A Death in Summer by Benjamin Black

Richard “Diamond Dick” Jewell is found in his country home with his head blown off and a shotgun in his hands, but Dublin pathologist Quirke and the Detective Inspector Hackett quickly conclude it is a clumsy attempt to make the death look like suicide.
Benjamin Black quickly lines up a cast of suspects for the murder of the Dublin newspaper magnate and horse breeder in the fourth novel to feature Quirke.
A bitter business rival and his instantly dislikable and creepy son, a stablehand with a violent criminal record, a sullen housekeeper, the dead man’s deeply disturbed sister and his exotic French wife all enter the frame.
Quirke, as usual, is quickly out of his depth, not least because he begins an affair with the Gallic widow before her husband is even cold in his grave.
Again he is struggling with alcoholism, drinking but trying to control it, his entire body quivering for more each time he sips a glass of wine.
Over the previous novels Black has assembled a retinue of supporting players, including Hackett and Quirke’s daughter Phoebe. But stepping from the sidelines of two-dimensional bit-player to take second billing this time round emerges Quirke’s assistant pathologist, Sinclair, to become a fully rounded character with hidden depths.
Author Black spends less time than in his earlier Quirke novels establishing the time frame of 1950s Dublin, just an occasional reference to the location of a long-flattened building or now-defunct tram line.
But as before he paints a scathing picture of establishment corruption and an Ireland still dominated by the Catholic Church, which allows elements of its clergy to commit appalling crimes against children in its care.
Moreso than in his previous pseudonymously penned novels by Benjamin Black, the voice of Booker prizewinner John Banville, keeps emerging from the pages of A Death in Summer as if he wants to push aside his crime-writing alter ego and show him how things should be done.
“They left the kitchen and went back to the nook in the dining room. The night was pressing its glossy back against the window. The candle had burned halfway, and a knobbly trail of wax had dripped down the side and onto the table. Quirke lifted the bottle of Bordeaux.”
In four sentences the straightforward storytelling prose of the crimewriter Black morphs in the prosaic lyricism of Banville and back again to functional narrative.
This is an elegant novel, well-paced with dramatic twists, disturbing surprises and richly drawn characters whose actions and motives have a tangible psychological depth.
Black/Banville is well in form here, and this is probably the most assured of his Quirke novels. It can be either plunged into without any need to reference the previous three or else taken as a welcome new installment of a sequential quartet by one of Ireland’s leading contemporary novelists who barely disguises himself behind his crimewriter penname.

This review was written for an first published The New York Journal of Books.

John Banville reading

The setting for this reading was in a small private church on an estate on the shores of Strangford Lough and getting there entailed a torchlit walk along a dark tree-lined path.
During the reading itself the lights were dimmed and the church was lit by candles, with spotlights for Banville and violinist Ruby Colley.
Colley uses an electronic violin and lays down her own backing tracks as she performs that are then played back on a loop and gradually builds to create layered pieces that musically seemed to be inspired by Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Michael Nyman.
The musical interludes sat well in the candle-lit church and might well have been composed as a soundtrack to a movie adaptation of John Banville's new novel The Infinities.
He read two pieces from his just-released book that I thought were not particularly representative of the novel as a whole or at least didn't give a real sense of the novel. However, they went down well and it was interesting to hear the clipped diction of someone who is in Ireland's premier division of novelists.
The question and answer session that followed was less structured and gave a good insight into the mindset of Banville the novelist. He is often portrayed as an arrogant novelist who antagonises other writers and his critics but came across as quite humble about the impact his novels have on the reader.
He often refers to himself in the third person as Banville and seems to have, in his own mind, distanced the man John Banville from the writer Banville and his crime-writing offspin Benjamin Black.
He said that quite often when reading back on what he had written he has no recollection of writing it, as if it comes from somewhere outside of himself. When he gets up from the desk at which he works in a Dublin flat he said leaves a "simulacrum" still sitting there that is Banville the writer while he returns to being Banville the man.

