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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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The
Silver Swan by Benjamin Black |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Justice John
Banville continues his popular fiction offerings using the pseudonym Benjamin
Black with a new novel, The
Silver Swan. Garret Quirke, the protagonist and pathologist from Christine
Falls, returns to solve a murder mystery set in Ireland in the 1950s. The
plot thickens and secrets are uncovered while justice is pursued. Here’s an
excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 3,
pp. 22-4: Quirke
had long ago lost what little faith he might once have had in the Catholic pieties
that the Brothers at the workhouse, officially known as Carricklea
Industrial School, where he had endured his early childhood, had tried for so
long to beat into him. Yet even now, when he was well into middle age, he
still had his household gods, his not-to-be-toppled totems, one of which was
the giant remnant of the man whom for most of his life he had
unquestioningly taken to be good, even great. Garret Griffin, or the Judge,
as everyone called him, even though it was some time since he had been in a
position to deliver judgment on anything, had been felled the previous year,
his seventy-third, by a stroke that had paralyzed him entirely, except for
the muscles of his mouth and eyes and the tendons of his neck. He was
confined, mute but in some way sentient, to a large white room on the third
floor of the Presentation Convent of St. Louis in Rathfarnham, a far suburb
of the city, where two windows, one in each of the adjoining corner walls of
the room, looked out on two contrasting aspects of the Dublin Mountains, one
rocky and barren, the other green and strewn with gorse. It was to these
soft hills that his eyes turned constantly, with an expression of
desperation, grief, and rage. Quirke marveled at how much of the man, how
much of what was left of the living being, was concentrated now in his eyes;
it was as if all the power of his personality had come crowding into these
last, twin points of fierce and desperate fire. Quirke visited the old man on
Mondays and Thursdays; Quirke's daughter, Phoebe, came on Tuesdays and
Fridays; on Sundays it was the turn of the Judge's son, Malachy. On
Wednesdays and Saturdays the Judge was left to contemplate alone the day-long
play of light and shadow on the mountains and to endure with speechless and,
if the expression in his eyes was to be credited, furious resentment the
ministrations of the octogenarian nun, Sister Agatha, who had been assigned
to care for him. In his former life, his life in the world, he had done many
quiet favors for the Presentation nuns, and it was they who had been the
first to offer to take him in when the catastrophe befell him. It had been
expected that after such a devastating stroke he would live no more than a
week or two, but the weeks had passed, and then the months, and still his
will to endure showed no sign of flagging. There was a school for girls on
the first two floors of the building, and at fixed times of the
day—midmorning, lunchtime, the four o'clock end of lessons—the pupils' voices
in raucous medley rose up as far as the third floor. At that sound a tense
and concentrated look would come into the Judge's eyes, hard to interpret;
was it indignation, nostalgia, sorrowful remembrance—or just puzzlement?
Perhaps the old man did not know where he was or what he was hearing;
perhaps his mind—and those eyes left little doubt that there was a mind at
some kind of work behind them—was trapped in a state of continuous
bewilderment, helpless doubt. Quirke did not know quite what to think of
this. Part of him, the disappointed, embittered part, wanted the old man to
suffer, while another part, the part that was still the child he had once
been, wished that the stroke might have killed him outright and saved him
from these final humiliations. Quirke passed these visits in
reading aloud to the old man from the Irish Independent. Today was a
Monday in midsummer and there was little of interest in the news pages.
Eighty priests had been ordained in ceremonies at Maynooth and All Hallows -
More clerics, Quirke
thought, that's all we need. Here was a picture of Mr. Tom Bent,
manager of the Talbot Garage in Wexford, presenting the keys of a new fire
engine to the town's mayor. The Summer Sale was on in Macy's of George's
Street. He turned to the foreign page. Dozy old Ike was harrying the
Russians, as usual. "The German people cannot wait eternally for their
sovereignty," according to Chancellor Adenauer, addressing a North
Rhine—Westphalia state election rally in Dusseldorf the previous night. Then
Quirke's eye fell on a paragraph on the front page, under the headline GIRL'S
BODY FOUND. The
body of Mary Ellen Quigley (16), shirt factory worker, who had been missing
from her home in Derry since June 17th, was recovered yesterday from the
River Foyle by a fisherman pulling in his net. An inquest will be held today. He put the paper aside. He
needed a cigarette. Sister Agatha, however, did not allow smoking in the
sickroom. For Quirke this was an added annoyance, but on the other hand it
did give him the excuse to escape at least twice in every hour to pace the
echoing, tiled corridor outside, tensely dragging on a cigarette like an
expectant father in a comedy. Why did he persist in coming
here like this? Surely no one would blame him if he stayed away altogether
and left the dying man to his angry solitude. The Judge had been a great and
secret sinner, and it was Quirke who had exposed his sins. A young woman had
died, another woman had been murdered, and these things had been the old
man's fault. What impressed Quirke most was the cloak of silence that had
been drawn over the affair, leaving him standing alone in his indignation,
exposed, improbable, ignored, like a crackpot shouting on a street corner. So
why did he keep coming dutifully each week to this barren room below the
mountains? He had his own sins to account for, as his daughter could attest,
the daughter whom he had for so long denied. It was a small atonement to
come here twice a week and read out the court cases and the death notices for
this dying old man. The Silver
Swan is a dark and brooding novel, so save it for reading on a sunny day
when you can shake off the gloom. Steve
Hopkins, April 21, 2008 |
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Go to Executive Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the May 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Silver Swan.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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