The Silver Swan (Quirke Series #2)

Publishers Weekly

Black is better known as the Booker Prize—winning author John Banville. Timothy Dalton is better known as the guy who used to play James Bond. Their collaboration on this mystery novel, the second in Black's Quirke series, offers an excellent opportunity for Dalton to flash his acting chops. Dalton's reading is hushed, intense and dramatic, read as if being performed onstage. This risky approach ends up melding perfectly with Black's atmospheric whodunit, with Dalton underscoring the literary quality of the prose. Dalton drops to a whisper nearly every other sentence, but it is the kind of whisper that penetrates the eardrums of even the duffers in the back row of the theater. The acted approach—Dalton playing every role, embodying every voice—is not always perfect, but the partnership between author and narrator is a definite success. Simultaneous release with the Henry Holt hardcover (Reviews, Jan. 7). (Mar.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Library Journal

Black, the pen name of Man Booker Prize-winning author John Banville (The Sea), is a fine writer, but, as so often happens when a "straight" author turns to writing genre fiction, this book (following Christine Falls) is just not one of his best. The wife of an old acquaintance has been found dead, and Irish pathologist Garrett Quirke wants to know what really happened. Not much of a mystery (the murderer, while not explicitly revealed, is quite obvious from the beginning), Silver Swan is mostly devoted to exploring the lives and thoughts of people before and after a murder. Unfortunately, despite some very beautiful writing, most of the characters seem one-dimensional, sometimes irritatingly so. As an audiobook this title suffers from another, more unusual problem: Timothy Dalton reads with a gentle, attractive, singsong inflection but also rather quickly, and American listeners may have difficulty understanding some sentences. Recommended for large public libraries.
—I. Pour-El

Library Journal

Following the success of Christine Falls , Black, the pen name of Booker Prize-winning author John Banville (The Sea ), returns with a second atmospheric crime novel once again starring Quirke, a 1950s Dublin pathologist and unlikely hero, a deeply curious man with the insight to know "something in him yearned for the darkness." Like the first book, this novel opens with the death of a young woman, the owner of a seemingly successful beauty salon called the Silver Swan. Her body is found in the river, her clothing neatly folded at the edge of the water. The distraught husband, not wanting his beautiful wife's body harmed, asks Quirke (a former classmate of the husband) to bypass the standard postmortem. Upon examining it, Quirke quickly notices a puncture mark visible on the dead woman's arm. And so Quirke's descent into darkness begins yet again. Black/Banville is a master of atmosphere; the fear and dread associated with hidden desires and deeds fairly leap off the page. Highly recommended for all public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/07.]-Andrea Y. Griffith, Loma Linda Univ. Libs., CA

Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

From the Publisher

"The eagerly awaited sequel to Christine Falls is brought to lief by none other than James Bond himself, Timothy Dalton, in a reading so good it will make listeners giddy with delight...It's all thrilling, honest, and raw." - AudioFile "...the second in Black's Quirke series, offers an excellent opportunity for Dalton to flash his acting chops. Dalton's reading is hushed, intense and dramatic, read as if being performed onstage." - Publishers Weekly "Elegant and elegiac are not words often used to describe the prose in a whodunit, but author Benjamin Black isn't the usual perpetrator of whodunits...Black casts a slick of despair over his carefully plotted narrative, the characters all seeming to yearn for a ntoe of grace to enter their bleak lives...As before, Timothy Dalton's brilliant performance is as nuanced as the story, his voice a mirror of its moods." - BookPage

“Dalton…gives a gritty, growling reading that will practically make you smell the rain on the dark Dublin streets.” – St.Petersburg Times

Dalton’s highly dramatic, fully differentiated performance keeps the plot moving swiftly and the net tightening as the novel builds to its surprising conclusion.” – KLIATT

Praise for Benjamin Black's previous book, Christine Falls, also read by Timothy Dalton:
“This is one of those rare occurrences when actor/narrator and prose suit each other so perfectly that the CD’s cost seems a small price to pay for the value of the performance.”—Chicago Sun Times

“Crossover fiction of a very high order...Christine Falls rolls forward with haunting, sultry exoticism.”—The New York Times

The Barnes & Noble Review

Benjamin Black is John Banville reincarnated as a crime writer, and his coming into being is surely a dimension of the author's obsession with the disunity of personal identity. As Black, however, Banville has jettisoned the heavy bales of philosophical ballast that weighed down -- or deepened, if you prefer -- the novels written under his own name. That's good news to the lightweights among us who admire Banville's potent visual and olfactory imagery, pungent style, and historical mischief making but who also find that a little philosophical rumination, not to say scab picking, goes a very long way.

