Marilyn Stasio on Black/Banville in the New York Times:
Genre fiction's scruffy reputation in the world of letters has always been a badge of honor. Still, there's a tendency in the ranks to get all twittery whenever a "literary" author adopts a catchy pseudonym and has a crack at a genre novel — especially if he's a Man Booker Prize winner like John Banville, whose first mystery, "Christine Falls," written under the pen name Benjamin Black, won a nomination from the Mystery Writers of America for the 2008 Edgar Award for Best Novel. It's easy to see why this community would take pride in a colleague who expresses his ideas in such shapely prose and striking imagery. But what allure does a niche field hold for an author who has already made his bones in the wider world — and why should we be surprised by it?
THE SILVER SWAN
By Benjamin Black.
288pp Picador £16.99
'Christine Falls,' by Benjamin Black: The Mysteries of the Dead (March 25, 2007)
"Crime fiction is a good way of addressing the question of evil," according to Banville, who has now written a sequel, "The Silver Swan," to the story he told in "Christine Falls." But the study of evil is surely also the provenance of other sorts of literature, so there must be more to it than that. Something to do, perhaps, with the format of the crime novel, a solid structure built on the implicit promise that evil, once detected, can be contained before it destroys the society that let it take root.
Such a job calls for an honorable protagonist — someone just like Quirke, professionally implausible as a "hotshot pathologist" at the Hospital of the Holy Family in 1950s Dublin (where he hardly ever shows up for work), but superbly suited to the role of sleuth by virtue of his "incurable curiosity." That unquiet and inquisitive mind, along with a sense of responsibility to the dead people he meets on his autopsy table, got Quirke beaten half to death in "Christine Falls." The same misadventure also caused serious rifts in his close and complicated relationships with members of the socially prominent family into which he was adopted as a workhouse orphan — something it really helps to know before picking up "The Silver Swan."
"There was another version of him," Black says of his attractively flawed hero, "a personality within a personality, malcontent, vindictive, ever ready to provoke." Given to masochistic guilt and remorse for those sins (real and imagined) he committed in "Christine Falls," Quirke tries to perform a kind of social penance in "The Silver Swan" by indulging a former college classmate's wish to avoid having an autopsy performed on his beautiful young wife, who committed suicide by plunging naked off a pier into Dublin Bay. That kindness is quickly retracted, however, after Quirke examines the body and suspects she's been murdered.
If Quirke's brooding Irish soul and independent code of ethics make him exactly the kind of troubled hero the genre loves, Black has given himself plot headaches by meddling with some techniques of the trade he mastered so brilliantly in "Christine Falls." Departing from the convention of allowing the reader to follow the story from the detective's perspective, Black runs Quirke's private investigation on a parallel track with the victim's own story, told in intimate flashbacks. Despite the depth and sensitivity of the storytelling, the device distances us from Quirke's investigations and diminishes the analytic intelligence of his viewpoint — which is, after all, an essential element in the appeal of the detective story.
In this melancholy second narrative, Deirdre Hunt emerges as a clever and ambitious girl, desperate to become her own woman. Her imagination awakened by a bogus spiritual healer, she claws her way out of the slums and adopts a professional name, Laura Swan, when she opens a fashionable beauty shop with a flashy business partner. But that louche bounder, Leslie White, is such a phony, with his studied airs and transparent line of seduction, that his astounding success with all manner and class of women — Quirke's rebellious daughter, Phoebe, among them — reduces these otherwise interesting characters to idiots.
Black also seems trapped by the complicated family saga and intricate personal relationships that were integral to the plot of "Christine Falls." What's a writer to do with all these fascinating people, few of them strictly necessary in this new novel, but some too deliciously wicked to kill off? His answer — to cram as many of them as he can into Deirdre's story — makes for such contrived situations and coincidental events that the characters themselves feel compelled to protest.
More in the New York Times
