Benjamin Black/John Banville's The Silver Swan

"She held up her wrist and examined, the white furrows his fingers had left there to which the blood was rapidly returning. Everything rushes back, everything replaces itself."

Yes, it takes a John Banville to write this as Benjamin Black. The phenomenological aesthetics of the body, the veins and the blood, the gushing wound in absentia in this case epitomizes the crime narrative. Isn't the movement of a crime narrative one where "everything rushes back" to recreate a past? But how does everything replace itself? Can anything ever replace itself? Perhaps only life can replace itself but then there's the wall of death to be considered. The thing which can always replace itself is a Banvillian ghost; a ghost of a crime and a crime of a ghost.

One more:

"May be if you looked at anything, any event, closely enough you would see the future packed into it, folded tight, like the tight-folded elastic filling of a golf ball."

This is a lilting logic of foreboding in a whodunit where the temporal structure is predominantly retroactive. Everything rushes back not only to form a past but replaces itself in and by the future.

'The Silver Swan' is one of Banville/Black's most accomplished crime novels. Not only is it psychic, atmospheric and existential, as one would expect from a literary if not wholly aesthetic writer, taking to the popular genre of the whodunit, the novel is beautifully layered in terms of its narrative.

The detective is replaced by Quirke, the pathologist who is such a psychic character that you can't trust the pseudo-detective figure. Inspector Hackett. instead of slipping into the classic detective couple. creates more nuisance than anything else for Quirke who always carries the poignant smell of a corpse by virtue of his profession. The mid 20th century Ireland with its social moralism and religious industry forms an intriguing historical backdrop. But what's special about this novel is the movement of its narrative.

The detective doesn't find anything. There's no detective as such and the police are pretty clueless as well. The mystery solves itself as the third person omniscient narrator takes to the myriad characters and goes inside out to narrate the crime retroactively from within the past as each chapter takes up a particular individual's perspective. What's most interesting is that in this flashback, the dead victim gets to tell her own version of the past through the omniscient narrator and by the end of the novel, it's the killer's turn to tell his own tale through the narrator's voice. Even at the end, though the police are in the know of things, law doesn't take its course.

The novel leaves the reader in an intensely humanizing and yet ethically unsettling place where the scene of crime lures us with human empathy as well as a profound sense of aesthetic delectation.