After something like Moby Dick, you can't just go read any old thing. A lot of the not-quite-first-rate material that Soho Crime has sent me this year becomes positively the freshman team in comparison. Ed Lin's Ghost Month was one that I read about four pages of, and then put away with some disappointment.
But you can always count on Benjamin Black for some fine prose, and exquisite attention to the details of his upper-crust-y Irish setting. Vengeance (Picador, 2012) worked just fine as a post-MD read, although I think Black, and by extension, his sad pathologist Quirke (did we learn his first name? Garrett? He doesn't answer but I think, yes, that may be it) are phoning it in a bit here.
There is no mystery surrounding the death of Victor Delahaye, unless you want to know why he chose his business partner's son as a witness, or why he left said son, a landlubber if there ever was one, floating alone on a large sailboat after shooting himself in the chest. But when his partner Jack Clancy is killed, well, there's your mystery. Vengeance includes the by-now almost stock Black characters of the not-particularly-grieving-but-particularly-beautiful widow, the creepily-amoral young men who are clearly up to no good, Quirke's daughter Phoebe who presents as fragile and old-fashioned but has a dark thrill-seeking streak, and Inspector Hackett who plays up his country roots with his "Is it yourself, Miss Griffin!" greetings and the like. (198)
Black's writing is mostly its usual marvelous self (see Christine Falls, The Silver Swan, and Elegy for April) but maybe getting a little old? The Irish summer sun is various shades of gold: gilded, molten, burnished, and there are just enough polished floors and crystal bowls of fresh flowers in elegant houses. Smells, as usual, are scene-setters, culminating perhaps with one character, who is badly sunburned, and remarks "I can smell myself . . . I can actually smell my skin where it got burned. It's like fried pork." (59) That detail is a bit off-putting, but has that edge that sets Black above the merely elegant mystery. He's not gone with taste before, however, and "a lustrous Mersault that in Quirke's mouth tasted of gold coins and melons" had me rolling my eyes and wondering if I was reading a Pat Conroy novel. (281) Finally, some of the plot points felt a bit recycled - once again Quirke gets closer than is wise to the black widow, once again Phoebe make a poor decision and gets herself into a tight spot, and again a fine dover sole is consumed at a window table at the Shelbourne.
Quirke really isn't central to this story, he just kind of hangs around to help out his friend Hackett - who claims to need Quirke's sophisticated touch around "the quality." Maybe that's why the story doesn't compel as much as the earlier ones, in which Our Hero was actually a more central figure. I had much the same sense from A Death in Summer, and wonder if Black, and Quirke, need a break.
Still, weak plot devices aside, nobody bites the soft underbelly of the upper crust quite like Black. Consider his description of the sailing set, right at the beginning:
"And they were all so jolly and brisk, smiling in a smug, self-satisfied way that set his teeth on edge. Unlike him, they knew what they were doing, the wind-burned men in yachting caps and khaki shorts and shapeless sweaters playing at being old sea dogs, and their loud-voiced, leathery wives - sea bitches, he thought, with a twinge of bleak amusement. He did not belong here, among these sailing folk with their lazy expertise; he knew it, and they knew it, too, which meant they had to behave twice as heartily towards him, though he could see that look in their eyes, that gleam of merry contempt." (3-4)
You know who he's talking about, you see them around here, or in Edgartown. It's a splendidly nasty little detail that keeps you coming back for more. Maybe with an amber whiskey in hand, because next up is Holy Orders.
Here's an interesting postscript: Black has written a new Philip Marlowe novel, The Black-Eyed Blonde. Does his prose translate from socially corseted Dublin to California? Based on the earlier Quirke novels, I'd certainly give him the benefit of the doubt. Others wonder.
Showing posts with label Benjamin Black. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Benjamin Black. Show all posts
Saturday, August 30, 2014
Sunday, March 17, 2013
A Death in Summer
While I was reading Benjamin Black's A Death in Summer (2011, Henry Holt and Co.), I found myself thinking that this latest in the Quirke series was not grabbing me as much as its predecessors had. Quirke himself seemed not quite so disastrously central to the story as in the others, and this plot generally felt thinner in foreboding and, well, darkness, than the previous tales in this series. Yes, the atmosphere was there in all its stinkiness - stinks, whiffs, and smells as usual are deployed to layer it in, and there's a lot of heat and for once, sunlight. So this story, taking place during a heat wave in Dublin, involved a lot of sweat.
