John Banville has been among those grounded by the Iceland volcano, his New York launch for Elegy for April, his latest Benjamin Black novel, Eyjafjallajokull 's latest casualty. Fortunately, TEV is delighted to offer this exclusive excerpt from the novel. The scene is from Chapter Four, wherein Quirke - the brooding pathologist star of the series - has been released from a spell in rehab and returns to his apartment with Malachy, his adoptive brother. Please come back tomorrow when the Friday giveaway will offer up a copy of this wonderfully moody novel. Enjoy.
***
Quirke’s flat had the sheepish and resentful air of an unruly classroom suddenly silenced by the unexpected return of the teacher. He put down his suitcase and walked through the rooms, peering into corners, examining things, not knowing what he expected to find, and found everything as it had been on the morning of Christmas Eve when the taxi had come to take him, sweating and shaking, to St. John’s. This was obscurely disappointing; had he been hoping for some outrageous violation, the windows smashed, his belongings plundered, his bed overturned and the sheets shat on? It did not seem right that all here should have remained intact and unaffected while he was away suffering such trials. He returned to the living room. His overcoat was still buttoned. There had been no fi re lit in the fl at for nearly two months, and the air felt colder in here than it had outside. He plugged in the one- bar electric fi re, hearing himself grunt as he leaned down to the socket; immediately there was a scorched smell as the reddening coil burned off the weeks of dust that had accumulated on it. Then he went into the kitchen and turned all four burners of the gas stove on to full, and lit the oven, too, and set it to high. Malachy Griffin had not ventured past the front doorway, where he stood now framed with the landing behind him, in his gray mackintosh and woolen muffler, watching Quirke grimly claiming back his territory. Malachy was tall and gaunt with thinning hair; his rimless spectacles gave to his eyes a teary shine.
“Can I get anything for you?” he asked.
Quirke turned. “What?” He was at the big kitchen window, with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. He had a lost, vague look. Fogged light fell down on him from the window, a thin, silvery misting.
“You’ll need provisions. Milk. Bread.”
“I’ll go up in a while to the Q and L.”
A faintly desperate silence fell. Quirke wished his brother- inlaw would either leave or come inside and shut the door. Yet at the same time he did not want him to go, not yet; even Malachy’s company was preferable to being left alone with himself in these suddenly estranged and sullen surroundings. He began to open a cupboard door, then stopped. He laughed. “Christ, I was about to pour us both a drink!”
“Why don’t we go to the Shelbourne?” Malachy said. “You probably didn’t have any breakfast, did you?” He was thinking how Quirke’s largeness— that great head, those massive shoulders— made him seem all the more vulnerable now.
“I don’t eat much, these days. The metabolism changes when the booze is taken away. Like a baby that’s been weaned, I suppose.”
The gas jets hissed and spluttered, spreading a faint, flabby warmth on the air.
“All the same,” Malachy said, “you have to—”
“Don’t say I have to keep my strength up.”
There was another silence, this time offended a little on Malachy’s side. Quirke waved a hand in irritated apology, shaking his head. He turned off the gas. “All right, let’s go,” he said.
The atmosphere outdoors had the texture of wetted, cold cotton. Malachy’s car was parked at the curb; although Malachy had picked him up in it from St. John’s, it was only now that Quirke recognized it, with a dull shock, as the big old black Humber once owned by Judge Garret Griffi n, his adoptive father. The Judge, now dead, was Malachy’s natural father; he had done them both great wrong. Why was Malachy driving the wicked old man’s motorcar— what was it, a gesture of forgiveness and fi lial piety?
Quirke suggested that they walk. They set off along Mount Street, their footsteps rising up a beat late behind them. There was coal dust from the city’s fi replaces suspended in the fog; they could feel the grit of it on their lips and between their teeth. At the corner of Merrion Square they turned left in the direction of Baggot Street.
“By the way,” Quirke said, “do you know that young one at the hospital, Conor Latimer’s daughter?”