The Newton Letter by John Banville

A man is so caught up in imagining dramas and dark secrets among his landlord's family that he fails to notice the real-life tragedy that is going on. John Banville's narrator in The Newton Letter will be a familiar figure to anyone who has read his other books - even those under his crime-writing alias Benjamin Black. He is damaged character, cut adrift from the world who drinks too much, is aloof and misses what has been going on right under his nose.
A sub-plot is the life of Sir Isaac Newton, who the narrator is writing a biography about. However, like Newton's work as a scientist the narrator's biography has stalled. The narrator reflects upon a letter that Newton wrote in which he mentions an "ailment" which has afflicted him.
"He mentions... the absolutes of space and time and motion on which the picture of the mechanistic universe in the Principia is founded, and trots out again, but without quite the old conviction, the defence of such absolutes exist in God, which is all that is asked of them. But then suddenly he is talking about the excursions he makes nowadays along the banks of the Cam, and of his encounters, not with the great men of the college, but with tradesmen, the sellers and the makers of things". (P59)
Similarly, Banville's unnamed narrator moves from Dublin to spend time in Co Wexford where he plans to finish his book on Newton but finds himself unable to continue and caught up in trivialities. He rents a house from what he believes to be an old Anglo-Protestant family. They come to obsess him and he finds himself constructing biography of their lives based on his observations.
Edward and Charlotte, live with their niece Ottilie and a child David, who the narrator at first assumes is the son of Edward and Charoltte but later realises is actually Ottilie's son. He begins an affair with Ottilie but eventually comes to the conclusion that he is in love with Charlotte. As he gets to know the family better he has to deconstruct his initial speculation about them - they are not Protestant but Catholics - and develope new ones, only to find that these are wildly inaccurate as well.
Banville sums up the entire plot of the novella towards the end when he writes: "I spent a summer in the country, I slept with one woman and thought I was in love with another; I dreamed up a horrid drama, and failed to see the commonplace tragedy that was playing out in real life. You'll ask, where is the connection between all that, and the abandoning of a book? I don't know, or at least I can't say, in so many words. I was like a man living underground who, coming up for air, is dazzled by the light and cannot find his way back into his bolt-hole. I trudge back and forth over the familiar ground, muttering. I am lost." P95
This is bite-sized Banville and pretty much sums up what he is about, although I only had to look up one word – 'succubus' – compared to his later novels in which he keeps droping in willfuly obscure words that had me constantly reaching for a dictionary.

The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black

"In his mind sometimes he got it all confused, got it all out of sequence..."
These words form part of an internal monologue by a character towards the end of The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black and in many ways it sums up this novel.
Despite having 350 pages in which to plant clues and lay trails for the reader to follow which all converge in a moment of realisation Black ends up having to explain exactly what had been happening all along.
It is a bit like the end of an episode of Scooby Doo when Velma tells us who the bad guy was, why he'd done it an how he got away with it.
Again, as in Christine Falls (CF), reviewed a few entries ago, the central character Quirke fails to come to life.
He is fleshed out a little and there is a bit more psychological depth to him but Black still needs other characters or his authorial voice to tell us that Quirke is complicated loner rather than through characterisation.
The novel is peppered with inconsistencies, cliches, reliance on coincidences and just stupid mistakes.
Quirke's daughter Phoebe, who at the end of CF had had become an heiress following the death of her millionaire grandfather, is working as an assistant in a hat shop.
Despite trying to expose his foster father and foster brother for the wrong doings he uncovered in CF, Quirke still pays them reqular visits.
One of the main protagonists is The Silver Swan is an English spiv called Leslie who is straight out a 1950's Ealing comedy who all-but twirls his moustache and exhales 'well heeeellllloooo' every time a pretty girl walks in to the room.
Quirke's daughter just happens to get caught up with one of the characters linked to a woman whose death Quirke is investiaging.
A policeman comically twirls his tie "like Stan Laurel" - surely it was Ollie who did that?
Benjamin Black's alter ego John Banville can get away without a plot because his novels are carefully paced exercises in styalised prose.
In his Booker winning novel The Sea, the plot could be scribbled on the back of a beer mat. But the external incidents are less important than the slow disection of the narrator's psyche and flashbacks to a childhood summer which we eventually realise defined him as person.
Part of the pleasure in reading The Sea is the act of reading itself, the plot is something on which Banville hangs his prose.
However, as Benjamin Black, Banville, has opted for the crime fiction genre in which plot is much more important but as his character says "sometimes he got it all confused".
Its not all bad and The Silver Swan is an entertaining enough read but somehow you get the feeling that Black/Banville has taken an 'ah sure that'll do' approach.

