One dark and snowy night in the winter of 1599, a young man enters the city of Prague, at the time “the centre of the world” because the Habsburg Emperor, Rudolph II, preferred it to Vienna as his seat. His name is Christian Stern, and he has come to the city with a head full of the same metaphysical arcana in which Rudolph delighted, on the basis of which he hopes to find imperial preferment for himself.
The night he arrives, though, Christian discovers the body of a young girl with her throat cut. Before he knows it he’s up to his oxters in cut-throat palace politics – the “dark world” suggested by the novel’s title, where torture hardly costs the perpetrator a thought, surveillance is hand in glove with sexual intrigue, and treason is astrology’s sidekick for such would-be shape-shifters as Dr John Dee and his scapegrace Irish henchman, Edward Kelley, who are among Rudolph’s retinue of mages and sages.
Here again, as in many a Black novel, the pathological conditions from which crimes arise are of more interest than the conventional or single-minded, pursuit of clue and motive. By the end, Prague Night's world of secrets, shadows and murder not only charts devious pathways to denouement but foreshadows a Europe about to debase itself in the violence and madness of the sectarian Thirty Years' War.
Initially, young Christian Stern seems bound for the scaffold. Instead, he is rescued by no less than the Emperor himself, whose ultra-superstitious mind has been so struck by the name – literally Christian Star – and its portentous potential, that he entrusts the new arrival with finding who killed the girl in question (who just happens to have been Rudolph’s mistress).
Courtly sport
Rather than a wise man from the East, Christian is a kind of Inspector Clouseau from the West. For a long time he seems less engaged in an investigation than being pulled hither and yon by various court factions, one of the many instances of the courtly sport of toying with people the story features.
Still, after a fairly slow start, by the new year (1600) Christian has risen to courtier status himself, though he never knows enough to engage in the fatal game of taking sides. This ignorance not only saves him; it helps him to stumble eventually across seductive bodies, monstrous bodies, conniving minds, constricted minds, the all-important strongbox and the key to the secret codes.
In addition, coincidence is rife, surprise encounters are the order of the day, and a werewolf lurks – no effect is spared in the confection of what the author calls "a historical fantasy". If the Benjamin Black novels are, in the John Banville corpus, the equivalent of Graham Greene's "entertainments", Prague Nights must go down as one of the most entertaining. At least on one level.
For Christian and his godless pilgrim’s progress past the galleries of grotesques that line the labyrinthine corridors of Habsburg, power is also an attempt to grasp the realities of desire and ambition concealed behind a “gauzy veil” of appearances. And this same scrim is one in which the winter world of Prague itself is enshrouded, a realm of dimness and distorted perspectives, of unexpected shifts in atmosphere, of lanes and alleys that proceed, in TS Eliot’s phrase, “with insidious intent”, leading Christian – a kind of stripling J Alfred Prufrock – to places where he plainly does not belong.
Alluring backdrop
A case might even be made for the city, not the protagonist, being the real star of Prague Nights, just as Dublin is in the Black novels featuring Quirke. Prague's physical layout, climate and aura form an impenetrable and alluring backdrop against which the plot's occlusions and deviations play out.
And, of course, readers will have been in Prague before with Banville, not only in Kepler (the astronomer is given a sprightly cameo here) but in Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (2003), which contains historical snapshots of Rudolph's associates, mentality and failure. There, too, Banville notes that "all novels are historical novels", partly because history is two-faced; as Prague Nights has it, "the grandeur and opulence of a great metropolis . . . sat atop a stew of squalor, vice and violence".
The interplay of such twinned contraries – stars and darkness, snow and stone, desire and destruction, Black and Banville; each entity illuminating the other – also supply the sparkling style and steely themes of the engrossing, wide-ranging, sneakily ambitious work.
George O’Brien is professor emeritus of English at Georgetown University