“Latimer? Which department is she in?”
“I don’t know. General, I imagine. She’s a junior.”
Malachy pondered; Quirke could almost hear the sound of his brain working, as if he were fl icking through a set of fi le cards; Malachy prided himself on his memory for detail, or used to, before Sarah died and he lost interest in such things. “Latimer,” he said again. “Yes. Alice Latimer— no, April. I’ve seen her about. Why?”
The traffic lights at the corner of Fitzwilliam Street, turning red, pierced through the mist with an unnatural and almost baleful brightness.
“Phoebe knows her. They’re friends.” Malachy was silent. Mention of Phoebe always made for constraint between the two men; after all, Phoebe had grown up thinking Malachy, not Quirke, was her father. “It seems,” Quirke said, clearing his throat, “she hasn’t been heard from for some time.”
Malachy did not look at him. “Heard from?”
They turned right onto Baggot Street. A tinker woman in a tartan shawl accosted them, doing her piteous whine; Quirke gave her a coin, and she gabbled a blessing after them.
“Phoebe is worried,” Quirke said. “It seems they’re in the habit of speaking every day on the phone, she and the Latimer girl, but it’s been a week or more since she had a call from her.”
“Has she been at work, April Latimer?”
“No—sent in a sick- note.”
“Well then.”
“Phoebe is not convinced.”
“Yes,” Malachy said after a pause, “but Phoebe does worry.” It was true; for one so young, Phoebe had known a disproportion of misfortune in her life— betrayal, rape, violent deaths— and how would she not fear the worst? “What about the family?” Malachy asked. “Bill Latimer would be her uncle, yes? Our esteemed Minister.” They both smiled grimly.
“I don’t know,” Quirke said, “I don’t think Phoebe has spoken to them.”
“And the brother? Hasn’t he rooms in Fitzwilliam Square?”
“Oscar Latimer— is he her brother?”
“I think so.” Malachy was brooding again. “She has a bit of a reputation, so I hear,” he said, “the same Miss or I should say Doctor Latimer.”
“Yes? A reputation for what?”
“Oh, you know, the usual. Drinks a bit, goes about with a fast crowd. There’s a fellow at the College of Surgeons, I forget his name. Foreigner.” He paused, frowning. “And that one from the Gate, the actress, what do you call her?— Galway?”
“Isabel Galloway?” Quirke chuckled. “That’s fast, all right.”
They were crossing at the top of Merrion Street when a green double- decker bus appeared suddenly out of the fog, bearing down on them with a roar, and they had to skip in haste to the safety of the pavement. A reek of porter from the doorway of Doheny & Nesbitts made Quirke’s stomach heave.
“So she might have gone to England, in that case,” Malachy said, and gave a little cough.
Quirke knew what “gone to En gland” was a euphemism for. “Oh, come on, Mal,” he said drily. “Wouldn’t she have got one of the likely lads at the hospital to help her with any little problem in that line?”
Malachy did not reply, and Quirke, amused, glanced at him and saw his mouth tightened in a deploring pout. Malachy was consultant obstetrician at the Hospital of the Holy Family and did not take kindly even to the suggestion that April Latimer or anyone else could have got an illegal abortion there.
At the Shelbourne, outside the revolving glass door, Quirke balked. “I’m sorry, Mal,” he muttered, “I can’t face it.” The thought of all that chatter and brightness in there, the winking glasses and the shining faces of the morning drinkers, was not to be borne. He was sweating; he could feel the wet hotness on his chest and on his forehead under the rim of his hat that was suddenly too tight. They turned and trudged back the way they had come.
