I was surprised by Snow: it's very different from John Banville's usual style. There's some beautiful prose as usual, but in the end it's quite a formulaic detective novel.
"Captain Wildboar was his apt nickname in Megalokastro. With his sudden rages, his deep, dark, round eyes, his short, stubborn neck and that jutting fang, the heavy, broad-boned man was really like a wild boar, rearing for the spring."
The View From Belmont raises interesting questions of race and gender amid the barbarousness of a slave-owning society. The dual narrative was a promising technique, but it didn't feel fully realised to me. I'd have liked more of 1990s Trinidad…
This section in A Universal History of Iniquity includes several interesting fragments, some of which could provide the basis for interesting stories but are not really developed.
This dual narrative set in a 19th-century Caribbean island is an interesting exploration of a critical period, but the narratives feel unbalanced: we spend a lot of time immersed in the prejudices of the plantation owner's daughter, while the account…