The Silver Swan

John Banville returns to neo-noir with The Silver Swan, published under his appropriate pseudonym Benjamin Black.  A couple of years have passed since the events of Christine Falls, and various people important to his protagonist, the pathologist Quirke, have either died (Sarah) or suffered poetic justice (Garrett Griffin, paralyzed by a stroke); to make matters worse, the revelation that he is the real father of his "niece," Phoebe, has only served to alienate him from her.  On what should be the upside, Quirke is no longer drinking.  Nevertheless, he once again stumbles over an inconvenient crime when an old school acquaintance, Billy Hunt, asks him not to perform an autopsy on Billy's wife, Deirdre, who apparently committed suicide.  Unfortunately, a glimpse of the needle mark in Deirdre's arm scuppers that plan...

Like Christine Falls, The Silver Swan does not attempt much in the way of formal or stylistic innovation. 
The novel consists of two narratives that join up at the novel's conclusion, all in third person limited POV: Deirdre's story, which explains how she falls in with the mysterious Dr. Kreutz and the sleazy Leslie White, and the postmortem story, as it were, which mainly follows Quirke and Phoebe (although other POVs get a look-in as well).  To a certain extent, Banville incorporates metafictional elements that reflect back on the text as a genre fiction, but metafiction has always been a characteristic of the mystery.  Thus, pondering his discovery that Deirdre had to have been murdered, Quirke asks himself if he wants "to become involved in another version of all that [the previous case]," despite the fact that he's in a sequel and therefore has no choice in the matter (25); Phoebe waxes sardonic about Quirke's "'little gray cells'" (83), an allusion to Agatha Christie's Poirot series; Inspector Hackett deliberately uses a "formula" that "made people uneasy, for it was the kind of thing they would have heard policemen in the pictures saying when what they really meant was that what was going to follow would be anything but routine" (120), suggesting that fictional policework has slowly infested reality.  The last point in particular also characterizes the kind of fictionalizing that most of the characters insist on for themselves, ranging from the professional names used by both Deirdre ("Laura Swan") and Dr. (or "Dr.") Hakeem Kreutz to Billy Hunt's oikish public persona to, indeed, Quirke's own attempt to cover up the murder. 

To the extent that Banville plays with expectations, in fact, it is at the level of genre conventions.  At the most basic level, this is still standard noir.  Banville's version of 1950s Dublin is entirely godless, despite the presence of the church (the priests rarely do anything priestly and there's a rather spectacularly blasphemous moment involving Deirdre); everything is alcohol-soaked, corrupt, sexualized, and generally seedy.  There are, however, some changes to the noir formula.  Most notably, Banville substitutes an homme fatale, Leslie White, for the femme fatale, and insists that there is a residue of justice in the police force, in the form of Inspector Hackett.  Even more ironically, the true "'innocent'" (84) turns out to be not any of the women involved, even Quirke's daughter, but Quirke himself.  As Inspector Hackett--who actually solves the case--says to Quirke at the end, "'But you really don't see it, do you? I thought you were less gullible.  I also thought you had a less rosy view of human beings and their doings'" (278).   In noir, the female innocent or "angel," like Effie in The Maltese Falcon or Lola in the film version of Double Indemnity, isn't defined just by her conventionality and sexual purity, but also by her optimism.  No matter how badly others act (Effie, after all, knows perfectly well that Sam Spade has been carrying on with Iva), the angels believe strongly in the possibility of goodness.*  It's ironic to find the supposedly world-weary Quirke in that position, but his attempt to short-circuit the murder inquiry (now encompassing multiple bodies), on the erroneous grounds that "justice has been done" (276), rests on the assumption that such vigilante justice shows that individuals can act righteously in an otherwise unrighteous world.

Unfortunately, Banville doesn't really follow up on the gender implications of an homme fatale and a male angel, beyond suggesting that 1950s Dublin was not a hotbed, so to speak, of Catholic virgins.  He does resuscitate Christine Falls' preoccupation with what it means to take action.  Garrett Griffin's paralysis, which reflects Quirke's moral paralysis in the first novel, symbolizes the state of Irish culture as a whole.  As an American character, Rose, complains, "'[t]he way you go about in a cowed silence, not protesting, not complaining, not demanding that things should change or be fixed or made new'" (256).  When Quirke informs Hackett that "I want you to do nothing" (276), he rests serenely on the belief that justice has already been done, that the right corrective action has been taken (by someone else).  But instead, this request reveals, in a bleak irony, that Quirke has merely reasoned himself into embracing Ireland's paralysis; indeed, to the extent that he tries to cover up a murder, he is repeating the crimes of the first novel (as Hackett bemusedly reminds him).  It's fitting that in the novel's final sentences, Quirke "stood there, paralyzed.  He did not know where to go.  He did not know what to do" (290). 

*--This is a slightly different take on the usual reading of the angel (e.g., here).