The Mysterious Disappearance of Benjamin Black

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Benjamin Black, Georges Simenon, Graham Swift, John Banville, William Boyd

I first came across John Banville sometime in the mid-1970s when his novel Kepler came out. I bought the hardback, loved it (I reviewed a subsequent reprint of the book), and since then I have read just about everything he has written. There are few contemporary writers I keep up with as assiduously I do Banville (Graham Swift and William Boyd come to mind), but his work is incredibly various. The historical ones, (Kepler, Doctor Copernicus), were vivid and convincing; his novel based on Anthony Blunt, The Untouchable, is sharp and engaging; but others, such as his Booker Prize winner, The Sea, seem to me so etiolated that you have to fight your way through a fog of allusive prose to find out what didn’t happen.

I have seen Banville speak a couple of times, once specifically on Georges Simenon. I can’t think of two more different writers than the author of The Sea and the author of Maigret, and yet there was an obvious connection between the two. So it was no great surprise that he started writing crime novels under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, starting with Christine Falls in 2006. The Black novels are hardly Simenonesque, the prose, while tighter than some of his John Banville novels, is still a lot looser, more elaborate, than you are likely to find in Simenon. But in these novels plot is to the fore, and they are indeed good plot-driven stories.

Most, though by no means all, of the Benjamin Black novels feature an alcoholic Dublin pathologist, Quirke. And they are interconnected in the way that they use the crime as a way of digging into the abusive control of 1950s Dublin society by the Catholic Church, and the corruption of the political class sheltering behind the power of the Church. This is an impoverished, grey Dublin where the physical and sexual abuse of children in Church-run orphanages and schools is an accepted part of life. There are few if any characters in the Benjamin Black novels who are not in some way damaged by the very society they inhabit.

Banville made no secret that he and Benjamin Black were one and the same. The books tended to declare on the cover: By John Banville writing as Benjamin Black. It was rather like the difference between Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks: the two names allowed the author to take different liberties with their writing.

Then, a year ago, a new John Banville novel appeared: Snow. And it was a crime novel, indeed it was a very distinctive Benjamin Black novel, yet the name Black appeared nowhere on it. It was a crime novel set in 1950s Ireland, and though there is a new central character, the rather austere and lonely protestant, Detective Inspector Strafford, Quirke does get a passing mention. And it is a novel that features corruption in high places, and the malign influence of the Church.

Now there is what is advertised as a new Strafford novel, April in Spain. Only Strafford doesn’t even appear until more than half way through the book, and even then mostly plays a supporting role. The central character is Quirke, and the story itself is a direct sequel, set four years later, to the third of the Benjamin Black Quirke novels, Elegy for April (2011). In that earlier novel, incest within the family of a prominent government minister results in a boy admitting to murdering his sister, April, and then committing suicide. Now, reluctantly on holiday in Spain with his new wife, Quirke encounters a doctor at the local hospital and recognizes her as April.

Quirke immediately telephones his daughter, Phoebe, who had been a friend of April’s. Phoebe tells the Dublin police, who arrange that Detective Inspector Strafford should travel out to Spain with her to confirm the identification, and to try to discover why her brother had confessed to her murder. But Phoebe also tells April’s uncle, the cabinet minister, which is why a one-time associate of the Kray twins is also heading out to Spain with a gun.

This is not a novel in which mysteries are solved, which I suppose brings it closer to earlier John Banville novels. But truths are uncovered, political repercussions are felt, and there are tragedies. It is a gripping novel, I read it in a day which is something I haven’t done much of recently.

Curiously, I notice that the John Banville Bibliography on Wikipedia does not list Snow, and counts April in Spain as a Benjamin Black novel, which it explicitly is not. Clearly some people are still confused by the identities of Banville and Black.

