The Cold, Cold Sea

The Drowned by John Banville is an atmospheric, emotional, layered murder mystery in the old-school mode.

There is no overt violence, no bloody beatings or grisly shootings, only waterlogged bodies floating to the surface or washing ashore, leaving the reader to ponder how and why until the final pages.

In the hands of Booker Prize-winning novelist Banville, it’s also a compelling study of how dire consequences can develop from even the smallest actions.

Two of the lead characters, Quirke and Strafford, will be familiar to readers of other Banville crime novels. While some may view this as a series, each book can be read as a stand-alone mystery.

The story begins with the mysterious disappearance of a woman in rural Ireland. Wymes, a formerly incarcerated pedophile, banished to living alone in a remote trailer, stumbles upon an idling, empty Mercedes in a field. Even in this stage-setting moment, Banville’s mastery of language is on display: “…when he saw the strange thing standing at a slight list in the middle of the field below the house, for a second he didn’t know what it was. In the gloaming, two red lights glared at him out of the long grass like the eyes of a wild animal crouched and ready to spring.”

History professor Ronnie Armitage of Trinity College claims his wife Deidre leaped from the car and ran toward the cliffs above the sea. He’s despondent. She’s missing for a week, until the floating body is found. It is ruled death by drowning, except that the water in her lungs was not salty seawater, but fresh water. There are disturbing coincidences with other unsolved murders.

The best way for me to explain The Drowned is to ask you to step inside the novel with me and experience the world Banville creates in what I believe is near pitch-perfect storytelling.

First, the setting. While it may appear to be a stereotypical murder mystery backdrop, the foggy, damp, cold Irish coast of the 1950s enhances the aura of this whodunnit. “To his left, the surface of the evening sea was chopped, metallic, faintly aglitter. Not a thing to be seen out there, no ship or sail, nothing between here and the Welsh coast, invisible beyond the horizon.” This is where a murderer, unfeeling and neurotically evil, ends another’s existence when the relationship becomes inconvenient. Gone, “not a thing to be seen out there,” once the body sinks under the rough surf. The omnipresent fog is shrouding secrets.

Take notice that Banville is applying his great skill as a literary novelist to telling this crime story. His words not only describe the scene, but inject a sense of foreboding and inevitability. “A horse and cart went by in the street. They listened to the unhurried clip-clopping of the horse’s hooves and the grinding sounds of the metal wheel-bands harshing on the tarmacadam,” a metaphor for the endless and unforgiving march of time.

The Drowned is an emotional novel, one of thoughts and ruminations told through the third-person lens of the characters’ perspectives and interior monologues. The reader is drawn inside the lifetime of regrets and missed opportunities of the two men working to solve the murders. Detective Inspector John Strafford and pathologist Quirke, no first name given, are both living with unresolved losses and the inability to voice emotions, allowing them an air of weariness and of the folly of resisting whatever fate has in store.

The men share grudging respect but have a complex relationship: “Dr. Quirke, in whose company [Strafford] found himself with unaccountable and annoying frequency, was these days displaying toward him an unrelenting—though for the most part unexpressed—animosity.” That could be because the unhappily married Strafford is dating Quirke’s daughter Phoebe. The couple learns she is pregnant. Recall that this is 1950s Ireland, so an affair with an inconvenient out of wedlock pregnancy must be only carefully whispered about.

This character-driven tension in a novel, often unrelated to the core narrative, adds context and depth, fleshing out and humanizing the protagonists. Once I can believe that the characters are like me or my friends, the wall between the fictional story and real life is punctured. It’s almost as if I can smell the foul odor of Quirke’s cigars and the damp raincoat of the rumpled Strafford.

Professor Armitage pops up through the story like a slithering snake in the tall grass. He leaves an oddly uneasy impression on those he encounters. At one point he follows Phoebe through a department store and invites her to sit for tea. “She studied him sidelong,” Phoebe thinks, “He wasn’t quite genuine. He made her think of card sharps, and the men who keep stalls at fairgrounds. Or he might be the loose-limbed cad in one of those Ealing comedies—he had the blazer and sharp shoes, all he lacked was a cravat and a pencil-stroke mustache.”

The Drowned is a clever story about hidden moments in its characters’ lives, seemingly inconsequential at the time but carrying forward consequences, life and death, for an unfortunate few. The killer has a history of drowning those women who, to his way of thinking, are not obedient. Murder is never uncomplicated and almost always an emotional act.