Banville whips up a heady brew in his favourite city
FICTION: Prague Nights, By Benjamin Black, Viking, €17
The latest novel by John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black, is not a Quirke thriller, but a gothic whodunnit set in the court of Rudolph II in Prague at the end of the 16th century, a city which “sat atop a stew of squalor, vice and violence”.
When young doctor Christian Stern, the illegitimate son of a dead bishop, arrives in the city in 1599, he is full of hope. Prague, after all, ...