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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Booker Noir, 8 Oct 2008
There's been a bit of debate about the Benjamin Black books and whether they really count as detective novels, because they are written by Booker Prize-winning Irish author John Banville, and it's clear that he doesn't really feel the need to follow the crime thriller textbook structure to the letter.
Far from finding this annoying, though, I absolutely loved it. The book has a dark feel to it, with subcurrents of drug addiction, spiritual healing and sexual jealousy that are powerful and dramatic. Set in Dublin in the 1950s the book has such a strong flavour of a past long gone. I love the main character of Quirke, who is a tired pathologist with a drinking habit he's fighting to control and a past full of mistakes and wrong turns. And other characters reoccur from the first novel as well, in a satisfying way.
Banville is a great, great writer, and there's such a control in what he writes; every sentence is perfectly balanced and every scene I could see exactly in my head. This book has the same sense of controlled menace as there is in his best novels. I loved it, despite its profoundly melancholy atmosphere, and I would very very much recommend it.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Benjamin Black - The Silver Swan, 31 Dec 2007
Incurably curious pathologist Quirke is back, in John Banville's second novel written as Benjamin Black. It's two years since the events of Christine Falls, and Quirke has given up the drink. He and his daughter aren't on good terms, his step-father's suffered a severe stroke, and his step-brother's lonely and mourning the death of his wife. A bleak picture in 50's Dublin, then. Things threaten to become even more interesting when Billy Hunt, an old school-friend Quirke barely remembers, calls him and asks a favour: his wife has been found drowned, a suspected suicide, and could Quirke please see that an autopsy is not performed. Billy can't bear the thought of his wife body under the pathologist's scalpel. Quirke, being Quirke, agrees but does one anyway after he notices a suspicious mark on the dead woman's skin. It seems he is right to be suspicious, but all that he finds only begs more questions, questions Quirke begins to worry away at, slowly picking his way through a puzzle of drugs, messy finances, and adultery, to reveal the answer.
It's possible that Banville is the best writer at work in the genre at the moment, in terms of artfulness at least. His prose is simply brilliant, gorgeous and evocative and poetic. The sentences he writes stun, the descriptions of the people and the city seem lovingly penned. However, there are moments when you get the sense he's working on autopilot with these books. Every now and then, a clunker, which would never happen in a book written under the real name. I read somewhere that he writes them very quickly, and if you were to compare the writing here to the writing in, for example, The Sea, I can certainly believe that. If his writing is this good when he's not even really trying, if he were to spend the time on a crime novel that he spends on a normal piece of fiction, imagine the result!
Quirke is a stunning character, too. Troubled, determined, dogged, melancholy, tee-total here, Banville furnishes him with dimension and makes him fascinating with absolute ease. The characterisation of Quirke alone is reason enough to read the series. As would be the atmosphere of the novel: vaguely sordid, repressed, a little desperate, dark, with everything seeming sinister.
Though only area where Banville is less than brilliant is the plotting. Christine Falls was a little too predictable in this department, though with a brilliant end. The plot of The Silver Swan is actually quite simple, but Banville moves it along at a perfect pace and this time ensures that there's enough the reader doesn't know to keep them interested in that department. There are no great shocks (there are, after all, only about three scenarios which could prove to be the truth), but it's all developed excellently. There's no punch at the end as there was with the last novel, but the whole thing is more satisfying over all. I can't wait for the next from the Benjamin Black pen... (Apparently called The Lemur, and to be serialised in The New York Times...)
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not as good as Christine Falls, 26 Oct 2008
Having loved Christine Falls, I'd been waiting eagerly for the follow-up. Maybe it didn't have the same novelty value, but I found it a much less satisfying read. The main problem is that it's so relentlessly grim and most of the principal characters are unlikeable and hard to care about. Quirke's daughter Phoebe is especially hard work.
The story proceeds in a plodding way, following parallel strands: in one, Quirke investigates, in the most desultory way possible, the death of a woman in an apparent suicide; in the second, we follow the woman's last few weeks to her death.
This book seemed to have less detail about Dublin in the 50s: the heavy drinking, the endless smoking, the priest-ridden hypocrisy. I found it quite easy to put down.
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