Not a word was exchanged between them until they got to the Q and L. Quirke did not know why the shop was called the Q and L, and had never been curious enough to ask. The proprietor— or more properly the proprietor’s son, since the shop was owned by an ancient widow, bedridden these many years— was a fat, middle- aged fellow with a big moon face and brilliantined hair slicked fl at. He always seemed dressed up for the races, in his accustomed outfit of checked shirt and bow tie and canary yellow waistcoat, tweed jacket, and cream- colored corduroy slacks. He was prone to unpredictable, brief displays of skittishness — he might suddenly yodel, or grin like a chimp, and more than once Quirke had been present to witness him essay a few dance steps behind the counter, clicking his fingers and stamping the heels of his chestnut- brown brogues. Today he was in undemonstrative mood, due to the dampening effects of the fog, perhaps. Quirke bought a Procea loaf, six eggs, butter, milk, two small bundles of kindling, a packet of Senior Service, and a box of Swan Vestas. The look of these things on the counter flooded him suddenly with a wash of self- pity.
“Thanky- voo,” the shopman said plumply, handing over change.
In the flat Quirke unplugged the electric fire— it had made little impression on the big, high- ceilinged room— and crumpled the pages of an ancient copy of the Irish In de pen dent and put them in the grate with the kindling on top and lumps of coal from the scuttle and set a match to the paper and stood back and watched the flames catch and the coils of heavy white smoke snake upwards. Then he went into the kitchen and scrambled two eggs and toasted slices of bread under the gas grill. Malachy accepted a cup of tea but would eat nothing. “My God,” Quirke said, suspending the teapot in midpour, “look at us, like a pair of old biddies on pension day.” They had been married to two sisters. Quirke’s wife, Delia, had died in childbirth, having Phoebe; Malachy’s Sarah had succumbed to a brain tumor two years ago. Being a widower suited Malachy, or so it seemed to Quirke; it was as if he had been born to be bereaved.
Angelus bells were tolling from all quarters of the city.
Quirke sat down at the table, still in his overcoat, and began to eat. He could feel Malachy watching him with the melancholy shadow of a smile. A sort of intimacy, however uneasy, had developed between the two of them since Sarah’s death. They were indeed like two sexless cronies, Quirke reflected, two aging androgynes shuffling arm in arm down the wearying middle stretch of life’s long road. Malachy’s thoughts must have been running on the same lines, for now he startled Quirke by saying, “I’m thinking of retiring— did I tell you?”
Quirke, teacup suspended, stared at him. “Retiring?”
“My heart is not in it anymore,” Mal said, lifting and letting fall his left shoulder, as if to demonstrate a deficiency of ballast on that side.
Quirke set down his cup. “For God’s sake, Malachy, you’re not fifty yet.”
“I feel as if I was. I feel about eighty.”
“You’re still grieving.”
“After all this time?”
“It takes all this time. Sarah was . . .” He faltered, frowning; he did not know how to begin listing the things that Sarah had been. After all, they had loved her, Quirke as well as Malachy, each in his way.
Mal smiled miserably and looked up at the gray light in the window beside the small table where they sat. He sighed. “It’s not Sarah, Quirke, it’s me. Something has gone out of my life, something that’s more than Sarah— I mean, that’s different from Sarah. Something of me.”
Quirke pushed his plate away; his appetite was gone, not that it had been keen to start with. He sat back on the chair and lit a cigarette. Malachy had been reminding him of someone, and now he realized who it was: Harkness, but without the apostate Christian Brother’s invigorating bitterness and biting scorn.
“You have to hold on, Mal. This is all there is, this life. If something is gone out of it for you, it’s your job to replace it.”
Malachy was gazing at him, his eyes hardly visible behind those gleaming lenses; Quirke felt like a specimen being studied under a glass. Now Mal asked softly, “Don’t you ever just want it to be— to be done with?”
“Of course,” Quirke answered impatiently. “In the past couple of months I thought at least once a day it might be best to go, or to be gone, at least— the going itself is the thing I don’t care for.”
Malachy considered this, smiling to himself. “Somebody asked, I can’t remember who, How can we live, knowing that we must die?”
“Or you could say, how can we not live, knowing that death is waiting for us? It makes just as much sense— more, maybe.”
