So it is with the prose style of John Banville in "Shroud." The style -- the voice -- is a phenomenon, a wonder in itself. It cannot fail to draw attention to itself. Asked in Paris if he was English, Samuel Beckett replied, famously, not "Non" but "Au contraire." Banville, who is Irish, writes English not as if it were Irish (he is from Wexford, not Galway) but, au contraire, as if it were French. He uses it, in other words, with an elegant, seigneurial detachment, as if it were a mistress whose body he knew and enjoyed in every secret detail but whom he would never dream of marrying.

It is a truism that few critics ever manage to write good fiction. Less often noted is the fact that few novelists ever manage to write good criticism. As a group, they like to tell stories and imagine characters rather than pursue arguments and explore ideas. Banville may be, in our day, the supreme exception to this double rule. Thinking back to his boyhood, Axel Vander mocks: "What self? What sticky imago did I imagine was within me, do I imagine is within me, even still, aching to burst forth and spread its gorgeous, eyed wings?" Oh, to be done with such stuff forever! But we never are, and down to the last page of this dazzling novel, neither is the stained and shrouded Axel Vander.

-- Jack Miles

*The Songs of the Kings

A Novel

Barry Unsworth

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: 342 pp., $26

A mighty army poised to invade the Middle East is delayed by unfavorable weather. Its commander in chief struggles to keep his allies from deserting him. Sports are used as a distraction; religious leaders and the media are enlisted to trumpet the justice of the invaders' cause. The superiority of Western culture is cited. But something more, it seems, is needed -- something to shock and awe all onlookers....

Who knows if Barry Unsworth had the United States and Iraq in mind when he wrote his latest novel, "The Songs of the Kings," but this retelling of the story of Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia -- a story first told in Homer's "The Iliad" and elaborated in dramas by Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Racine and Goethe -- is meant to strike a disturbingly modern note. "The Songs of the Kings" is a smaller book than Unsworth's monumental and heartbreaking novel of the 18th century slave trade, "Sacred Hunger," which won the Booker Prize in 1992. It's less suspenseful, because we know the outcome. Its characters, though vivid, are further removed from us. But it shares with "Sacred Hunger" an immensely sophisticated grasp of politics, economics and psychology, of how the world works. Then and now, the innocent and the honestly uncertain rarely prevail against people who push a simple, brutal idea relentlessly, much less against those who can dress up that idea in fine-sounding words.