Christine Falls by Benjamin Black

Despite having the personality of a granite mortuary slab, the physique of Shrek and a drink intake that would probably floor Shane MacGowan, Benjamin Black's anti-hero Quirke seems to have women falling into his bed without him even having to chat them up.
A nurse caring for him – after he is beaten up and is suffering from a broken leg – can't resist a quicky with him in his hospital bed. A recently widowed woman (his late father-in-laws younger wife) also impulsively tackles him without him having to woo her with chat-up lines and a date at a restaurant.
Maybe it is the number of cigarettes he smokes that makes him so attractive, although I don't remembering women throwing themselves at me just because I happened to be in the same room when I was a smoker.
But then Quirke doesn't just smoke, he breathes tobacco and there is hardly a page in this 380-page novel in which he isn't lighting up, stubbing out or inhaling heavily. There were times I felt like coughing loudly and waving my arms in the air and telling him 'do you mind, I'm trying to breath'.
The central premise of Christine Falls is that The Knights of St Patrick, a secretive Catholic society working in 1950s Ireland, is shipping the babies of young unmarried mothers to the US where they are put up for adoption.
Quirke, a Dublin-based pathologist, only becomes aware of the Knights when he accidently discovers his brother-in-law falsifying the details of a young woman (Christine Falls) who has just died during childbirth.
When he tries to investigate Quirke is threatened (and later badly assaulted) and a woman he speaks to is murdered. Sinister elements are at work trying to cover up the deeds of men who like to portray themselves as good upstanding Christians.
Quirke suspects that his brother-in-law, Mal, is up to his neck in these seedy goings on and despite being told by Mal to back off keeps trying to find out more.
There is ongoing rivalry between the two men. Quirke was rescued from an orphanage by Mal's father, a papal count and senior judge, and the two were brought up like brothers. They both went to Boston in the 1930s and married sisters Delia and Sarah. Quirke married Delia but he really loved Sarah but she married Mal.
Deliah died in child birth and Quirke succumbed to the demon drink but managed to recover, although given the amount of whiskey that he still puts away you wonder how he ever got up in the morning when he was really drinking.
From these elements Black manages to create a novel that carries you along but which never really seems to flow easily.
Black wants his readers to regard Quirke as an interesting anti-hero, the sort of person who women do simply strip off and throw themselves at. But while there is enough there to make Quirke – a tragic loner, betrayed by his adopted brother, shunned by his true love– relatively intriguing, somehow the characterisation doesn't really gel.
Similarly for a crime novel in which Quirke is the man who is unravelling the mystery he doesn't really do that much detective work. People tend to just tell him things and the plot moves on a bit and then he somehow guesses something else.
Never-the-less there is some great writing that is a pleasure to read even though it seems to be there simply because Black likes the sound of the words or the images they create rather than because they move the story forward. Not surprising given that Benjamin Black is an alter ego of Booker prizewinner John Banville
There were also some nice little literary vignettes thrown in, including a couple of the minor characters who seemed to be introduced purely to get the reader guessing who Black might be talking about.
The drunken playwright and novelist who was put in prison for republican activities when he was a teenager has more than a passing resemblance to Brendan Behan, while the drunken, bitter poet sitting in the corner of the pub screamed out to be recognised as Patrick Kavanagh.
Despite the criticisms there was enough going on in Christine Falls to make me want to head down the street in the morning and pick up its sequel, The Silver Swan.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks having a John Banville-fest. I’d never really taken much notice of the Booker Prize-winning author until I heard him being interviewed on RTE radio last month. He was actually talking about his crime-writer alter ego Benjamin Black and his new novel The Lemur. He gave an interesting insight into how he operates as a writer, saying that in the time it takes ‘John Banville’ to write a sentence ‘Benjamin Black’ would have finished a page.