A Death in Summer finds our Quirke helping his polenta-pal Hackett figure out who killed a powerful, and powerfully disliked businessman named Richard Jewell. The death appears to be a suicide but it is immediately clear to Quirke and Hackett that no one could blow his own head off like that and still be holding on to the gun.
"The shotgun blast had lifted Jewell out of his chair and flung him backwards at a crooked angle across the desk, where he lay with a bit jawbone and a few teeth and a bloodied stump of spine, all that was left of what had been his head, dangling down on the far side. On the big picture window in front of the desk there was a great splatter of blood and brains, like a giant peony blossom, with a gaping hole in the middle of it giving a view of rolling grasslands stretching off to the horizon." (2)
Black doesn't go in for gratuitous violence, in fact, the more horrific crimes in this particular book are never fully described. (It doesn't take much to intimate what they are, esp. if you've followed the Jimmy Saville case in the U.K.) So his judicious use of such imagery makes it all the more effective, and I love the idea of the peony, a flower of summer, as the motif of this violent act that takes place in the hot depths of the season.
Anyway, Jewell has, not surprisingly, a not-very-upset wife, a remote and perhaps disturbed daughter, a weird sister, various business frenemies, and some funny ties to a local orphanage. Maybe you can guess where that goes. Quirke and Hackett eventually figure it out, although the denouement suggests that justice will never truly be served.
Most of the usual characters are involved here - Phoebe, Rose, Hackett, Sinclair - but it is only the last one who features significantly in the story and then in an oddly central way for someone who is so present but usually so unimportant in Quirke's life. I mean, I know why Sinclair's plot line turns the way it does but overall this whole story lacked the tightrope-quality of whether Quirke would make disastrous choices for himself and those he cares about like he usually does. He makes some bad choices but they are also made for him and cleaned up by an all-too-convenient skeedaddle right at the end, which lacks some of the angst I've come to expect from our Quirke
Then I finished A Death in Summer and started the highly hyped Ratlines (2013, Soho Crime) by Stuart Neville and realized again how great a writer Benjamin Black is and thought that maybe I had judged too hastily. Man, I just could not get going on the Neville, it felt soooo one-dimensional compared to Black's nuanced personal portraits, layered atmosphere of light and smell and landscape, and subtle social strictures that make his affluent 1950s Dublin a cage for its inhabitants.
I'll probably finish Ratlines, but I need something a little less literary before I turn back to it so it is better by comparison. But I'll definitely return to Quirke.
A Death in Summer finds our Quirke helping his polenta-pal Hackett figure out who killed a powerful, and powerfully disliked businessman named Richard Jewell. The death appears to be a suicide but it is immediately clear to Quirke and Hackett that no one could blow his own head off like that and still be holding on to the gun.
"The shotgun blast had lifted Jewell out of his chair and flung him backwards at a crooked angle across the desk, where he lay with a bit jawbone and a few teeth and a bloodied stump of spine, all that was left of what had been his head, dangling down on the far side. On the big picture window in front of the desk there was a great splatter of blood and brains, like a giant peony blossom, with a gaping hole in the middle of it giving a view of rolling grasslands stretching off to the horizon." (2)
Black doesn't go in for gratuitous violence, in fact, the more horrific crimes in this particular book are never fully described. (It doesn't take much to intimate what they are, esp. if you've followed the Jimmy Saville case in the U.K.) So his judicious use of such imagery makes it all the more effective, and I love the idea of the peony, a flower of summer, as the motif of this violent act that takes place in the hot depths of the season.
Anyway, Jewell has, not surprisingly, a not-very-upset wife, a remote and perhaps disturbed daughter, a weird sister, various business frenemies, and some funny ties to a local orphanage. Maybe you can guess where that goes. Quirke and Hackett eventually figure it out, although the denouement suggests that justice will never truly be served.
Most of the usual characters are involved here - Phoebe, Rose, Hackett, Sinclair - but it is only the last one who features significantly in the story and then in an oddly central way for someone who is so present but usually so unimportant in Quirke's life. I mean, I know why Sinclair's plot line turns the way it does but overall this whole story lacked the tightrope-quality of whether Quirke would make disastrous choices for himself and those he cares about like he usually does. He makes some bad choices but they are also made for him and cleaned up by an all-too-convenient skeedaddle right at the end, which lacks some of the angst I've come to expect from our Quirke
Then I finished A Death in Summer and started the highly hyped Ratlines (2013, Soho Crime) by Stuart Neville and realized again how great a writer Benjamin Black is and thought that maybe I had judged too hastily. Man, I just could not get going on the Neville, it felt soooo one-dimensional compared to Black's nuanced personal portraits, layered atmosphere of light and smell and landscape, and subtle social strictures that make his affluent 1950s Dublin a cage for its inhabitants.