Openings

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Adam Mars-Jones, Christopher Priest, Graham Swift, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Leonard Woolf, Lisa St Aubin de Teran, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Philip Norman, Rose Tremain, Virginia Woolf, William Boyd

The first of the Book Marketing Council’s “Best Young British Novelists” promotions in 1983 came at an odd time. The British publishing industry was struggling, mostly due to outdated methods, and a quick and dirty fix was needed. Hence the promotion. And it worked. Well, it did for me at least. Christopher Priest was the only one of the featured writers whose work I was already familiar with (by this time I’d read Philip Norman’s book on The Beatles, Shout!, but I’m not sure I associated the Philip Norman featured in the promotion with the author of that book), but I read the associated issue of Granta cover to cover (one of the few times I can say that of the magazine) and discovered a good handful of writers whose work interested me. For a while after that I would religiously buy each new book by Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Adam Mars-Jones, Ian McEwan, and Graham Swift. I’ve read, with pleasure, the occasional novel by Rose Tremain and Lisa St Aubin de Teran, without consistently following their work, and though I’ve tried the occasional book by Martin Amis I’ve never really got on with his writing. Over the years, I stopped following most of these writers (Ishiguro I dropped quite quickly, then picked up again later and do now follow him). So today only Boyd and Swift are writers whose new work I religiously buy and read.

Which brings me to the latest William Boyd novel, Trio. What I like about Boyd is his storytelling, which is why it is no surprise that along the way he has written a couple of very effective spy stories. He does come up with some quite arresting metaphors and descriptive passages, but in the main his prose can be a little pedestrian. But his control of pace, revelation, drama, is powerful enough to keep you reading even if the writing might limp a little. Even so, I was a little startled by how flat the opening of this novel seemed:

Elfrida Wing stirred, grunted and shifted sleepily in her bed as the summer’s angled morning sun brightened the room, printing a skewed rectangle of lemony-gold light onto the olive-green-flecked wallpaper close by her pillow.

Yeah, that reads like someone trying too hard, like a writing-class exercise in stuffing as many descriptive words as possible into a single sentence. Then you turn the page to the start of chapter two (the chapters are short in this novel, mostly only two or three pages, which is one reason that the lumbering, over-emphatic description feels too much), and you read: “Talbot Kydd woke abruptly from his dream.” Then another couple of pages and another chapter begins: “Anny Viklund woke up and, as she did every morning as consciousness slowly returned, she wondered if this day was going to be the day that she died.”

Three successive chapters beginning in exactly the same way: the full name of the character followed by a description of them waking up. It is laboured, repetitive, and it is hardly the most inspired or inspiring way to introduce the three central characters who make up the Trio of the title. I’ve come to expect fancier footwork than this from Boyd, even at his most pedestrian.

We are well over half way through the novel before it begins to dawn on us what Boyd is doing here. Elfrida is an alcoholic one-time novelist who hasn’t written anything other than fanciful titles for never-to-be-written books in over ten years. At the height of her fame, and to her perennial disgust, she was always called the new Virginia Woolf. It doesn’t help that she can’t stand Woolf’s work, which may be one of the reasons why she stopped writing. But now, between drinks of vodka from the countless old Sarson’s Malt Vinegar bottles she has stashed around the house, she gets an idea for a new novel, one that will lay the old ghost while getting her back into print: She will write a novel about the last day of Virginia Woolf.

Inevitably, she gets no further than the first paragraph, which she rewrites over and over again. A typical example reads:

Virginia Woolf was sleeping. On the wall by her bed a pale parallelogram of lemony early-morning sunlight crept towards her face. When the sunlight hit her eyes, she grunted and turned over, but consciousness had indisputably dawned in her brain and was urging her awake.

The openings of the first three chapters are all variations on the opening of the Virginia Woolf novel. Elfrida herself grunts and shifts with the lemony light. Talbot’s dream figures in several of the putative openings, and his own story that follows will take the form of an awakening to a clearer understanding of what is going on around him (he is a film producer out of step with the modern world of the late-1960s, coming to terms with his own homosexuality, and also coming to recognise that his trusted partner is defrauding him). And Elfrida’s various opening paragraphs always end with Woolf recognising that “this was going to be the last day of her life”, echoing Anny’s own premonition. Anny is a young American film star brought to Britain to add cachet to the film Talbot is currently producing, but she also brings with her a host of troubles, mostly initiated by her former husband who is now a wanted terrorist, and the more she tries to run away from things the fewer places she has to turn, until the story does indeed end in her death.

