Review: Christine Falls

Inspired by the Inspector Maigret novels of French author Georges Simenon, Irish novelist and Booker Prize winner (“The Sea”) John Banville took up crime writing as he was approaching 60, adopting a new name, Benjamin Black, and a new approach to writing.

Black, he says, is more of a storyteller than Banville and a lot faster as a writer. Like Simenon, Black aims for a direct, pared-down style. Readers may find his noirish books more reminiscent of Ian Rankin and Ken Bruen than Simenon, but the characters share a certain enigmatic mystery.

Black’s first two crime novels are set in 1950s Dublin. His protagonist is consultant pathologist Quirke, a determined loner, alcoholic and stubborn contrarian (“…in secret Quirke prized his loneliness as a mark of some distinction.”). He lives in the apartment Banville himself had lived in the 1960s as a struggling writer. Though Quirke is not struggling, the dingy apartment suits his bleak outlook. An orphan, scarred by his years in a regimented, brutal Catholic orphanage, he had been eventually rescued and taken in by Judge Garret Griffin, still a prominent Dublin figure.

Quirke is a widower who enjoys a certain guilty relief in a continuing grief for his wife, who died 20 years before in childbirth. She was a lively, compelling woman but he had always preferred her sister, Sarah, who had married the Judge’s son, Mal, now a prominent obstetrician. Quirke enjoys an indulgent-uncle relationship with their mildly rebellious daughter Phoebe, 20.

As “Christine Falls” begins, Quirke, very drunk, stumbles upon Mal in Quirke’s office in the morgue, writing in a file. It’s the file of a young woman, said to have died of an embolism, unusual in one so young. Quirke soon discovers she had worked in the judge’s household and she died, not of an embolism, but in childbirth.

Unwed motherhood in deeply conservative, Catholic 1950s Dublin was a catastrophe, a shame from which there was no recovery. Secrecy was the only recourse. Quirke, unsure of his own motives, doggedly traces the life and death of Christine Falls, disregarding Mal’s warnings, unearthing secrets that shock even him.

Assault and murder punctuate the course of his careening, often drunken pursuit of truth, which, we all know, will lead to nothing good.

Black brings a gritty, repressed, downtrodden Dublin to claustrophobic life. Quirke’s fear and loathing of Mother Church is palpable. When he first confronts Mal with all he has learned it’s in the hospital chapel, a place he generally avoids. “The Holy Family chapel was small, without pillars or side alcoves, so that there was no avoiding the beady eye of the little oil lamp with the ruby-red globe that burned perpetually before the tabernacle.”

While the novel is character rather than plot driven, Black manages to contain plenty of suspense in a tale that exposes the underbelly of power and social constructs as well as personal conflicts. The characters, while intensely explored, retain their essential privacy. Beautifully written and evocative of a bygone Dublin, Black’s debut fully satisfies. Readers will wish Quirke a long career.

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Lynn Harnett

Please Note: Books reviewed are usually provided by the publisher, author, or an agent. Reviewers usually get to keep the book.

Book Review: Christine Falls

Please Note: Books reviewed are usually provided by the publisher, author, or an agent. Reviewers usually get to keep the book.