The Drowned by John Banville review – death and drizzle in 50s Ireland

Tight-lipped humour thrums through the latest in the Booker winner’s Strafford and Quirke crime series, which centres on a university professor and his missing wife
Anthony CumminsSun 13 Oct 2024 15.00 BSTShareJohn Banville is so far staying true to his suggestion in 2022 that The Singularities would be his final “non-crime” novel, preferring in late life to concentrate instead on books that take him five months to write rather than five years – not the painstaking high-art endeavour of Joyce and Henry James so much as the prolific pragmatism of another of his masters, Georges Simenon. Set in the buttoned-up Ireland of his 1950s boyhood, the crime series that Banville began under the alias Benjamin Black (dropped in 2020) now reaches its 10th instalment with his latest book, The Drowned, another absorbing outing for the widowed Dublin pathologist Quirke and his reluctant sidekick DI Strafford, last seen in 2023’s The Lock-Up.
Banville is as much concerned with the emotional life of this central duo as he is with the book’s driving mysteryHalloween draws near when a university professor, Armitage, turns up at the door of Charles and Charlotte Ruddock, new parents holidaying on the Wicklow coast. His wife, Dee, is missing – he’s asking for help – yet he seems bizarrely laid-back, happy to accept a whiskey, with the unnerving habit of referring to her in the past tense. And while he and the Ruddocks would appear to be strangers, their exchange bears a whiff of prior antipathy – or at least that’s how it seems to an unlucky bystander inveigled into Armitage’s bid for help: one Denton Wymes, a convicted paedophile, once jailed, now living as a hermit.
Into this tangle comes detective inspector Strafford, blindsided by his estranged wife’s desire for a divorce (good job they got married in England), just as his sort-of girlfriend, Phoebe – Quirke’s daughter – reveals that she’s pregnant: cue much awkward small talk between the two men, reunited by the case of Dee’s disappearance.
Banville is as much concerned with the emotional life of this central duo as he is with the book’s driving mystery. Mid-century mores of class and creed also exert steady pressure on the narrative, with seemingly no aspect of life free from ethno-sectarian interpretation, from surnames to diction to choices of drink at the bar. While Strafford’s fearful disbelief that he’s to become a father gets plenty of airtime, the drift of the action underlines how far he is from being the novel’s main character, as Banville’s third-person narration bobs around the thoughts of its diverse cast. (More than one of them is preoccupied by phrases from Joyce’s Ulysses; there’s even a character called Molly, who reappears from an earlier instalment to seal a happyish resolution with a “yes” of sorts.)
View image in fullscreenJohn Banville, who is concentrating on crime fiction in later life. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty ImagesTight-lipped humour thrums amid the drizzly downbeat ambience. When a cop named Hackett, one of Quirke’s old confreres, inquires if Strafford and his daughter are “in a friendly way”, Quirke concedes grudgingly that Strafford “takes her out now and then… Dinner, or the pictures, that kind of thing.” (“Ah. Right. Dinner, or the pictures.”) Minor characters aren’t only foils but a focus of emotion – witness scenes that turn on Hackett’s rapidly deteriorating health – and the novel’s unhurried pace ratchets into gear after a second disappearance, this time of a toddler, which plunges us into the heart-rending dilemma that threatens to destroy a protagonist in the wrong place at the wrong time. All that before the action finally boils over in the company of a master criminal seduced by his own villainy – the kind of character that has always fascinated Banville even in his non-genre output, at least since 1989’s The Book of Evidence.
While readers of past instalments may find satisfaction in the comeuppance handed out to the novel’s prime malefactor, The Drowned stands alone, too, suspenseful on its own terms. Twining the separate threads is the abiding theme of male possessiveness, sometimes vengeful, sometimes solicitous – instincts that Banville has anatomised time and again, not least in his Booker-winning widower’s monologue The Sea (2005). And while it’s ultimately evil, not good, that gives The Drowned its crackling denouement, the novel takes care to part on a more cheerful note – even if the logic of the series demands that Quirke can hardly be content for too long.
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