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In every institution there’s an unofficial hierarchy. It’s natural � even the choirs of angels are ranked in strict order, from your poor old workaday guardian angel at the bottom, all the way up to the six-winged seraphim, the burning ones, who serve the Lord God directly.

I confess to having a love/hate relationship with John Banville, driven largely by exasperation. I have only read two of his books before, so apologise in advance to well-versed fans of his oeuvre. For me, his 2005 Booker winner The Sea was stilted and just too precious. The Infinities (2009) was slightly better, but did not exploit the full potential of its grand themes. Instead, it once again focused on style at the expense of substance.

I had no idea that Banville has been writing crime fiction under the pen name of Benjamin Black since 2006. In an interview with the TLS, he says that Black is a “competent craftsman� who writes much faster than Banville, the “Booker Prize-winning artist�. The latter will agonise over a single word, as if he were a disciple of Flaubert (Is that why The Sea reads so agonisingly slowly?) What is also a mystery is whether Snow is a Banville or a Black novel. In fact, it reads like a hybrid between the high-level and somewhat arch literary styling of the former and what one presumes is the more colloquial tone and approach of the latter.

As for why Snow has been released under Banville’s own name, the TLS notes (rather sniffily), that “it isn’t really crime fiction; it is a beautifully written, atmospheric, literary novel that begins with a murder.� Genre writers, especially crime, romance, SF and horror, have long been held in disdain by the purveyors of literary fiction, it seems.

Imagine to my surprise then that Snow is not only a crime novel to boot, but a detective potboiler of the kind that Agatha Christie churned out in her sleep. However, we soon realise we are not in Christie territory anymore:

“Jesus Christ, will you look at this place?� he wheezed. “Next thing Poirot himself will appear on the scene.�

And:

“It’s a library,� he muttered incredulously to Hendricks. “It’s an actual fucking library, and there’s a body in it!�

Yes, the plot revolves around that much-loved trope of classic crime fiction, a body in the library. In this instance, it is a Catholic priest. Who happens to have been castrated. The first-person point of view of the priest opens the novel as he is surprised by the murderer, and then equally surprised at his own gristly demise. He appears again in a much later interlude that only serves to confirm the reader’s suspicions about the crime and its true motive, but which is a bravura piece of writing nevertheless in a book that is passionately literate. Hence a typical Banville novel ... but unlike anything he has written before under his own name, of course.

Suffice it to say that the murder mystery itself is given short shrift by the author and the reader (though there is a delicious sting in the last few pages that made me gasp). What is of chief enjoyment here is Banville’s wonderful characterisation of his motley cast of characters, from the stiff-upper-lipped Colonel Osborne, whose library the dead priest ends up in (and whose first wife died in mysterious circumstances), to the husband, wife and dog team that run the inn where our detective hero stays for the duration of the investigation.

I practically inhaled Snow over a couple of days� frenzied reading. Not only did it keep me enthralled, but it is deeply funny and humane at the same time. Banville’s depiction of the Irish countryside and the weather is equally mesmerising, with the titular snow ever-present in the form of a blizzard that grows in intensity as the story unfolds. Yes, there are some of Banville’s beloved Greek allusions, especially the concept of ‘agape�, “the love of God for man and of man for God�.

But Banville’s touch here is infinitely lighter than the heavy-handed The Sea. His depiction of Ireland at the height of the Protestant/Catholic divide is deeply nuanced, yet acutely aware of the absurdity inherent in such an artificial barrier, which gave rise to so much unnecessary tragedy. This sense of playfulness mixed with melancholy, and Banville’s own keen affection for his characters (even the dead priest), is what makes this novel such a living, breathing wonder.