The Lemur
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 he gets wind of a hostile biography planned for him by the investigative journalist Wilson Cleaver, he commissions his daughter's husband, John Glass, to pen the official line. But Glass' young researcher tries to blackmail him, and Glass is horrified, fearing that his own secrets, as well as the Mulhollands', are at risk. He slings him off the project, only to hear from the NYPD that the man he has nicknamed 'the Lemur' has been found fatally shot ...Silence cannot be bought - even by one of New York's wealthiest families.
3.4 out of 5 based on 8 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
Crime, Thrillers & Mystery |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
184 |
| RRP |
£12.99 |
| Date of Publication |
September 2008 |
| ISBN |
978-0330461252 |
| Publisher |
Picador |
| |
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 he gets wind of a hostile biography planned for him by the investigative journalist Wilson Cleaver, he commissions his daughter's husband, John Glass, to pen the official line. But Glass' young researcher tries to blackmail him, and Glass is horrified, fearing that his own secrets, as well as the Mulhollands', are at risk. He slings him off the project, only to hear from the NYPD that the man he has nicknamed 'the Lemur' has been found fatally shot ...Silence cannot be bought - even by one of New York's wealthiest families.
Benjamin Black is the pen-name of John Banville. This novel was first published as a serialisation in The New York Times.
Reviews
The London Review of Books
Tobias Gregory
“[A] slim, efficient novel, elegantly done as such things go, in which literary pretensions are largely resisted and the proper conventions observed... One literary pitfall The Lemur does not altogether avoid is that of self-consciousness. Characters in the novel tend to register their awareness of clichés as they utter them... this pattern comes across as a small tic of authorial embarrassment, as if Banville wants his more sophisticated readers at least to know that he knows he’s slumming... But these things are not a major distraction.”
03/07/2008
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The Times
Marcel Berlins
“Black writes beautifully and there are plenty of witty and cynical asides on marriage, journalism and the rich. The Lemur is a pleasure to read, but depth of plot and characterisation will have to await a Black novel free of serialisation.”
17/10/2008
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The Independent
Patricia Craig
“...What has the Lemur's research uncovered to warrant so precipitate a removal from the scene? The explanation is fairly predictable, while the author enjoys his jeu d'esprit, poking mild fun at the conventions of the genre. But what distinguishes The Lemur is its New York atmosphere – the "narrow strip of sky above Fifth Avenue", the "bluey-green tinge" of a spring day in Central Park.”
16/10/2008
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Time Out
Jonathan Messinger (Chicago)
“A dense, brief, character-driven thriller, The Lemur features Banville’s trademark dark humor and interest in Old World social mores... As the mystery eventually unfolds, nearly all parties become implicated in a tight and complex network of lies, damaged pride and hyperextended longing. Banville may want to keep his mysteries separated from the rest of his oeuvre, but all of that sounds an awful lot like his more “literary” work, too.”
24/07/2008
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The Financial Times
Melissa McClements
“It's a long way from the author at his best - but to make such comparisons might be missing the point. There are so many B-movie clichés in this book, it is hard to believe Banville's tongue is not stuck firmly in his cheek throughout.”
11/10/2008
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The Guardian
James Lasdun
“...it's very much the genre that seems to be shaping the narrative rather than vice versa, with all the contrivance that the convention calls for - false leads, surprise twists, bursts of B-movie dialogue...This would be fine if it were done with conviction, but that seems only intermittently the case...There's also enough queasily self-conscious invocation of the generic...to suggest the enterprise may think of itself as entirely tongue-in-cheek. Whether that makes it any more interesting will depend on your taste. Certainly the pages go by at a good clip.”
27/09/2008
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The Daily Telegraph
Jake Kerridge
“Life among the rich and powerful in New York, even if only superficially glamorous, does not seem to fire John Banville's imagination in the same way as the dowdy Fifties Dublin setting of his previous Benjamin Black books, and the crime element of the story is a perfunctory intrusion on the more interesting business of Glass's uneasy relations with his fiery wife and glacial mistress. There is some fine writing, but nothing of the oppressive sense conveyed in the other novels that there are deeper mysteries still to be explained even after the murders have been solved and the books shut.”
24/11/2008
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The Sunday Times
John Dugdale
“Banville probably wryly chose his pseudonym partly because it rhymes with “hack”, and while the Dublin stories are far from being hackwork, in this case the term is appropriate — the plot is skimpy, the denouement predictable, the characters clichéd.”
14/12/2008
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