In "The Silver Swan," Benjamin Black brings back the dour and solitary Garret Quirke, who lives in Dublin in the 1950s and works as a pathologist in the Hospital of the Holy Family. Quirke is an alcoholic who avoids drinking except for one bottle of wine that he and his daughter, Phoebe, share at their weekly dinner. Although he is desperately trying to stay sober, he occasionally gets the urge to indulge: "Quirke longed suddenly for a drink, just the one: short, quick, disastrous. For, of course, it would not be just the one." One day, he receives a message from a former acquaintance, Billy Hunt. The body of Billy's much younger wife, Deirdre, has been found after she apparently flung herself off Sandycove Harbor into the waters of Dublin Bay. Billy tells Quirke, "I don't want her cut up," meaning that he does not want a postmortem done on Deirdre. Although Quirke tells Billy, "I'll see what I can do," after he examines the corpse, the pathologist realizes that Deirdre's death is not as straightforward as it seems. Even after the coroner rules that Deirdre drowned accidentally, Quirke decides to look into the matter further.
Black is a literary stylist who revels in long descriptive passages laced with elegant similes and metaphors. He uses an omniscient narrator to delve into each character's innermost thoughts. Even after Deirdre's death, the author utilizes flashbacks to explore the inner demons that drove this tortured woman to engage in reckless behavior. She had been a beautiful girl with reddish gold hair and brilliant blue eyes; sadly, her impoverished and angst-ridden childhood left her scarred for life. Partly to escape her unrelenting misery, she married Billy Hunt, a stolid man nearly sixteen years her senior. He was a salesman who traveled a great deal and the couple was childless; this left Deirdre with a great deal of time on her hands. She eventually met two people who would seal her fate: one was Dr. Hakeem Kreutz, who called himself a "spiritual healer"; the other was Leslie White, a shiftless rogue who exploited gullible young women. Deirdre took White on as her business partner; they opened a beauty salon called "The Silver Swan" and Deirdre renamed herself Laura Swan.
Quirke is a cynic who has seen people at their worst. As a young orphan, he was confined to a workhouse, the Carricklea Industrial School, where the Catholic priests tried to beat religious pieties into him. He also endured some terrible experiences, recounted in the first book of this series, "Christine Falls," that deepened his bitterness and pessimism. Quirke has not forgotten a series of heartbreaking events that left two young women dead, with a "cloak of silence drawn over the affair, leaving [Quirke] standing alone in his indignation." This time, Quirke is determined to exact justice for Deirdre. If she did not kill herself, who did and why? "Quirke was aware of the old itch to cut into the quick of things, to delve into the dark of what was hidden--to know."
The author is a virtuoso at evoking emotion and creating atmosphere; he portrays every room and character with painstaking detail. Readers who take pleasure in vivid word pictures will enjoy "The Silver Swan" far more than those who are fond of fast-moving dialogue and a tight narrative. The characters are meticulously delineated: Quirke has crippling regrets that have mired him in guilt and psychological torpor; Detective Inspector Hackett, an unprepossessing but extremely sharp individual, sees beneath the surface of things far more than Quirke; twenty-three year old Phoebe, Quirke's emotionally stunted daughter, has not forgiven her father for his past betrayals; Englishman Leslie White, who is "handsome, in a pale, jaded sort of way," is a rogue and a freeloader who uses Deirdre shamelessly; Kate is Leslie's long-suffering wife who puts up with her husband's peccadilloes until she cannot stand it anymore.
The novel's major flaws are its weak plot construction and unremittingly dreary tone. The melancholy story meanders quite a bit until it reaches its convoluted and not entirely realistic conclusion. It is highly unlikely that the astute Inspector Hackett would patiently allow Quirke to blunder his way through an investigation of this importance before finally stepping in. In spite of its shortcomings, "The Silver Swan" effectively depicts a stifling era when women with few resources felt unable to make informed and independent choices. In addition, Black powerfully demonstrates how tragedy inevitably follows when immoral and selfish people exploit those who are too vulnerable to protect themselves.
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The Silver Swan: A Novel Books In Print, Audio Books.