I'll probably finish Ratlines, but I need something a little less literary before I turn back to it so it is better by comparison. But I'll definitely return to Quirke.
Thursday, December 6, 2012
Elegy for April
The "crime" in Benjamin Black's Elegy for April (Picador, 2010) is not particularly heinous, although its precipitating events, which we only learn about at the end, are hard to read. In fact, we really don't know that there has been any sort of criminal activity at all for most of the book. We know only that Phoebe Griffin's friend April Latimer, has gone missing. Phoebe turns to her father, the recently dried-out one-named Quirke, for help. And in his big old way, Quirke rather bulldozes his way to a conclusion.
Quirke's and Phoebe's relationship is the center of the story here. Since Christine Falls, we've learned how strained, how close, and how constantly tested it is. I'll simply say that it's not entirely clear that things are improving here, despite everyone's half-hearted efforts. Quirke can't stay dry, and Phoebe can't get past her past (not surprisingly, given the events in Christine Falls and The Silver Swan). But Black's gorgeous prose and elegant atmospherics will keep us coming back for more. What a master at setting up a depressing scene. The story here takes place in winter, so Dublin is apparently permanently shrouded in fog and mist (until the end of the story, when things CLEAR UP). But for much of the story, we get scenes like this: "The sun somewhere was trying to shine, its weak glow making a sallow, urinous stain on the fog." (38) Others might just say that the sun was trying to break through the fog, but not Black - his sun is urinous. This sums up Black's Quirke novels. Life is just not that great, and sometimes downright awful. But it is what we have, and like democracy, beats the alternative.
And of course, Black employs his (to me) almost-trademark of setting the scene by smell. Consider:
"She went out to the kitchen. Night smells, she had often noticed, were different from day ones, were mustier, fainter, more insidious. She drew open the lapels of her silk gown and put her face into the hollow there and sniffed. Yes, her smell too was different, a babyish, secret staleness." (150) There's an eroticism, a sense of menace, and a truth, all here. Later, "The house had a stuffy, morning smell of bedclothes and bath soap and milky tea and bread that had been toasted under a gas flame." (264) Of course there is. You know just what he's talking about.
There are two more Quirke novels, but I have to spread them out. They really are kind of depressing to read, but so rich and compelling that they satisfy in spite of themselves. Despite Quirke's efforts to obliterate his mind through drink, he keeps on keeping on, and you do too.
Quirke's and Phoebe's relationship is the center of the story here. Since Christine Falls, we've learned how strained, how close, and how constantly tested it is. I'll simply say that it's not entirely clear that things are improving here, despite everyone's half-hearted efforts. Quirke can't stay dry, and Phoebe can't get past her past (not surprisingly, given the events in Christine Falls and The Silver Swan). But Black's gorgeous prose and elegant atmospherics will keep us coming back for more. What a master at setting up a depressing scene. The story here takes place in winter, so Dublin is apparently permanently shrouded in fog and mist (until the end of the story, when things CLEAR UP). But for much of the story, we get scenes like this: "The sun somewhere was trying to shine, its weak glow making a sallow, urinous stain on the fog." (38) Others might just say that the sun was trying to break through the fog, but not Black - his sun is urinous. This sums up Black's Quirke novels. Life is just not that great, and sometimes downright awful. But it is what we have, and like democracy, beats the alternative.
And of course, Black employs his (to me) almost-trademark of setting the scene by smell. Consider:
"She went out to the kitchen. Night smells, she had often noticed, were different from day ones, were mustier, fainter, more insidious. She drew open the lapels of her silk gown and put her face into the hollow there and sniffed. Yes, her smell too was different, a babyish, secret staleness." (150) There's an eroticism, a sense of menace, and a truth, all here. Later, "The house had a stuffy, morning smell of bedclothes and bath soap and milky tea and bread that had been toasted under a gas flame." (264) Of course there is. You know just what he's talking about.
There are two more Quirke novels, but I have to spread them out. They really are kind of depressing to read, but so rich and compelling that they satisfy in spite of themselves. Despite Quirke's efforts to obliterate his mind through drink, he keeps on keeping on, and you do too.