Now Malachy laughed, or at least it was a sort of laugh. “I never knew you to be so enthusiastically on the side of life,” he said. “Doctor Death, they call you at the hospital.”
“I know that,” Quirke said. “I know what they call me.” He tipped the ash of his cigarette into his saucer and saw Malachy’s nostrils twitch in distaste. “Listen, Mal, I’m going to buy a car; why don’t you come and help me pick one out.” Now it was Malachy’s turn to stare. He could not take it in. “But you can’t drive,” he said. “I know I can’t,” Quirke answered wearily. “Everyone keeps telling me that. But I can learn. In fact, I’ve already decided the model I have my eye on.” He waited. “Aren’t you going to ask me what it is?”
Malachy was still staring at him owlishly. “But why?” he asked.
“Why not? I have a sack of money I’ve been accumulating all these years; it’s time I bought something with it, for myself. I’m going for an Alvis.”
“What’s that?”
“Best car the British ever built. Beautiful thing. I knew a fellow that had one— Birtwhistle, at college, remember, who died? Come on, we’ll go up to Crawford’s. There’s a chap there, Protestant, dependable. I did a P.M. last year on his aged mother, who unaccountably fell downstairs and broke her neck the day after she’d made her will.” He winked. “Shall we go?”
Excerpted from ELEGY FOR APRIL: A Novel, published this month by Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright (c) 2010 by Benjamin Black. All rights reserved
"This blog" despises genre fiction? Really?
Posted by: Niall | April 22, 2010 at 10:29 AM
If the editor had gone through this and removed every odd-numbered adjective, it would greatly improve the style of the prose. As it is, it is seriously overloaded with ornamental qualification that impedes, rather than enlightens, the reader.
Posted by: Niall | April 22, 2010 at 10:31 AM
Niall,
This will get deleted, but I agree, the excerpt seems bloated and first-draftish. As a Banville and crime-novel fan I was excited for this but very disappointed.
Posted by: GG Gaynor | April 22, 2010 at 01:34 PM
I'm a great fan of genre fiction. I've never felt "despised" on this blog for that reason.
Posted by: Niall | April 22, 2010 at 01:34 PM
Ah, 'cut most of the adjectives', the first resort of every workshop hack. Banville's work, whether one loves its style or not, is altogether willed, so I don't think an editor would have been allowed to 'improve' his prose. And I'm glad of that, because I love it, and I didn't feel impeded. Niall's, and GG's, mileage, I guess, varies.
Posted by: Tim | April 23, 2010 at 03:02 AM
There's an explanation for this rather loose writing: Banville is not as careful with genre, as he more or less admitted during a recent talk, saying that during a morning he can crank out two thousand words as Benjamin Black, but only two hundred as John Banville.
Posted by: Ward | April 23, 2010 at 07:40 AM
Tim:
I didn't say cut most of the adjectives. Just half of them. And since I've never published anything, I can hardly be considered a hack. Writing is about precision, which means choosing your adjectives carefully, like fine spices. I'm not at all part of that school that believes they can be dispensed with - they can't. But there is such a thing as too much. Conversely, he could go the Lovecraft route, and proliferate adjectives so hysterically that it becomes a new kind of style. But one or the other. Not what he's produced here.
Ward -
This just shows that Banville has a secret contempt for genre literature, because he uses it as an excuse to let his own literary standards down. We should be glad that Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson didn't feel that way about their art.
Posted by: Niall | April 23, 2010 at 08:04 AM
Tim, I also think "hack" is unnecessarily rude. That said, I will say I always tend to be a little suspicious when people object to "adjectives" because that smacks of a rigid predisposition about what writing should be. But I know Niall to be a more sophisticated reader than that.
That said, I don't really agree with his read here. What I have most enjoyed about the Black series are the lush atmospherics of the thing. I find his Dublin so rich and textured that I personally don't want one word less. I love the thickly layered feel of the work. But that's a taste thing in the end, not a provable right/wrong.
