Reviewed by Rod McLary
John Banville is one of the world’s finest living writers. He has won numerous awards including the Booker Prize and is believed to be a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 2006, he began writing crime novels under the non-de-plume of Benjamin Black and has written seven novels featuring Dr Quirke. More recently, the crime books have been published under his own name.
Either way, the books are excellent crime stories and remarkably literate. But the crime is not at the heart of the books – what is there instead is the story of a repressed Ireland in the 1950s as seen through the eyes of the protagonists and primarily the eyes of Dr Quirke. In the more recent books, Inspector St John Strafford has joined Quirke with his own perspective on the world.
The Drowned opens with a car – engine running, lights on, doors open – stationery in a field with no one in sight. Almost immediately, one of the features of Banville’s prose is apparent – the way that many inanimate objects appear to the observer to be sentient and threatening; thus suggesting the physical world cannot be trusted or even relied upon. An observer says of the car: two red lights glared at him … like the eyes of a wild animal crouched and ready to spring [1].
The observer is reluctant to become involved and almost walks on – but something holds him there against his will. So he does become involved and caught up in other people’s confused and confusing lives. Metaphorically speaking, the car [the wild animal] has now sprung. The owner of the car – Mr Armitage – claims that he and his wife were arguing when she leapt from the car and disappeared into the sea. Now he seems distraught – and ‘seems’ is the operative word here – and believes that she is dead. Armitage and the observer, whom we learn is Denton Wymes a man with a shameful past, walk to the house to which the field belongs. The owner is Charles Ruddock who is holidaying there with his wife.
Almost immediately, the reader suspects that nothing and no one is what it/she/he seems. The author writes of Armitage: He sounded oddly unfocused, as if the real matter were not the missing woman, but something else, some other matter off to the side [15]. And this off-centre focus is maintained consistently through the narrative – the world is simply unreliable and the real action is ‘off to the side’. Other action ‘off to the side’ of the death includes Quirke conducting the autopsy of the drowned woman, his relationship with his daughter Phoebe, his ongoing grief at the death of his wife Evelyn [in April in Spain], Phoebe’s relationship with Strafford, and the death of Strafford’s boss Chief Inspector Hackett – and shockingly the death of a child. All set out in beautiful prose and underpinned by repression and sinister happenings; and the seeming sentience of inanimate objects.
Much like life, there is little resolution at the end of the narrative. Some matters are finalised while others remain hanging. Perhaps for the next Quirke/Strafford novel?
It is an overused cliché to say of any novel ‘I couldn’t put it down’ but this is one which almost demands a straight-through reading. An excellent crime story and a fine literary novel.
The Drowned
[2024]
by John Banville
Faber & Faber
ISBN 978 05713 7082 5
$32.99; 340pp