So we have it: the three interweaving stories that make up this trio are all variations on the last day of Virginia Woolf. Elfrida herself is, of course, the most Woolf-like. At one point, frustrated that no publisher wants the novel she is planning (1968, when most of the novel takes place, was the nadir of interest in the Bloomsbury crowd) and beginning to suffer from DTs, and therefore in a mental state closely resembling that of Virginia Woolf in March 1941,she buys a secondhand fur coat, stuffs stones into the pocket, and plans to march into the Ouse near Woolf’s home at Rodmell. A farcical intervention stops this happening, and she ends up drying out in a religious establishment outside Taunton.

If Elfrida offers the closest parallel to Woolf, Talbot and Anny are the more engaging characters. This is because Elfrida has been defeated, knows it, and is complicit in her own downfall. Talbot and Anny are both bemused by events but are still trying to keep ahead of the game. Talbot succeeds, Anny doesn’t, perhaps ending as Woolf herself did (thought there is an unresolved mystery here), but at least there is more sense of them playing an active part in their own lives.

Thinking of Elfrida, I wonder how Boyd pitched this novel to his publisher. Things have moved on since 1968, the Bloomsberries are fashionable again, so to that extent he had an easier job. But still: “It’s a novel about the last day of Virginia Woolf, only it is set in 1968 and Woolf never appears.” Actually, Leonard Woolf is seen at a distance once, still living at Monk’s House and irrascibly chasing away would-be sightseers. In the end it’s a clever book, but perhaps more clever than good, a satisfying intellectual confection rather than something more engaging.

Here We Are

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Graham Swift

In writing about Graham Swift before I have referenced the first Granta Best Young British Novelist feature, which was where I discovered him. His piece there was an extract from his novel, Waterland, which I thought was one of the very best pieces in that magazine. Of course I read the novel, of course I was blown away by it. Since then, my only complaint about Swift (who remains one of my favourite novelists) has been that he has never again written anything like Waterland. But I’m beginning to realise that, of course, he has, that every novel owes a structural debt to Waterland.

That is something that is obvious in his wonderful new novel, Here We Are, even if, on the surface, there is no comparison whatsoever. In Waterland story and history intertwine, chronology is disrupted, and landscape plays a formative part in everything the novel does. In Here We Are story and history intertwine, though on a very different scale; chronology is disrupted, we are being told this story in 2009, 1959 and 1940, without it always being apparent which year we are viewing the narration from; and again landscape is formative, though in this case the landscape is restricted to a pier in Brighton and a middle class house in Oxford.

One of the things I find distinctive about Swift’s writing is how he makes the end of the story obvious right at the beginning; there can be no surprise in the story, and yet somehow there is. It’s a technique that requires great skill in the construction of the story, the ability to give out candid revelations and yet still hold something back without ever seeming to do so. It is something you don’t come across very often, and never as consistently and as skilfully done as Swift manages.

We know that in the summer season at the end of the pier in Brighton the Great Pablo and Eve (actually Ronnie and Evie) are the hit of the show, rising inexorably to top the bill. We know that Ronnie and Evie are engaged to be married the moment the season ends in September, but for some reason that marriage will never happen. There is a tragedy, a mystery, and Ronnie is never seen again. The compere of that show, the person who secured that slot on the bill for Ronnie, is his old army buddy, Jack Robinson, though he will go on to become a famous actor under his real name, Jack Robbins, even if he never quite gets the knighthood that has so often been promised. And we know that, 50 years after the event, Evie will look back on that time in Brighton and recall her 49-year marriage to Jack, whose career she managed and guided to its success.

That’s a lot to tell us in the early pages of quite a short novel. With all that information, surely we know how it’s going to turn out, surely we can guess the secrets that are being hidden in plain sight?

Except that Ronnie is a talented stage magician. We see him evacuated from Bethnal Green at the start of the Second World War, and placed with an elderly childless couple on the outskirts of Oxford. Here, Ronnie has the happy childhood he never had at home. And the surrogate father is a one-time magician who teaches him the tricks of the trade. After the war he must perforce return to his widowed mother who has no sympathy with his dreams of going on the stage. But during his national service he meets Jack Robbins, another stage-struck youngster who is already starting to make a name for himself as a comedian. When Jack Robinson, as he now styles himself, gets to head up the show on Brighton pier for the summer season 1959, he tells Ronnie he can get him a spot on the bill if Ronnie can recruit a pretty assistant. He recruits out-of-work chorine Evie. The two hit it off, both on stage and off; they become engaged and their act is the hit of the show. All of which is told with a nostalgic glow, except for the hint of something tragic in the offing.

