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December 10, 2008

GUEST PROFILE: WHISKEY IN THE JAR - Part 3

Being the third of a four-part profile of Benjamin Black based on an interview that Jim Ruland conducted with the author during a recent visit to Dublin. Read Part One and Part Two.

At the beginning of Benjamin Black’s second novel, The Silver Swan, we find Quirke back in Dublin, but under extraordinary circumstances: after getting riotously drink at his favorite watering hole, “flushed and bulbous and bleary” our hero has decided to give up the drink. Depriving Quirke of his whiskey is akin to sending Popeye into battle without his spinach.

“I just wanted to see what he’d be like when he’s sober," Black admits. "He’s worse than when he’s drunk! I mean he’s such an awful person, Quirke. He’s a horrible person.”

It’s not often that you meet a novelist who holds his protagonist in such low esteem.

“He’s a pretty grim character,” he continues, “but I think he’s real. He’s no Phillip Marlowe. He’s no knight in shining armor. All he has is his curiosity. His unwillingness to let something go, and that’s not a great thing to boast of. So I think he’s nicely awful. That’s what I like about him. He’s cold, he’s selfish. My wife says, He’s just a man!”

Maybe so, but Quirke differs from his countrymen, including his author, in at least one regard...

“I wanted to write about somebody very large and slightly awkward because that would interest me. How a really large person manages the world. Especially this country, where people are quite short.”

Banville3

Quirke makes his decision to stop drinking in McGonagle’s Pub. When I ask the author if there is a corollary, he admits there is: an old place called McDaid’s on Harry Street, which is just off of Grafton Street, the pedestrian thoroughfare just north of the city center.

McDaid’s is one of Dublin’s oldest drinking establishments and was once Brendan Behan’s local and many of Ireland’s men of letters have spent time there, including Flann O’Brien, J.P. Donleavy and Patrick Kavanagh. Before McDaid's was turned into a public house, the edifice housed a Moravian church and before that, ironically enough, a morgue.

“McDaid’s was the one they all went to cure their hangovers. How they managed to do so much drinking and do all that work…” Black leaves the sentence hanging as he pours more water into his tea.

“I often wonder if they did drink as much as they said they did. Brendan Behan, for instance, was an undiagnosed diabetic. And I suspect that a lot of his problems came from diabetes not from drink. I couldn’t work with a hangover. I can’t do anything with a hangover except sit and feel sorry myself.”

McDaids

For all Quirke’s flaws, self pity isn’t one of them. Quirke’s sobriety forces him to confront himself, warts and all. Quirke’s institutional past is hinted at in Christine Falls, and while he has a long way to go before he achieves enlightenment, he revisits his humble origins in The Silver Swan. In this respect Quirke is a symbol for the way modern Ireland has been forced to come to terms with its past: church scandals, industrial schools, pedophilia.

“We’ve learned so many horrible secrets about ourselves that that was preying on my mind. And I wanted to give him a past that was shadowed. First of all, to make him an orphan so he wouldn’t know his background because that’s the source of his curiosity, his urge to know, to find out secrets. When he looks back all there is is silence about his earliest background. That was a conscious choice. And I wanted to give him the weight of a dark past.”

The burden of troubled yesterdays drives much of the action in The Silver Swan. Like Christine Falls, it begins with a body and a cover-up. This time an old acquaintance of Quirke’s comes to ask for a favor: he doesn’t want an autopsy performed on his young wife, Deirdre, who turned up on the rocks of Dalkey Island. If such a request seems preposterous, it has less to do with our knowledge of modern science than our lack of understanding of mid-century mores where a mysterious and tragic death by drowning was preferable to an accidental overdose or, even worse, suicide.

DublinSwan

Quirke, of course, ignores his friend’s request and delves into the case. He quickly zeroes in on Deirdre’s business partner, a two-bit lothario who draws Quirke’s niece, Phoebe, into his web of deceit. The Silver Swan is superior to Christine Falls largely because Phoebe, one of the former novel’s more cheerful characters, is given her own voice. As a result, not only do we see Quirke in a more nuanced light, Phoebe emerges as a fully rounded character in her own right.

“I’ve become very interested in Phoebe,” Black confesses. “I think she’s a fascinating character. I think the next one I do, whenever I do it, I’m going to feature her quite strongly. My agent insists I’m in love with her. Maybe I am in love with her."

Tomorrow: Through a Glass Darkly  (Photos by Nuvia Ruland.)

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  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

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