The Silver Swan follows Christine Falls, the first of the Black oeuvre. It is two years since we last met the central character, Garret Quirke, a Dublin pathologist and a Gloomy Gus of Banvillian proportions, so shy of intimacy that even a home-cooked meal perturbs him. His lost love, Sarah, whom we left in the previous novel feeling dizzy, is dead of a brain tumor; his onetime benefactor and "great and secret sinner," the Judge, has been paralyzed by a stroke; and Phoebe, his recently if unhappily reclaimed daughter, now lives in Dublin in a state of emotional bleakness. Quirke, himself, has given up drink, though the crapulousness of the last book has been replaced by fierce cravings, "every parched nerve crying out to be slaked."

You can't really win in this world, but then it is the Ireland of the 1950s, a hard, dingy, secretive decade, suffused with a moral queasiness left from the Emergency (as Ireland's condition as a neutral country during the Second World War was called). Everyone here suffers some form of spiritual desolation, a state perfectly exemplified by Quirke's widowed friend Mal, who has been given a dog by his daughter: "It was a stunted, wire-haired thing the color of wet sacking.... It was plain the dog and master disliked each other, the dog barely tolerating the man and the man seeming helpless before the dog's unbiddably doggy insistences. It was odd, but ownership of the dog made Mal seem more aged, more careworn, more irritably despondent. As if reading Quirke's thoughts, he said defensively, 'He's company. Of a sort.' "

The novel is set, for the most part, during an especially hot summer in Dublin, and the drawn-out days of deliquescent, sweating flesh are quite as insalubrious as those of the Irish winter's crepuscular damp. An old university acquaintance, Billy Hunt, gets in touch with Quirke, imploring him to prevent an autopsy on the body of his wife, a woman who called herself Laura Swan in her capacity as proprietor of a beauty parlor. She appears to have committed suicide by swimming out to sea. Wretched, "a bulging sack of grief and misery and pent-up rage," Hunt claims that he cannot bear the idea of his wife's body being violated.

Hmmm, we think, and so does Quirke. A pathologist to his unamiable core, he feels "the old itch to cut into the quick of things, to delve into the dark of what is hidden -- to know." He discovers a needle mark on the woman's arm and evidence that she died not from drowning but from a drug overdose.

For all Quirke's appetite for discovery, what follows is not so much an investigation as a perambulation -- a time-honored Irish literary tradition, after all -- through the streets of Dublin with excursions to Clontarf and Howth. Along the way, clues and coincidences swim out of the summer's mephitic ether, drawn into Quirke's darksome orbit by fate's gravitational pull. Indeed, for a while, the plot seems to be actually generated by Quirke's inner state, going so far as to appropriate through brazen happenstance his daughter, Phoebe, the focus of his obsessive self-castigation. But intermittent flashbacks to Laura Swan's life as seen by herself soon give the book real narrative muscle and another voice. It is one of cagey optimism, daring, and, finally, dismay when the doomed woman learns the worst and walks "out into the summer morning feeling as if she were the sole survivor of a huge and yet entirely soundless disaster." These scenes trace a path to death: from her marriage to her involvement with a certain Dr. Hakeem Kreutz, "spiritual healer," and, finally, to her affair with her business partner, Leslie White, and its terrible dénouement. He is a cruel and creepy narcissist with hair the color of "burning magnesium" -- "a born suede shoe wearer," Quirke reflects with distaste. A couple of swatches of narrative from this creature's point of view afford us a glimpse of exquisite malignity.

Benjamin Black's sensibility, dour and doomy and lonesome as hell, pervades the novel, yet it never drags down the lithe prose, prose more supple and unerring than Banville's, whose way with words -- though just as inspired -- suffers bouts of sclerotic ontology. Or so it strikes the shamelessly hedonistic reader. What we like is people and places and plot. We like the image of Quirke as "a huge, dangerous, baffled baby, needful and destructive." We are transported by Black's brilliantly conjured settings and his precise evocations of time and place. Sights, sounds, smells and the whole feel of this world are wonderfully conveyed and are bliss to read. At Howth harbor: "a squad of trawlermen was mending an immense fishing net strung between poles, vaguely suggestive of harpists in their deft, long-armed reachings and gatherings.... A grinning dog raced along the edge of the pier, barking wildly at the gulls bobbing among the boats on the harbor's oily swaying, iridescent waters." Witnessing this, even Quirke feels "the possibility of happiness."

But it is not to be -- for Quirke at any rate. In the end, the realm he inhabits is a grim one of murder, sadistic sex, pornography, drugs, blackmail, embezzlement, brutal beatings, and general sneakiness. On the other hand, fun lovers that we are, all that makes us happy too. --Katherine A. Powers

Katherine A. Powers writes the literary column "A Reading Life" for the Boston Sunday Globe and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.