Benjamin Black, “A Death in Summer”

This, my friends, is a very classy entertainment. Dark, certainly: Benjamin Black is no cheerful read. On the final page of the novel our wounded protagonist Dr. Quirke sums up the previous 300 pages to Detective Inspector Hackett:

‘It isn’t much, is it,’  he said. ‘Costigan, and a couple of thugs, and a rotten priest transferred?’

‘It’s the times, Dr. Quirke, and the place. We haven’t grown up yet, here on this tight little island. But we do what we can, you and I. That’s all we can do.’”

You won’t find that much of a comfort, but if you’re looking for sweetness and light you shouldn’t be visiting Black’s mid-twentieth century Dublin, as seen through the jaundiced eye of pathologist Dr. Quirke and his complicated network of friends, enemies, and family. (Often all the same in one body.) He’s almost as depressing as those ghoulish Swedes. But for me the redemption is in the faint sliver of light provided by Quirke’s mostly good intentions and, to a much greater extent, in the writing.

Black's Ireland is deeply Catholic

Benjamin Black is, of course, John Banville moonlighting, and having what appears to be a perfectly wonderful time. He can’t seem to help it: he tosses off local color like, “Far out, a pallid sun broke through the clouds and set two burly pillars of light standing astride the sea.” Or our first view of Quirke: “Teetering along on those absurdly dainty feet of his the big man seemed not so much to walk as to stumble forward heavily, limping slightly; it was as if he had tripped over something a long way back and were still trying to regain his balance.” Happily, these flights of color don’t interfere with the story telling, though this is a novel where the atmosphere and characters dominate the plot. Yes, there is a murder; newspaper magnate Richard Jewell’s head is blown off with his own shotgun, and made to look like a suicide. Yes, there are suspects: Jewell’s wife, his disturbed sister Dannie, his chief business rival. I suppose the book could be classed as a procedural since the crime is ultimately survived by the efforts of Quirke and the froglike Inspector Hackett. But the plot developments aren’t startling. You can see them coming a mile away. Heavens, if I say “orphanage” and “priest,” you’ve pretty well got it. Nevertheless, Black’s imagined Dublin and its ruined citizens kept me turning the pages. Along with passages like this, in which Quirke falls hard for the French widow of the murder victim:

… Quirke’s increasingly agitated spirit led him helplessly on into ever deeper excesses of amorous folly. He felt like a stony hearted old roué embarrassingly shackled to a lovesick youth… France, now, not just France the country but France the idea, suddenly loomed large for him, as if he had been running a magnifying glass idly over a map of the world and had come to a wobbly stop on that big ghost-shaped mass at the western edge of Europe. He had only to take a sip of claret and he was there, in a Midi of the mind, under dappled vine leaves, smelling the dust and the garlic…

The passage goes on, embroidering, picking up momentum like Quirke tripping over his own feet. Then the plot resumes, “excesses of amorous folly and all.”

Benjamin Black, “The Silver Swan”

OK, now I am officially envious of John Banville. Or Benjamin Black, as he calls himself when writing mysteries. This must happen to everybody sometime: you think you’re competent at your trade, and you come across someone who is just that much better and you think, “Wow. I’m good, but I can’t do that.” So in addition to Banville being really smart and a high-powered literary novelist and turning out these very intelligent murder mysteries on the side, he’s just such a lively writer. Here’s a plane landing in Dublin, with “its four big propellers churning in the rain and dragging undulant tunnels of wet air behind them.” “Undulant tunnels,” for heaven’s sake! In another scene he gives a character a posy of slightly wilted violets that she fidgets with, for no particular reason except that they make a wonderful image.

Not that we’d care much about such touches if the framework of The Silver Swan weren’t also sound. It’s another tale about the Irish pathologist Quirke, who can feel himself getting into trouble again and is forced to admit that his motivation for prying into a suspicious death may be nothing more than curiosity. As in Christine Falls, the victim of this murder is a young woman. The setting is 1950s Ireland and Banville/Black leans pretty hard on the many, many ways a woman could run into trouble in those days — most having to do with sex. Quirke’s own daughter Phoebe gets mixed up in this tale as well, allowing the author to explore the mistrust and longing that vibrate between the two of them. The mystery itself is less complex than the one in Christine Falls, and less depressing, which came as something of a relief. Quirke has also quite drinking, which I found quite refreshing. He thus leaves the company of alcoholic detectives so thoroughly explored by writers like Henning Mankell and Ian Rankin.

