Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Putting the Ire in Ireland

The Drowned by John Banville

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Autumn is beginning to make its entry in rural Ireland. An expensive car stands in the middle of a field. An oddly-dressed man runs up, tells a passer-by and the inhabitants of a nearby house that his wife has left the car after a tiff and has jumped off a cliff, drowning herself into the chilly Irish sea. But something is off, and the man’s behaviour is suspicious. Days pass, and the woman is not found. It is unclear if she has ever even existed. […]

Hello Darkness My Old Friend

The Lock-Up by John Banville

Alles Wat er Was by Hanna Bervoets

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Two relatively short, easy reads this week, neither of them terribly cheerful! The Lock-Up (John Banville) *** 1950s Dublin. A young woman is discovered in a rented garage, sitting in her car with the windows closed and a hose connecting the exhaust to the interior. The police are quick to call it suicide, though no note is found. But pathologist Quirke, still in mourning over the loss of his beloved wife, soon discovers that the young woman was probably sedated before being placed inside the […]

The Rain in Spain

April in Spain by John Banville

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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 […]

Chilling.

Snow by John Banville

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It’s impossible for me to review this novel without providing SPOILERS, so read at your own peril.  Rural Ireland, 1957. Detective St. John Strafford (with an R) has been summoned to a country estate in the south-east of Ireland, where a Catholic priest has been found dead in the house of a Protestant land owner. The real kicker: the priest has been castrated. It’s December and the countryside is cloaked in a thick blanket of snow that chokes out sound and hides evidence. Under the […]

A nightmare before a 1950s Irish Christmas

Snow by John Banville

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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 […]

They departed, the gods, on the say of the strange sea.

The Sea by John Banville

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This is the 2006 winner of the Booker Prize by the Scottish author John Banville. I should start by saying that this is a relatively limited novel in a lot of ways, but has a very distinct and earnest narrator. I feel like the characterization and the writing are relatively strong, but the novel itself is not particularly remarkable or memorable. Had it not won the Booker Prize (and it probably should have lost to Kazuo Ishiguru’s Never Let Me Go) it would have faded from […]



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