The Drowned by John Banville

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Reviewed by Harriet, 14 Jan 2025

When John Banville announced that he was going to give up writing the multi-award-winning literary fiction for which he had been celebrated for decades, and would be concentrating in future on his detective fiction, some of his ardent admirers may have been disappointed. Personally I was very pleased, having tried his Booker-winning The Sea and found it very hard going. Far easier to read, and more entertaining, are the crime novels which he started to produce under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. Some years ago I reviewed one of these, The Black-Eyed Blonde, which I described as an extraordinary example of literary ventriloquism: it features Philip Marlowe in a story that could easily have been written by Raymond Chandler. More recently, though, I’ve discovered his Quirke novels, initially published as Black but recently under his own name. Set in mid-1950s Ireland, they feature the eponymous gloomy, troubled, alcoholic pathologist, who somehow ends up being caught up in murders. I reviewed the eighth of these, April in Spain, back in 2021, and a year earlier wrote about Snow, which doesn’t feature Quirke but centres instead on Detective Inspector St John (pronounced Sinjun) Strafford, who, in the two subsequent novels, finds himself working with Quirke. Central to the novels in which both these men appear is the fact that Quirke is an Irish Catholic and Strafford an Anglo-Irish Protestant. His background in the crumbling Anglo-Irish gentry is an embarrassment to him, and makes people, including himself, surprised to find him in the predominantly Irish police force, and though Quirke grudgingly respects and maybe even secretly likes him, he can’t resist digs at Strafford’s dislike of alcohol and of eating meat, and of course his religion and his background. 

In The Drowned, the split between the Catholic Irish and the Protestant English, whether born in Ireland or living there for work purposes, shows clearly in the case Strafford gets involved in. The novel begins with a sad, solitary man by the name of Denton Wymes (pronounced Weems) discovering an apparently abandoned sports car, its door open and its engine still running, on a clifftop overlooking the sea. Standing there in puzzlement,  and wishing he could just walk away, he is prevented by the sudden appearance of a man who rushes at him from the direction of the sea, crying out for help: ‘ I think my wife’s drowned herself!’ He introduces himself as Armitage, and expresses relief when Wymes tells him his name: 

‘You’re not a Paddy, then’, he said, with a sort of laugh, ‘Thank Christ for that’.

‘Actually I am Irish, if that’s what you mean,’ Wymes said stiffly. ‘But not…’

‘Not bog Irish. That’s the point. Good man’.

Eventually Wymes takes Armitage to a nearby cottage, the holiday home of a South Dublin couple named Ruddock, to whom Armitage explains the curious circumstances of his wife’s disappearance. Even more mysteriously, though Ruddock and Armitage claim not to know each other, Wymes has the distinct impression not only that they did, but that ‘there was something between them, some hidden grudge or grievance’. When Strafford inevitably gets caught up in the case of the disappearing wife, he visits the Ruddocks, only for Charles Ruddock to realise that he and Strafford were at school together: “‘Christ Almighty!’, he said, in dawning wonderment. ‘Strafford! I thought I knew you. You’re St John the Injun. Well, I’ll be buggered.’ He also has a rather difficult interview with Wymes, in which the two men are very conscious of their similar backgrounds and find it awkward and embarrassing to be in such a situation.

So has Armitage’s wife really drowned? If so, was it a suicide or a murder? Or has she run off to escape her deeply unpleasant husband? The intricacies of the case continue, and are eventually solved, not without Strafford getting briefly involved with Charlotte Ruddock, who is unhappy with her equally unpleasant husband. This would be basically wrong by many standards, but is infinitely confusing for Strafford who is not only in the midst of a divorce from his English wife but is also in a relationship with Quirke’s daughter Phoebe, who has just told him she is pregnant. Quirke, meanwhile, is struggling with the loss of his own wife, who was shot by mistake in Spain when he and Strafford were working on another case. His grief is beautifully conveyed by Banville, as for example when he finds that his devastation is not helped by occasional visits to the cinema:

Pictures in Technicolor he avoided. Monochrome was somehow more realistic than all the garish colour. Or easier to look at, anyways. The actresses’ skin had a wonderfully stark, chalky paleness, the stuff of their frocks flared and shimmered with an electric energy, and shed blood was black. Often, he didn’t bother to look at the screen at all but sat and leaned his head back on the rim of the seat and gazed at the projector’s shivery beam above him, admiring the clouds of luminous silvery grey cigarette smoke that billowed through it.

What is so admirable about this series of novels – and I’ve caught up with the backlist – is that Banville manages to combine humour and entertainment with serious issues about the state of Ireland in the 1950s. In Snow, for example, the plot turns on the abuse of children in Catholic boys’ schools, and Strafford’s investigation is hampered by the refusal of the Archbishop to allow the murder to be treated as anything other than an unfortunate accident. In the present novel, though it’s the relationship between the Irish, the Anglo-Irish and the incomers that is the main thread, the Archbishop gets a brief look in when Strafford, visiting a country area, finds himself close to the Archbishop’s summer home. ‘McQuaid. A cold fish. There were rumours about him’:

 ‘Oh, bejasus now, you wouldn’t want to youngsters go near that fellow, I’ll tell you for nothing.’ And then the low chuckle, the wink, the nudge.

Another winner, then, from Banville. Long may he continue.

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Harriet is a co-founder and one of the editors of Shiny New Books.

John Banville, The Damned (Faber & Faber, 2024). 978-0571370818, 352pp., hardback.

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