And then there are the casual perceptions that linger. It occurs to me that perhaps one of the reasons people read murder mysteries is that they provide us with a way to tiptoe up to the subject of death and contemplate it without making the obvious terrible link that it will some day apply to us. Banville/Black put this thought in my head, and this is how he did it:

“It [death] happened all the time, of course, it was as commonplace as people being born, but death was surely a far deeper mystery than birth. To be not here and then to be here was one thing, but to have been here, and made a life in all its variousness and complexity, and then suddenly to be gone, that was what was truly uncanny.”

John Banville, “The Untouchable”

I suppose this is electronic serendipity. Stuck in a waiting-room somehow without a book, I went to Amazon to order what I thought was going to be the new Benjamin Black murder mystery. I thought maybe I’d recovered enough strength after the darkness of Christine Falls to attempt a revisit with the nasty Irish pathologist Quirke. I saw that The Untouchable had been highly rated, and bought it.  Quirke did not appear at first. We were in London in the late 1970s. The narrator was clearly based on the spy Anthony Blunt. I thought this might be yet another Banville/Black production: why not a murder mystery around the scandal of the upper-class English spies?

But then something about the pacing gave it away — this was a straight novel. One I would probably not have embarked on without the little tiny Amazon/iPhone mixup. It’s an uncomfortable read. The Blunt character, here called Victor Maskell, is so tricky, so full of self-loathing, so deeply unreliable — and he drinks so very much! Ultimately the novel is more about levels of deception than about spies. Or rather, Banville uses spies to ruminate on deception. But lord, he’s cold! With Le Carré, you’re still aware of a deeply romantic sensibility; his characters believe in something, even if they know it’s hopeless. Maskell is a chilly mortal, for whom one pose is as good as the next and whose greatest attachment is to a painting he believes to be a Poussin.

A word on the booze: nobody in fiction seems to drink for fun any more. I’ve never read so many detailed descriptions of hangovers than in this book, and even the legendary London parties of the 1930s sound terribly distressing. The characters swill everything from warm beer to slivovitz almost dutifully, as if knocking back gritty foul-tasting nutritional supplements. What ever happened to the martini-shaking glee of the Thin Man movies?

Banville doesn’t relish the spycraft the way Le Carré does (and I do, for that matter), so this is less a matter of legends and dead letter drops than of slippery relationships. Because, of course, Blunt/Maskell didn’t exactly spy alone. He’s part of a network of men, highly placed in the British establishment, who fed material to Russia starting in the 1930s. Banville folds another level of deception into his narrator’s character by making him gay, so really, the man’s identity is a funhouse mirror. And I have to say, Banville manages really well with the unreliability and odiousness of this particular character. The man is a complete toad. The only reason to keep reading is the prose.

As in: a wonderful scene set at Dunkirk. As in: the ironic, showy detachment of the narration. “If not a Hun, I thought, then Austrian, surely — somewhere German-speaking, at any rate; all that gloom and soulfulness could only be the result of an upbringing among compound words.” As in endless brilliant word choices: a boat nosing its way “intently” toward a pier; Picasso’s “mighty maenads.” I won’t be ready for another one of his books for a while, though, even if it really is a murder mystery.

Benjamin Black, “Christine Falls”

Another case of an overqualified author turning out a crackerjack murder mystery. Benjamin Black is a psuedonym of John Banville, the Irish poet and novelist. Which is why, I suppose, we get fabulous sentences like this:  “Suddenly for him death had lost its terrifying glamour and become just another bit of the mundane business of life, although its last.” The irony — and there is a great deal of that quality in Christine Falls — is that the book’s protagonist Quirke is by trade a pathologist. It’s entirely appropriate that death should have held “terrifying glamour” for him and his disillusionment on this score is just one of the sad revelations that rain down on him. (I don’t remember, by the way, ever learning Quirke’s first name. It’s that kind of book and he’s that kind of character.)

Graceful writing is not the only strength here. The novel’s structure is both strong and neat. Looking back, I’m hard put to remember any extraneous characters or plot points. The setting is 1950s Ireland and Massachusetts, that Catholic territory that spanned the Atlantic, with money and people crossing back and forth easily, frequently. What Quirke discovers is traffic in something else again (no, not guns).  The larger plot, with its deceptions and corruptions, mirrors Quirke’s relationships, not one of which is unchanged by the end of the narrative. Black is so good that even the walk-on characters are made complex and believable. The atmostphere, too, is very rich, whether we’re in a depressing Dublin tenement or the overheated conservatory at Moss Manor in Scituate, Mass. And though this is one of your darker tales, you can, if you choose to, permit yourself a flicker of hope at the end, as Quirke rouses himself from his drink-sodden regrets and sets about redressing some wrongs.

As a side note, the cover is brilliant, a trompe l’oeil conceit in a very dark green (for Ireland, right?) “peeling” back from a moody black and white photograph, with white scoring on the back as if the cover had been folded back. It suggests hard wear and nasty secrets. Totally appropriate.