I also think Niall is mistaken to posit motivations. Banville is on record as considering Simenon's romans durs among the best books ever written. I don't think it speaks of contempt at all - he simply has a very different artistic mission with each set of books, and recognizes allowances must be made to the conventions at either pole, whether "genre" or "literary." From everything I have heard him say, he has an abiding respect and affection for genre fiction. It is true that he does not consider it "art" the way he considers other writing "art," but that does not translate into contempt - something GG gets wrong about me.
Posted by: TEV | April 23, 2010 at 10:44 AM
TEV -
Those are good points. Perhaps "contempt" is too strong a word. What he seems to be saying is that writing in genre under a new name helps him use a new style, which, upon further reflection is fine. I would say, though, that perhaps he is underestimating what it takes, stylistically, to create the genre style he is aiming for. Lushness is a good thing to aim for. But I do think he uses too many adjectives to say basically the same thing in the excerpt above.
Posted by: Niall | April 23, 2010 at 11:02 AM
Not sure anything so programmatic as cutting half the adjectives is needed, but it does seem that some of the phrases are paradoxical, like "dull shock" or "faintly desperate." I'm just not sure that "shock" can be dull or "desperation" faint. I think this adds to the mushiness to which Niall seems to be reacting.
Posted by: Skip | April 25, 2010 at 04:55 PM
Skip -
Yes, I noticed that too. You can add "obscurely disappointing" to the list. He seems to want to put strange spins on everyday words by modifying them in odd ways. I don't think this works too well for him here, as he keeps making you stop and wonder what on earth he really meant to convey. It's also theatrical in way that doesn't ring true. Take this line, "He could feel Malachy watching him with the melancholy shadow of a smile." Not a melancholy smile, mind you, but a melancholy *shadow* of a smile. He's finessing things to death that he could more effectively present with less pointless ornamentation.
I think that's why the excerpt comes across as inert, for all the stylistic calisthenics he has invested in it.
Posted by: Niall | April 26, 2010 at 10:19 AM
How about "flabby warmth"? Or: "The atmosphere outdoors had the texture of wetted, cold cotton." I still don't know what the hell that means.
Posted by: GG Gaynor | April 26, 2010 at 10:40 AM
I also question Banville's motives for the whole Benjamin Black thing. It's not even meant to be a secret that Black=Banville - the connection is explained in large type on the home page of the Black website. So why use the pen name in the first place? To be able to conveniently separate himself from lesser writing? Preservation of legacy? "Oh, well, that whole Ben Black thing was just a lark, nothing serious, you know."
Maybe he's addressed this in interviews, I don't know. I'm sure someone here can fill me in.
Posted by: GG Gaynor | April 26, 2010 at 10:49 AM
Actually, "the atmosphere outdoors" sentence rings very true, if you've ever lived in that kind of climate. But you're on the money about "flabby warmth". What could that possibly mean?
I seem to recall Banville is a big Nabokov fan. If so, this might explain these stylistic encryptions. The sorcerer's apprentice has not yet mastered his master's spells.
Posted by: Niall | April 26, 2010 at 10:51 AM
GG -
I can't speak for Banville, but it may be that historically pulp and genre writers have published under different noms do plume. It's part of the tradition, in a way. Banville may be writing as Benjamin Black as a kind of hommage to the genre he is writing in.
It might also be helpful to analyze the (not so)pseudonym as a tool to define a "child brand" for Banville - one that clearly separates this type of writing from his more literary efforts, walling it off from what he would prefer to be seen as his real legacy. Perhaps Benjamin Black is the Toyota to Banville's Lexus.
Posted by: Niall | April 26, 2010 at 11:04 AM
"Flabby warmth" is a good one too. I agree with Niall that "branding" might be a good way to think about this. Maybe the sentence-level excess is reflected in the pseudonym; both are as much about affectation as they are about effect.
Posted by: Skip | April 26, 2010 at 12:57 PM