on the nation is mentioned intermittently. The relationship between Quirke and his wife is sweet without being cloying; they understand each other well but are never one of those sickly-sweet couples that never disagree on anything. It’s occasionally very funny, too, and there’s a parallel plot about a menacing killer for hire that is genuinely unsettling and that contrasts nicely with the couple on their holiday.
The downside, though, is that Banville spends so much time with these people that it takes ages for the central mystery to appear, and when it does it’s over before it even begins. In a way, that is to be expected; Banville is much more interested in people and why they do the things they do than he is in solving mysteries, though that does make his excursions into the genre an odd choice. I didn’t like the conclusion of the book; it was clunky, inelegant, rushed. I’d expected more from such a competent writer.
Nevertheless, this was a quick and fun read for me and I’ll definitely pick up the next books in the series, though I hope they’ll take us back to Ireland. Banville seems like he’s more at ease on his home turf, and who among us isn’t?