And remember, Ronnie is a talented magician, and magicians never reveal the secret of their act. Evie allows herself to be seduced by Jack. Does Ronnie know? Evie is sure he does, but all Ronnie wants to talk about is a new climax for their routine. It is spectacular, and on the final performance of the last night of the season, it builds to … well, something that isn’t quite what we expected. But we don’t exactly know what it is: Swift does not reveal his secrets, the mystery remains unresolved.

Magic is a business that involves misdirection. So is novel writing, and Graham Swift is a quiet, understated master of the trade. He shows us everything, and yet none of it is quite what we think.

Swift’s Atonement

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Graham Swift, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, William Boyd

Of that generation of mainstream writers who were brought to prominence by the first of Granta‘s Best Young Writers promotions, I steadily lost interest in most of them over the years. Amis fils fell away after just a couple of books, I managed four by Pat Barker before losing interest, it was pretty much the same with Julian Barnes, and the last few novels by Ian McEwan were so dull that the most recent has been sitting on my to-be-read pile for a couple of years without me ever feeling like opening it. Only William Boyd and Graham Swift have, for rather different reasons, stayed the course: I enjoy the historical sweep of Boyd’s novels at his best, and the narrow focus of Swift’s at his best.

Reprint: Throwing Away the Orthodoxy

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Aldous Huxley, Arthur C Clarke, Bob Shaw, Brian Aldiss, Christopher Priest, Ed Bryant, Eric Frank Russell, Eric Rohmer, Gardner Dozois, George Orwell, George R.R. Martin, Graham Greene, Graham Swift, H.G. Wells, Ian McEwan, J.G. Ballard, Jack Dann, Jerry Pournelle, John Clute, John Fowles, John Jarrold, John Sladek, Kazuo Ishiguro, m john harrison, Martin Amis, Olaf Stapledon, Peter Ackroyd, Philip K. Dick, Rebecca West, Richard Cowper, Roz Kaveney, Thomas Huxley, Thomas M. Disch, William Boyd

I’ve written a lot about Chris Priest over the years, and most of it has ended up in What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction or Call And Response, but there is one major piece that hasn’t been reprinted. It is this interview I did with him in 1999, not long after the publication of The Extremes and The Dream Archipelago. The interview was first published in Vector 206, July-August 1999.

THROWING AWAY THE ORTHODOXY
A conversation about sex, innocence and science fiction

Paul Kincaid:  Let’s start at the end. You have just brought out all the Dream Archipelago stories collected in one volume. Why have you gone back to that?

 Christopher Priest:  Well, there’s a bad reason and a good reason.

Let’s have the bad reason.

Making an Elephant

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Graham Swift

Making an Elephant: Writing from Within by Graham Swift. As with Unsworth, I’ve been following Swift’s work for a good few years now, ever since Waterland. He is not a very prolific writer, and has produced very little non-fiction, which makes the sudden appearance of this collection rather strange, particularly as it is something of a mess. There are interviews he has conducted and two interviews he has given, there are snatches of memoir, an introduction to a new edition of Montaigne, and a bunch of poems some of which are quite good though best when telling odd allusive stories rather like Cavafy. Practically everything in the book has a long introduction, some of the introductions are longer than the pieces. For example, there is a long piece about Wandsworth (where he lives) covering the history of the area, his family’s background in the area, and especially his liking for a particular pub near the prison that has since been demolished, all of which turns out to be an introduction to an interview with him conducted in that pub, the interview being much shorter and much less interesting than the introduction. There is also a sense of the precious about the book in chapter titles like ‘Buying a Guitar with Ish’ (Kazuo Ishiguro) or ‘In the Bamboo Club with Caz’ (Caryl Phillips), and to be honest his constant talk of ‘writer friends’, the fact that he seems to know no-one who isn’t a writer, doesn’t help to dispel that image. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book more than I feared I might, especially the chapter in which he seeks a reclusive and apparently unknown writer in Prague at the time of the Velvet Revolution, and the memoir of his father, both of which are model of how such pieces should be written.

First published at LiveJournal, 1 April 2009.