SOURCE: "Irish Eyes Unsmiling," in Chicago Tribune, July 9, 1995, p. 3.

In the following review, Glover asserts that Banville's Athena has a much more conventional plot than his earlier novels.

John Banville is an Irish author singularly unafraid of the stigma of hyperbole and baroque excess. His novels are littered with incestuous, decaying families, waifish women inviting the whip or the hammer, and drunken, ineffectual male orphans (real or figurative) who move through a fog of decadence, drift and dread worthy of the great Gothic masters.

Known best in America for his historical novels Kepler and Dr. Copernicus, Banville has lately been mining a vein of contemporary Irish grotesquerie centered on a serial character called Freddie Montgomery. In The Book of Evidence, Freddie, drinking too much and down on his luck, tried to steal a painting from a squire's country house and ended by murdering the maid with a hammer...