Booker Award-winner John Banville had a commercial hit with “Christine Falls,” his first mystery written under the nom de plume Benjamin Black, so he’s come back to the well with “The Silver Swan” (Holt, 308 pages, $25).
As before, the setting is Dublin in the 1950s, which may as well be Dublin in the 1930s, as Banville carefully crafts a timeless aura of generalized Irishness, which is to say a mingling of loss and anger, piety and sin, all of it in an atmosphere of regret molded in sodden gray.
The moral of the work is uttered early: “It doesn’t do to keep going over things, Billy. The past is the past. Death is death. It doesn’t give up its secrets.”
The speaker is Quirke, an aptly named pathologist who was drinking heavily in “Christine Falls” but has gone on the wagon shortly before the new novel gets under way, mostly because “he had a secret conviction that the body has a consciousness of its own, and knows itself and its needs as well as or better than the mind imagines that it does.”
Quirke is waylaid by Billy Hunt, an old friend from college, who asks him not to do an autopsy on Laura Swan, Hunt’s recently deceased wife and the proprietor of a beauty shop called The Silver Swan.
Laura, whose real name was Deirdre Hunt, has apparently committed suicide by drowning herself in the ocean.
Banville is a profoundly Irish writer, and he cuts to the quick of the religion-haunted, maternally based country. “I so hate your Irish mealymouthedness, the way you treat your women,” an American tells Quirke. “You either make saints of them and put them on a pedestal, or they’re witches out to torment and destroy you.”
Beneath the luscious writing and the evocative setting, the book’s bones are quite conventional.
We know from early on that Laura was murdered, and there are only three viable suspects, one of whom is too obvious to be the murderer.
Then there are the component parts of pornography and drugs, all of which derive from a recognized classic in the field: Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep.”
Also added to the mix are betrayals by family, and friends who are closer than family, also deriving from Chandler, this time “The Long Goodbye.”
Beyond the tactics of the mystery, though, this is a strong performance, full of an earned moral weight. “It’s a bad world, Mr. Quirke, with bad people in it,” says the police inspector.
“And there’s no justice, not that I can see.”
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