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Is there some sexism happening here?
It has just occured to me - in a blinding flash of the obvious, dawn breaks over Marblehead - that in crime fiction, the MEN write about MEN and the WOMEN write about WOMEN. And they almost never ever cross that bright line. Furthermore, there are a lot fewer books with female protagonists, at least in the collections that I've read.
Now, there are some exceptions. Magdalen Nabb's man in Florence was Guarnaccia, and there are Louise Penny, Ann Cleeves, Grace Brophy, and Donna Leon writing about men. (Many about Italian men. Is it the men, or Italy, or the food?) But other than Michael Genelin (Jana Matinova), have I come across many male writers have female protagonists? (Charles Todd is sui generis, being a mother and son who write together under a pseudonym about a man.) There are some men who write excellent supporting female characters: Christopher Fowler's Janice Longbright and Phoebe and Sarah and really all the messed-up gals in Benjamin's Black's works are compelling characters in their own right, essential participants if not the driver of the plot. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough.
Women write about women. Rebecca Cantrell gave us the interesting Hannah Vogel, negotiating Nazi Berlin, and Cara Black's Aimee Leduc charges around Paris. And Charles Todd has that nurse, Bess whatshername Crawford doing good in WW1 England. (They are equal opportunity that way.)
It has also just occured to me that generally speaking, I don't find the female protagonists that appealing. Do I judge them more harshly? Do they not meet my preconceived notions of what a crime-solver should be? Do I just not want to deal with girl problems? I liked Hannah Vogel, am on the fence about Jana Matinova, and couldn't stand Aimee Leduc. Have I just been conditioned in some nefarious social manner to prefer male protagonists?
I don't actually think there is much sexism happening here, but I like phrase, from Caitlin Moran's How To Be a Woman, "is some sexism happening to you?" Her litmus test for sexism is, is this polite or not? I believe I am being perfectly polite in my interpretations of these characters. But am I viewing them all through some social goggles that I didn't realize I was wearing? Am I aiding and abbeting some sexism without knowing it?
Now, there are some exceptions. Magdalen Nabb's man in Florence was Guarnaccia, and there are Louise Penny, Ann Cleeves, Grace Brophy, and Donna Leon writing about men. (Many about Italian men. Is it the men, or Italy, or the food?) But other than Michael Genelin (Jana Matinova), have I come across many male writers have female protagonists? (Charles Todd is sui generis, being a mother and son who write together under a pseudonym about a man.) There are some men who write excellent supporting female characters: Christopher Fowler's Janice Longbright and Phoebe and Sarah and really all the messed-up gals in Benjamin's Black's works are compelling characters in their own right, essential participants if not the driver of the plot. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough.
Women write about women. Rebecca Cantrell gave us the interesting Hannah Vogel, negotiating Nazi Berlin, and Cara Black's Aimee Leduc charges around Paris. And Charles Todd has that nurse, Bess whatshername Crawford doing good in WW1 England. (They are equal opportunity that way.)
It has also just occured to me that generally speaking, I don't find the female protagonists that appealing. Do I judge them more harshly? Do they not meet my preconceived notions of what a crime-solver should be? Do I just not want to deal with girl problems? I liked Hannah Vogel, am on the fence about Jana Matinova, and couldn't stand Aimee Leduc. Have I just been conditioned in some nefarious social manner to prefer male protagonists?
I don't actually think there is much sexism happening here, but I like phrase, from Caitlin Moran's How To Be a Woman, "is some sexism happening to you?" Her litmus test for sexism is, is this polite or not? I believe I am being perfectly polite in my interpretations of these characters. But am I viewing them all through some social goggles that I didn't realize I was wearing? Am I aiding and abbeting some sexism without knowing it?
Saturday, July 7, 2012
The Silver Swan
If you think Irish people are just jolly joking drinkers with charming accents, you need to read Benjamin Black's The Silver Swan (Picador, 2009). The characters here, several returning from his first crime novel Christine Falls, are positively Swedish in their bleak outlook on life. The protagonist Quirke, and his glum satellites Phoebe and Mal (not to mention the deceased-but-present Sarah and Delia) seem to be just passing time on this earth, waiting for the release that death might bring. I'm not making this up, one wonders if any of them ever laugh (any way but mirthlessly). They live in a world of physical and economic comfort, but not one of them cannot get over the "sins" of his or her past. These transgressions consist mostly of loving the wrong person, or maybe just not loving enough. The Silver Swan is most decidedly not a romance, but relationships are at he heart of the slowly-unfolding tragedies.
