Catholics

Review: Dark Irish Mystery

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★★★★★

Celebrated author John Banville’s latest novel is a slow-burn mystery simmering with secrets, fears, and sins. Almost everyone in it seems a bit off in one way or another, including Detective Inspector Strafford. He’s a fascinating character: brooding, alienated from himself, his feelings, and even the woman he thinks he loves. “It sometimes appeared to Strafford that his life was a series of tableaux as elaborate, studied and unreal as a stage performance at Versailles at the height of the reign of the Sun King.”

The mystery opens in the 1950s with the discovery of a flashy car in the middle of a rural Irish field and a peculiarly calm man claiming that he and his wife have argued, she’s run off and he’s been looking for her. Has she had an accident, committed suicide, or just abandoned him?

At a nearby house where the police are called, the couple renting the place for a week seem to know this man but pretend they don’t. When the local cop shows up, he’s drunk, which adds to the peculiar buzz underlying every word and glance of these people. The mystery fades in and out of view from that point, seeming to parallel a previous mystery Strafford and his pathologist colleague Quirke were involved in. At the end of the novel we find out why that other case lingers here.

Along the way we dive into and out of Strafford’s ambivalent love life and alcoholic Quirke’s profound loneliness. This is where some of the book’s best, most moving prose can be found. And writers who want to polish their dialogue can take a master class from Banville in Chapter 5 where Strafford and his estranged wife have a long conversation that’s quietly nasty and deeply unsettling for both of them. It’s a scene I read twice because it’s so finely crafted. 

There’s also a dazzling, deeply moving foray into the depths of mourning and loneliness which details how badly Quirke is badly coping with the death of his wife. Banville paints the portrait with elegant, moving brush stokes: Quirke feels as “if nothing had happened. The blunt, unceasing continuity of things, baffled him, affronted him. It was a scandal, the entire indifferent business of being alive.”

Equally as fascinating for this American reader, there are many smarky interactions where people recognize with great accuracy each other’s origins and religion based on their accents, something that does not have the charm of anything Henry Higgins sings in My Fair Lady.

Adding to the overall melancholy of the book is the deft description of scenery and the weather which is grim whether the summer has gone on too long or winter rain is pelting down. Physical and emotional atmosphere is everything in this novel.  The Booker Prize-winner is a masterful writer about anything that has been lost.  Here’s how colleagues feel after their boss has died:

“Yet his going left a vast and unfillable absence. It was as if a sacred idol, present for so long that even the attendant priests had ceased to take much notice of it, had been stolen by some sacrilegious vandal, and suddenly the rgeat, glittering temple was reduced to bricks and mortar, and nothing remained of its former sanctity, save a wisp of incense and a gleam of light through one corner of a stained-glass window.”

Lev Raphael is the former crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and has reviewed for The Washington Post as well as several Michigan radio stations, one of which aired his interview show. His guests there included Doris Kearns Goodwin, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, and Erica Jong.

 

Tudor Thrills & Chills

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Vanessa Wilkie’s book focuses on a powerful woman and her dynasty, a woman who should be much better known.  This is a compelling story of upward mobility as Alice Spencer, the daughter of a wealthy sheep farmer, rose to wealth and status through two important marriages, married her daughters off extremely well, and worked hard to maintain all the right connections.

Status anxiety was rampant in this period and the author clearly lays out the importance of finding the right patron and keeping him happy, of marrying well, of expanding one’s holdings of land, and doing everything possible to rise higher.  There was always the possibility of the Wheel of Fortune dropping you to the bottom in an instant.  Doom could be quick and sudden and your head could end up on a pole.

There are times when the book reads like a thriller, as when Alice’s husband, the Earl of Derby, is approached by Catholic plotters who want him to depose Elizabeth and restore Catholicism in England.  They pick him because he’s a descendant of Henry VIII’s sister and might be a Catholic despite publicly adhering to the Protestant faith.  He alerts authorities that he plans to lead them to London where they should be arrested as traitors.  The ride south takes several several days.

Given legitimate paranoia about attempts to overthrow the Queen, there was the chance that he himself could be arrested, tortured, and executed on suspicion of treason, leaving his wife ruined and persona non grata.  It’s a harrowing episode in a generally well-wrought story of power and privilege. 

In some ways, the Tudor period in which Alice began to rise feels very close to ours: she needed good publicity as she made her way into the upper realms of Tudor society and did everything possible to enhance the position of her three daughters.  Alice, a book lover, was the recipient of fulsome praise via author’s dedications and thereby “gained social capital for being celebrated as [a patron] of the arts and religious works.”  No less a poet than The Faerie Queene’s Edmund Spenser  praised her in some really wretched verse that seems to have helped boost her reputation.  

The prose in this book often undermines the strength of the narrative because it’s filled with words like “probably,” “likely,” “would have,” “could have, “maybe,” “surely,” “may have been,” and “very likely.”

The author does offer up some fascinating material, like the fact that there were actually two forms of secular court at the time whose jurisdiction overlapped:  the common-law courts and so-called equitable courts that dealt with exceptions demanding demanded special attention.  This comes up in the context of a nasty lawsuit brought by Alice’s brother-in law that lasted for well over a decade.  And then there’s a bizarre, horrendous sex scandal worthy of the Marquis de Sade involving one noble daughter and granddaughter.  It’s so freakish, it could truly have been the focus of a separate book.

Alice Spenser was a strong, determined woman who actively built and fostered “a political and social network” while creating “a persona of grandeur” and amassing “landed wealth and power.”  Wilkie doesn’t downplay her faults–like being overly litigious and caring so very much about propriety–but deftly situates her in the complex, murky terrain of upper-crust Tudor and Stuart England.

Lev Raphael recently reviewed a dual biography of Queen Elizabeth I and Marie de Medici: Blood, Fire, and Gold.