The Silver Swan [Audiobook] [Englisch] [Audio CD]

Benjamin Black, The Silver Swan (Henry Holt, 2008)

The Silver Swan is one of those books that reminds me of why I like to read series novels in order. I hadn't read the first book John Banville published under the Benjamin Black name, but Henry Holt were kind enough to drop this one on my doorstep unannounced a couple of months ago, so I figured I'd read it. Black, even more than, say, Robert Parker, draws heavily on the events of his earlier novel for this one; I'm sure the epilogue would have resonated with me a great deal more had I read Christine Falls. That said, Banville still writes a very capable mystery, when he's not wallowing in the past misdeeds of Garret Quirke, the medical examiner/amateur sleuth who once again finds himself enmeshed in a mystery he doesn't really want anything to do with.

In this case, he is approached by an old college classmate, Billy Hunt, with a simple request-- his wife has just died, drowned, and Billy would like Quirke not to perform an autopsy on the body, Quirke agrees, but it's pretty standard operating procedure in mystery novels that such a request (which is relatively common in real life for religious reasons) is going to spark some neurons; in performing a quick examination of the body, Quirke finds a fresh needle mark, and we're off to the races. Things are not helped out by the fact that Quirke's daughter Phoebe is a client at the Silver Swan, Hunt's wife's salon, and that her flamboyant ex-business partner seems to be taking more than a consumerly interest in the girl.

The best thing about Banville-writing-as-Black is that he's not afraid to slap both the reader and the mystery genre around a bit. (The police sergeant's final line in the book is about as slappy as one can possibly get in a mystery novel, and we feel just as chagrined as Quirke when we realize what he's on about. Or we should.) That is always welcome in a genre that he become as codified as mystery has, and if you can get round Black's wallowing-- or if you've already read Christine Falls-- then I say have at it. There's some fun to be had with this one. ***

In "The Silver Swan," Benjamin Black brings back the dour and solitary Garret Quirke, who lives in Dublin in the 1950s and works as a pathologist in the Hospital of the Holy Family. Quirke is an alcoholic who avoids drinking except for one bottle of wine that he and his daughter, Phoebe, share at their weekly dinner. Although he is desperately trying to stay sober, he occasionally gets the urge to indulge: "Quirke longed suddenly for a drink, just the one: short, quick, disastrous. For, of course, it would not be just the one." One day, he receives a message from a former acquaintance, Billy Hunt. The body of Billy's much younger wife, Deirdre, has been found after she apparently flung herself off Sandycove Harbor into the waters of Dublin Bay. Billy tells Quirke, "I don't want her cut up," meaning that he does not want a postmortem done on Deirdre. Although Quirke tells Billy, "I'll see what I can do," after he examines the corpse, the pathologist realizes that Deirdre's death is not as straightforward as it seems. Even after the coroner rules that Deirdre drowned accidentally, Quirke decides to look into the matter further.

Black is a literary stylist who revels in long descriptive passages laced with elegant similes and metaphors. He uses an omniscient narrator to delve into each character's innermost thoughts. Even after Deirdre's death, the author utilizes flashbacks to explore the inner demons that drove this tortured woman to engage in reckless behavior. She had been a beautiful girl with reddish gold hair and brilliant blue eyes; sadly, her impoverished and angst-ridden childhood left her scarred for life. Partly to escape her unrelenting misery, she married Billy Hunt, a stolid man nearly sixteen years her senior. He was a salesman who traveled a great deal and the couple was childless; this left Deirdre with a great deal of time on her hands. She eventually met two people who would seal her fate: one was Dr. Hakeem Kreutz, who called himself a "spiritual healer"; the other was Leslie White, a shiftless rogue who exploited gullible young women. Deirdre took White on as her business partner; they opened a beauty salon called "The Silver Swan" and Deirdre renamed herself Laura Swan.

