Product Description

‘The Lemur has pace and bravado; the writing is sharp and the timing flawless while the prose, naturally, is brilliant’ Time Out

William ‘Big Bill’ Mulholland is an Irish-American electronics billionaire. An ex-CIA operative, he now heads up the Mulholland Trust, with the help of his daughter Louise. When Mulholland gets wind of a hostile biography planned by journalist Wilson Cleaver, he commissions his daughter’s husband, John Glass, to pen the official line. But neither he nor Glass had reckoned on the sinister services of ‘the Lemur’. It turns out that silence cannot be bought – even by one of New York’s wealthiest dynasties . . .

‘The Lemur lives up to expectations. The writing is lighter and sleeker than his literary fiction but without any loss of his ability to perfectly describe situations and sensations. Engrossing reading’ Irish Mail on Sunday

‘The Lemur displays an emotional poignancy that is present in both of Black’s previous works’ Independent on Sunday

‘What stands out is Black’s portrayal of contemporary New York, its towers of steel and glass providing a glossy background for a tale in which no one is trusted. It’s an edgy read, worthy of Don DeLillo’ Evening Standard

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38307 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-02
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
John Banville’s credentials as a literary novelist are, of course, impeccable – but his track record in that field hardly guaranteed him success in the crime novels he decided to pen under the nom-de-plume of Benjamin Black. Despite some initial resistance, the first two Black novels, Christine Falls and The Silver Swan, gleaned a considerable following, with Black/Banville’s Dublin pathologist Quirke quickly established as an eccentric and individual protagonist. The 1950s settings are one of the most striking elements of the earlier books, and in the third novel The Lemur, a standalone thriller set in modern America and Ireland, the earlier strengths are once more to the fore -- but in a contemporary form.

Irish-American billionaire William Mulholland has a past in intelligence, but his chief preoccupation has become the organisation he operates with his daughter Louise, the Mulholland Trust. Realising that a forthcoming biography is planning hatchet job on him, Mulholland plans a counter-attack by commissioning the once-influential journalist John Glass (his daughter’s husband) to pen the official biography - which will, inevitably, be far more sympathetic. The researcher employed by Glass, the youthful Dylan Riley, is the eponymous ’lemur’, so called because of his resemblance to that rodent. But Riley begins to uncover more than he should, and attempts blackmail. He is discovered dead.

The vividness of The Lemur is in its rich and loamy panoply of modern Ireland, both similar to and very different from the country that so many of its citizens moved to, the United States. Very different from the earlier Black books, but distinctive and ingenious. --Barry Forshaw

Review
'Slick dialogue and typically elegant descriptive passages.' --Sunday Telegraph

'Action, blackmail, deception and murder are on the cards.'
--Daily Express

Review
'The pages go by at a good clip . . . high quality . . . memorable observations'


'This is...a masterclass in characterisation, which is spot-on...This is Banville revelling in creative freedom'

Customer Reviews

You what?
Read this last night in one sitting - it's a slim volume. I can't help feeling extremely bemused and disappointed. The beautiful prose of the other Black books (which featured Quirke, the 1950s Dublin pathologist) has vanished, leaving a trail of cringey cliches. Set in contemporary New York, it felt like Black trotted out every rotten phrase that could go in a detective novel. (It's about a journalist commissioned to write the biography of his incredibly rich former CIA father-in-law, who immediately gets into trouble doing so.) There were three of the most ill-conceived characters of non-Caucasian origin I've read in a 21st century novel, including an African American journalist of epic-ly distasteful proportions; AND the plot was... lame.

I love everything else I've ever read by John Banville / Benjamin Black, so I can only assume that this is an experiment in genre fiction gone horribly wrong. (Perhaps he was trying to create for today something like the hard-boiled style of noir American thriller writers?) The best bit about the book is the title, which refers to one of the characters, and which really made me remember why I like his writing usually.

Anyway, I didn't like it, and I wouldn't recommend it!

Don't give up your day job Mr Banville
As it says on the cover, this book is by 'John Banville writing as Benjamin Black'. John Banville has written a string of ambitious and successful novels, characterised by prose of great beauty and almost poetic intensity. Complex storylines with multilayered illusions and metaphors are other 'trademarks'. I have read all his novels and thoroughly enjoyed every one. His idea of writing under the alter ego of Benjamin Black was discussed in a recent radio interview (BBC Radio 4 Open Book September 2009) where Banville suggested that after winning the Booker Prize in 2005 for 'The Sea' he felt a need to "...reinvent himself...". Well, he certainly did that with this book.

Set in modern day New York, the plot is based on the happenings when a filthy rich ex-CIA businessman commissions his Irish-American son-in-law to write his biography. Just about everything goes wrong, but although there are a few twists and turns here and there, the plot and storyline are so weak that the novel barely limps from chapter to chapter. The characterisation of the people in the story is very poor and the characters are therefore not truly credible. But, knowing who the author really is, by far the biggest disappointment in the book, to me, is the language, which is a strange mish-mash of Irish-inflected English and colloquial, multiethnic 'New York speak', with the occasional lapse into the eloquent English we have come to expect of Banville. It is a cringe-inducing mixture that fails disastrously and makes a lame story even worse. I find it puzzling why a multi-award winning author, who has consistently written novels that have been rightly acclaimed as true works of art, should wish to assume an alter ego writing a book of such mediocrity.

This is not a book I enjoyed or would recommend, and after this I will certainly give other 'Benjamin Black' titles a miss.

Good idea, sadly underdeveloped
I kept waiting for this book to start properly! When I got to the end, I felt as if it had been setting the scene for pages and pages - but nothing ever really happened. Written by John Banville under the pen name of Benjamin Black, The Lemur is a world away from Banville's fiction.

The plot is a pretty good one, and The Lemur gets off to a punchy start. The characters are carefully drawn but I found them a little bit bland and one-dimensional. It's a book with a lot of reflection, rather than action - which personally I felt was a little frustrating. Not much actually happens, which is a shame because the storyline has a lot of potential that I didn't think was fully explored. For instance, the Lemur's ambiguously drawn girlfriend never develops beyond an abortive coffee date - surely could be more there than meets the eye? As it was, I felt disappointed by the lack of development.

I don't mean to be too damning - The Lemur was a decent read, Banville/Black is obviously a good writer, and I thought there was a great deal of potential in the overlap between family/professional lives in the plot. I also liked the basic premise and felt it was well-written. It was just a shame that the characters and the plot did not develop beyond the basic. I felt that there should have been more here, but unfortunately there wasn't. A slim book that is okay, but could clearly have been great with a bit more development.