The Silver Swan

The Silver Swan
Author: Benjamin Black 2008 290 pp
My rating: 3*
Started September 22 2009, Finished September 24 2009.

Benjamin Black is an alias for John Banville, a Booker Prize winning Irish novelist, who has taken to slumming or at least paying the bills by writing detective novels under the name of Black. As one might expect, The Silver Swan consequently has considerable literary merit. Alas, it does not rise above the pack as a compelling who-done-it, failing to generate much suspense or interest in its central mystery. At the very end, however, it does find itself in a memorably indefinite and bleak place.

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Strange, she thought again, this business of people dying. It happened all the time, of course, it was as commonplace as birth. To not be here and then to be here was one thing, but to have been here, and made a life in all its variousness and complexity and then suddenly to be gone, that was what was truly uncanny. (72)

Everything rushes back, everything replaces itself. … When she turned back to the hall the emptiness of the house rushed at her, as if she were a vacuum into which everything was pouring, unstoppably. (272)