John Banville: Prague Pictures

Reviewed by DAVID LARSEN


How nice: an easy John Banville book. I didn't think the beast existed. Banville, if you don't know him, is one of Ireland's most intensely challenging novelists, whose consistently impressive abilities with language only partially compensate for his steadfast refusal to make sense. I generally put down a Banville book muttering some variant on: "That would have been so much more fun if I'd had any idea what it was about."

But he's worth the effort, and not just because he writes brilliantly. There are superb writers - Julian Barnes, for instance - who frequently seem bereft of anything interesting to write about. Banville is fully Barnes' equal when it comes to penning a good sentence, but he's far more ambitious artistically. Love him or loathe him, he's never dull.

And now, in a stroke of editorial genius, The Writer and the City series has enlisted him for a book on Prague, whose difficult, rich history fits his talent like a glove. This is a small volume, but it contains worlds. Banville encounters a different city on each of the many visits he recounts, and a different one again in each of the historical periods he discusses. He gives a great deal of attention to artists, from Kafka to lesser-known but equally interesting figures such as the photographer Josef Sudek - two of whose prints feature on the book's gorgeous cover - and he's quietly profound on the effects of the Soviet system on the people who had to live under it, and on the unsettling realities of democratisation.

Plus, of course, there are the dumplings. "Perhaps the dumpling's most striking characteristic is its extreme viscosity. It sits there on the plate, pale, tumorous and hot, daring you to take your knife to it, and, when you do, clinging to the steel with a kind of gummy amorousness, the wound making a sucking, smacking sound and closing on itself as soon as the blade has passed through."

How many writers could give a dumpling this much personality? So imagine what he can do with the rest of Prague. Or don't imagine. Buy the book and find out.

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Price: $34.95