The Lemur was my first port of call and it was a quick, unchallenging read. During his interview Banville said it had been commissioned as a 15-intallment series by The New York Times. His Irish journalist narrator John Glass – a washed-out, chain-smoking hack – is just the most blatant cliché in this novel. Glass’s artist lover lives in Bleeker Street in Greenwich Village and his father-in-law is a domineering, former CIA man and self-made billionaire. Glass eats in swish Manhattan restaurants, works in mirror-windowed skyscrapers and lives in a plush apartment.
The plot centres on the murder of an internet sleuth hired by Glass - and who he nicknames the Lemur - to help him research a biography he has been commissioned to write about his father-in-law. Again the clichés come thick and fast - Captain Ambrose of the NYPD who is investigating the killing is an archetype who has appeared in a thousand New York cop novels, TV shows and movies, while the portrayal of a black journalist is dangerously close to racial stereotyping.
What I am wondering here is – did Banville set out to write a New York crime novel ‘in the style of a New York crime novel’? Is he purposely loading all these clichés on top of one another as a sort of literary tribute act? A knowing nod to a school of writing that will bring an appreciative smile to other aficionados?
On the other hand is he just ripping the arse out of the genre and thinking ‘sure this will do?’
I picked up two Banville novels – Eclipse and The Book of Evidence – in a second-hand bookshop a few days after finishing The Lemur. The gear shift in writing was immediately evident in Eclipse. It is dense, stream-of-consciousness prose that had me constantly reaching from my dictionary. It is self-consciously literary and not afraid of being so.
Eclipse tells of an actor who has suddenly been stricken by stage fright, who leaves his wife to live in his abandoned parental home where he thinks he sees ghosts. The ghosts are not the bit that stretch the credulity, it is the father and daughter who are squatting there and who the narrator does not notice until about half way through the novel that caused me to go ‘oh come on’. There are constant references to the narrator’s own mentally-fragile daughter and dark intimations of the fate that awaits her.
However, the flimsy plot is a subservient vehicle whose sole purpose is to provide a washing line on which Banville can hang out his meticulously laundered prose. That is not a bad thing. Banville’s writing is something that, if you’re in the mood for it, is worthwhile submitting to and letting yourself be carried along by. I read a review somewhere comparing him to Samuel Beckett and that rang true. Murphy, Molloy and Malone Dies all sketch out fragile scenarios that are launching pads for philosophical musings and ponderings on the meaning of existence. Beckett kicked the ball 60 years ago and Banville is happy to keep dribbling it. That is not a criticism for he does it very well.
I bought a new copy of The Sea, which won Banville the Booker in 2005 (The Book of Evidence remains unread at this point). Different scenario, different wife and daughter but essentially the same narrative voice carried over from Eclipse. Max, an art historian whose wife has just died, returns to a seaside town where he spent a childhood holiday and became infatuated with a girl of his own age and her mother.
The emotions are definitely rawer here than in Eclipse. The inability of Max’s wife to come to terms with her terminal illness, the feeling that her body has somehow betrayed her has a horrible authenticity while Max can only bumble ineffectually and fears to say anything in case it is the wrong thing. Memories of his childhood 50 years earlier, his more recent past, during his wife’s illness, and the present intermingle and are often only separated by a full stop or hyphen. Banville clearly relishes words and can bring you up short with a sentence because it articulates something you might have once have thought about but were never really able to find the words to say.
Describing Max’s youthful relationship with Chloe, Banville writes: ‘In her I had my first experience of the absoluteness of other people… And if she was real, so, suddenly was I. She was I believe the true origin in me of self-consciousness.’ (pp168).
‘Memory dislikes motion, preferring to hold things still, and as with so many of these remembered scenes I see this one as a tableau.’ (pp221).
Plot-wise The Sea is much more accomplished than Eclipse and there is a nice twist in the last couple of pages that I didn’t see coming, probably because I was too busy waiting for other ones which of course didn’t materialise. Still I think I think I’m out-Banvilled for now and I’ll leave The Book of Evidence on the shelf for a while yet. I think I need to brace myself for more Banville, take a deep breath before submitting to his unsettling and occasionally annoying style of writing.