THE SILVER SWAN
Benjamin Black
Henry Holt and Company
Thriller
ISBN: 9780805081534

What’s in a name? Not much for Man Booker Prize winner John Banville, who, writing as Benjamin Black, brings back his potential series character, Quirke, for a second case.

THE SILVER SWAN --- as in the first book, CHRISTINE FALLS --- is set in 1950s Dublin, a place rendered as overcast and gloomy. Quirke is still a persnickety pathologist who spent a good deal of his time drinking his troubles away. But, as this novel opens, he has given up the bottle and is mourning the death of Sarah, his first love. Twenty years ago, circumstances interfered and he got together with Delia, Sarah’s sister. She seduced him into marriage, then sadly died in childbirth. Ironically, Quirke gave the infant girl, Phoebe, to Sarah and her husband Mal to bring up as their own. They decided that Phoebe would never know the truth. Now, her “mother[s]” are dead and she is an unhappy loner who judges her world harshly.

Mal’s father (Phoebe’s presumed grandfather) “Garret Griffin, or the Judge, as everyone called him, has been felled by a stroke [at] seventy [three] that paralyzed him entirely, except for the muscles of his mouth and eyes and the tendons of his neck.” The tangled web of relationships between these people began years ago when Griffin rescued Quirke from Carricklea Industrial School and tried to make him feel part of the family. The secrets, lies, resentments and jealousies that bind these people together remain a big burden to everyone involved in the sordid goings-on.

Then, out of the blue, Quirke receives a call from an old school acquaintance, Billy Hunt, who asks to set up a meeting. As the two men awkwardly sit across from each other in a pub, Hunt tells Quirke that his wife Deidre, who also used the name Laura Swan (in the beauty-spa business she ran with her partner, Leslie White), committed suicide. He has just come from identifying the body. That was bad enough, he says, but to think of her on a slab “cut up like some sort of carcass… If you’d known her, the way she was before, how - how alive she was. I can’t bear it” --- and he implores Quirke not to do a postmortem on the body.

Deidre was found naked and dead on the rocks beside the body of water in which she drowned. Her clothes were neatly folded, and her car was not far away. She left no note, and no one had the least suspicion that she was depressed or suicidal. Without committing himself to Hunt’s request, Quirke’s unquenchable curiosity gets him involved in the quest to find out what really happened to Mrs. Hunt.

"For Quirke a corpse was a vessel containing a conundrum, the conundrum being the cause of death. Ethics? It was precisely to avoid such weighty questions that he had gone in for pathology. He did prefer the dead over the living. That was what had happened. No trouble there. Nevertheless he maintains his humanity and his curiousity forces him to seek out the truth. He expects the corpse to help him determine cause of death, especially in cases that are not clear-cut.” And the death of Deidre is just such a situation, especially “after he had chanced on [a] needle mark in the woman’s arm.” Thus he goes ahead with the autopsy, and when he lies to the coroner’s court about the cause of death, he is further drawn into this twisted case. Quirke now knows that his wife was probably murdered and is determined to ferret out the killer or killers.

Deidre’s partner, Leslie, is a con man of the first order. And he has always been mixed up in some shady deal or other, which always falls flat and loses money. He is a charmer, and women fall under his spell. That is what happened to Deidre and later to Phoebe.

Leslie plays an interesting role in this multi-layered thriller. He is involved with a “spiritual healer,” Dr. Kruetz, who “is a Sufi [a religion] based on the secret teachings of the Prophet Muhammad.” His office is otherworldly with its different teasing scents, vivid colors and arrangements of pillows in place of western furnishings. When Deidre meets Kruetz, she is mesmerized and considers him beautiful. He tells her stories and legends while stressing that love must grow between “shaykh, sage” and “murid, the student or apprentice who places himself under the guidance and care of the shaykh.

As the narrative continues to unfold, readers are on a ride through the underside of Dublin where pornography, drugs and blackmail sweep through the lives of the characters. The body count rises, albeit slowly. This draws Quirke further and further into the activities of the killer or killers and forces him to face his personal demons.

A fast-paced, interesting plot, well-defined characters and evocative prose are the architectural underpinnings of THE SILVER SWAN. While some red herrings swim across the pages, the big clues are well placed and not necessarily recognized until the finale. Readers familiar with the work of Banville will have no trouble immersing themselves in his second foray into genre fiction, taking it to new literary heights. These novels need not be read in sequence, though reading CHRISTINE FALLS first will offer some insight into the goings-on carried over in THE SILVER SWAN.

    --- Reviewed by Barbara Lipkien Gershenbaum

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