Quirke is a cynic who has seen people at their worst. As a young orphan, he was confined to a workhouse, the Carricklea Industrial School, where the Catholic priests tried to beat religious pieties into him. He also endured some terrible experiences, recounted in the first book of this series, "Christine Falls," that deepened his bitterness and pessimism. Quirke has not forgotten a series of heartbreaking events that left two young women dead, with a "cloak of silence drawn over the affair, leaving [Quirke] standing alone in his indignation." This time, Quirke is determined to exact justice for Deirdre. If she did not kill herself, who did and why? "Quirke was aware of the old itch to cut into the quick of things, to delve into the dark of what was hidden--to know."

The author is a virtuoso at evoking emotion and creating atmosphere; he portrays every room and character with painstaking detail. Readers who take pleasure in vivid word pictures will enjoy "The Silver Swan" far more than those who are fond of fast-moving dialogue and a tight narrative. The characters are meticulously delineated: Quirke has crippling regrets that have mired him in guilt and psychological torpor; Detective Inspector Hackett, an unprepossessing but extremely sharp individual, sees beneath the surface of things far more than Quirke; twenty-three year old Phoebe, Quirke's emotionally stunted daughter, has not forgiven her father for his past betrayals; Englishman Leslie White, who is "handsome, in a pale, jaded sort of way," is a rogue and a freeloader who uses Deirdre shamelessly; Kate is Leslie's long-suffering wife who puts up with her husband's peccadilloes until she cannot stand it anymore.

The novel's major flaws are its weak plot construction and unremittingly dreary tone. The melancholy story meanders quite a bit until it reaches its convoluted and not entirely realistic conclusion. It is highly unlikely that the astute Inspector Hackett would patiently allow Quirke to blunder his way through an investigation of this importance before finally stepping in. In spite of its shortcomings, "The Silver Swan" effectively depicts a stifling era when women with few resources felt unable to make informed and independent choices. In addition, Black powerfully demonstrates how tragedy inevitably follows when immoral and selfish people exploit those who are too vulnerable to protect themselves.

Booker Prize-winning author John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black, features Quirke, a pathologist at the Hospital of the Holy Family in Dublin in this change-of-pace mystery set in 1950s Dublin. Quirke often finds it necessary to go beyond a pathologist's normal duties, and in this second novel in the Quirke series (after Christine Falls), he is visited by Billy Hunt, a casual friend from college, who asks him not to autopsy the body of his wife Deirdre. Deirdre may have drowned herself, and the family wants to avoid conflict with the Catholic Church over her burial. Quirke conducts a secret autopsy, Deirdre gets her church burial, and Quirke then begins his private investigation into her death.

Through flashbacks and shifts in the point of view from Quirke to the other characters involved in Deirdre Hunt's story, her complicated life unfolds. Deirdre, partners in a beauty salon with Leslie White, a roue, has been exploring the "spiritual healing" of Dr. Hakeem Kreutz, a man of German/Indian background who teaches her about his Sufi religion while engaging in secret activities. Inevitably, Deirdre becomes more and more controlled by outsiders, less able to make decisions, less grounded in reality. The involvement of someone close to Quirke makes him even more determined to understand Deirdre's death.

Quirke is an engaging and sympathetic protagonist. Sober for six months when this novel opens, he longs to become closer to his estranged daughter Phoebe, though he recognizes that he has no right to her affection. As Quirke, Deirdre, Phoebe, and the other principal characters reveal their unique points of view, the characterization and the plot expand. Quirke's relationship with Leslie White's estranged wife is sensitively explored in intense, but often delicately rendered, scenes. The nightmarish atmosphere becomes increasingly fraught, however, sometimes developing into kinky sequences as characters give in to the lure of their "dark" sides.

Like Christine Falls, the novel depends to a great extent on coincidence and improbability for its action and resolutions, but Banville's talents, so obvious in his literary novels, are on full display. His descriptions bring Dublin to life, and his recognition of life's ethical subtleties (and the church's creation of many of those conflicts) gives some thematic punch to the novel. As the action leads to a fierce crescendo (and a somewhat ambiguous epilogue), the author also opens several new avenues for future novels. More plot-based, less thematic and less moralistic than Christine Falls, this second mystery will be followed in July 2008 by a new Benjamin Black mystery, The Lemur. n Mary Whipple

Christine Falls: A Novel
The Lemur: A Novel