The Drowned Detective by Neil Jordan review: noir like no other

The Drowned Detective

Author: Neil Jordan

ISBN-13: 978-1408865149

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Guideline Price: £16.99

An unnamed eastern European city. A troubled marriage. Blind angels, charlatans and an old photograph. In Neil Jordan’s haunting new novel, a detective tracking down a long-lost child is drawn down into a ghost world of love withheld, neglected and corrupted.

Jonathan is an English expatriate in the city of shifting surfaces, putting together a business with local partners, tracking bootleg goods, cheating politicians – the stuff of a detective’s life. He has made his home there with his wife and young daughter. It is summertime. The heat and humidity bear down. Political unrest builds. Young protesters in coloured Pussy Riot balaclavas take on the police: the faceless old order against the faceless new.

An elderly couple emerge from the heat and tension with a photograph of their long-lost daughter. Jonathan’s hard-headed partner knows that a brothel is the most likely destination for a lost girl and hardly worth bothering about, but Jonathan pictures his own daughter and takes on the case.

Jonathan has drifted apart from his wife, Sarah, their marriage held together only by the careworn ties of habit and parenthood. Jonathan finds a man’s cufflink in her purse. Glittering objects – cufflinks, wedding rings, black pearls – cascade through the text, gathering meaning to themselves.

Jordan has a light touch and a clear eye on matters of the heart – when the heart is stripped down and left open to jealousy and attraction. Sexual mystique is never far from the surface, but the hard-won graces of monogamy are given their due. Jonathan and Sarah attend an analyst, trying to get to the bottom of things, Jungian dualities adding another rich and ambiguous layer.

This is Mitteleuropa, the East’s lost dream of itself, and fidelity is in short supply. The city’s shifting perspectives cannot be depended on. Narrow streets double back on each other, music drifts from hidden courtyards. Derelict industrial buildings conceal dingy bordellos.

Under the blind stone angels of the city’s bridge, Jonathan sees a young woman fall into the river. He rescues her from the filthy water, but a sinister miasma persists.

English rationalist

Dashiell Hammett described his Maltese Falcon detective Sam Spade as a dream man, and Jonathan has something of that quality. The Englishman is a rationalist as far as it goes, and you feel he has enough integrity to see things through to the end. But there are no reliable guides to this city.

The rescued woman, Petra, is half seductress, half darkling child. Jonathan is caught, entangled from the start. She is a cellist, and Bach’s music is a counterpoint to the movement of the characters. The strands of the story weave and cross, reflecting the darkly polyphonic matter of Bach’s cello suites, each strand a formal dance elevated into something other.

There’s an opera house, all gilt and velvet, an unpleasant seducer, and a psychic with the hauteur of an aged Marlene Dietrich. The suspension of disbelief is required and we are reminded of it. The psychic, Gertrude, talks about voodoo practitioners’ fear of photography, how the photo’s acetate retains a piece of the soul: “They know the face we present is just a shadow.”

You could get lost in the beguilements of the dream city if it were not for the reminders of love found and discarded, the heart turning on itself. Like all lost lovers, Sarah and Jonathan are both wounded and culpable. Sarah at least knows what is required from her husband but despairs of getting it. She is an archaeologist, and themes of unearthing run through the novel.

The political tension builds. Sarah is drawn into it when she uncovers a bog- woman and is accused of destroying national treasures. Rioters and police remain anonymous behind masks and balaclavas. The city teeters on the brink.

The novel makes the point that politics is as prone to mystery as anything else. The protesters, moving through the city, seem to be its future pitted against its past. But nothing is defined, and Sarah at any rate is more concerned with the lost artefacts of her marriage.

Both damaged innocent and knowing revenant, Petra wraps dark tendrils around the heart of Jonathan’s family. The Brothers Grimm are never far away in the novel – as in their tales, the child is the most open to harm. Beneath the cities summer heat and gritty surfaces lies Hansel and Gretel’s dark forest. Bach’s Allemandes and Sarabandes open a seductive path and no better woman that Petra to make use of it. It’s time for Jonathan to address what Gertrude calls “the dead business”.

If Jonathan is the dream of a detective, then his local partners are more like Hammett’s archetypal sleuths, his “hard and shifty fellows”, and he realises that the city is best left to them. But he still has promises to keep, his lost girl to find.

As in all the great crime writers, the corruption of family lies at the centre of noir tradition, the plundering of innocence. The girl’s secret is tawdry and corrupting. Redemption, it seems, isn’t to be found this side of the grave.

Classic detective story

The momentum and narrative voice of a classic detective story are brought to bear on an esoteric tale, and it works brilliantly. The conventions of noir are put to use, but there are no easy formulas in The Drowned Detective, no moments of empty revelation – the endings are resolved but not solved. Each element of the story has its allotted part to play, the movement as complex and predetermined as one of Bach's sublime country dances. Even the protesters, the "neutered, degendered flowers of the West", in the local detective's phrase, are pressed into service.

The Drowned Detective is a tour de force of the dead business. In Gertrude's words, "they whisper, they murmur, they don't know they're dead".

Eoin McNamee is the author of the Blue trilogy