In this second installment of Black's series about his Dublin-based pathologist, Quirke is asked by an old school acquaintance to overlook certain aspects of his wife's recent death, when doing her post-mortem. But our tormented soul just can't stop when the evidence doesn't support the request, and gets tied up in a tense knot of relationships that soon come to include his daughter, Phoebe, the dead gal, and her increasingly creepy lover. I think there is a bit of madonna/whore going on here. The female characters are deeply flawed, or dead, or both, and one picks up an almost wistful sense of why-can't-women-just-be-at-ease?
It's hot in Dublin this summer, but that doesn't make the story steamy, it just adds a vaguely menacing sense of lethargy and fate. Most of the characters seem compelled by some force other than their own free will to act the way they do. Deirdre Hunt knows she shouldn't go see the mysterious Dr. Kreutz, but she does. Phoebe knows perfectly well that she shouldn't get involved with the smooth but slightly seedy Leslie White, but she does. Rose decides to stay in Dublin, but I can't figure out why, no one seems to want here there! Even Quirke's major lifestyle change - he is off the gargle, as the colorfuly corrupt Maisie Haddon puts it in my favorite phrase of the whole book - seems somehow imposed upon him despite his ferocious efforts to stay that course. Tomato juice anyone?
You know from the start that this will not end well, probably for anybody. In my last set of notes about a Black novel, I commented on the author's use of light for atmospherics. In The Silver Swan, it is all about smells as the sensation that backstops a moment with dread. You are barely in to the story before he gets to it, describing Billy Hunt as having "that smell, hot and raw and salty, that Quirke recognized at once, the smell of the recently bereaved." (6) Billy's late wife grew up in conditions rather less elegant than Quirke's crowd currently enjoys. "Worst of all, thought, worse even than the cold in the low rooms and the plumbing that was always breaking down and the dirt everywhere, was the smell that hung on the stairs an din the corridors, summer and winter, the brownish, tired, hopeless stink of peed-on mattresses and stewed tea and blocked-up lavatories - the smell, the very smell, of what it was to be poor, which she never got used to, never." (13) A river is noted by its "usual greenish stench," (66), a summer evening is noted for its "clear, iodine-scented air." (171) They're never lovely, these smells, but they are essential to their place or person. "At times the policeman gave off a whiff of something - it was as tangible as a smell, chalky and gray - that hinted of institutions. Was there perhaps a Carricklea in his far past, too? Were they both borstal boys? Quirke did not care to ask." (67)
This all sounds a bit grim, and it is - with about the bleakest ending I've read in crime fiction to date. Nonetheless, it is gripping, largely because of Black's leisurely unfolding of the plot and spectacular control of language.
In this second installment of Black's series about his Dublin-based pathologist, Quirke is asked by an old school acquaintance to overlook certain aspects of his wife's recent death, when doing her post-mortem. But our tormented soul just can't stop when the evidence doesn't support the request, and gets tied up in a tense knot of relationships that soon come to include his daughter, Phoebe, the dead gal, and her increasingly creepy lover. I think there is a bit of madonna/whore going on here. The female characters are deeply flawed, or dead, or both, and one picks up an almost wistful sense of why-can't-women-just-be-at-ease?
It's hot in Dublin this summer, but that doesn't make the story steamy, it just adds a vaguely menacing sense of lethargy and fate. Most of the characters seem compelled by some force other than their own free will to act the way they do. Deirdre Hunt knows she shouldn't go see the mysterious Dr. Kreutz, but she does. Phoebe knows perfectly well that she shouldn't get involved with the smooth but slightly seedy Leslie White, but she does. Rose decides to stay in Dublin, but I can't figure out why, no one seems to want here there! Even Quirke's major lifestyle change - he is off the gargle, as the colorfuly corrupt Maisie Haddon puts it in my favorite phrase of the whole book - seems somehow imposed upon him despite his ferocious efforts to stay that course. Tomato juice anyone?
You know from the start that this will not end well, probably for anybody. In my last set of notes about a Black novel, I commented on the author's use of light for atmospherics. In The Silver Swan, it is all about smells as the sensation that backstops a moment with dread. You are barely in to the story before he gets to it, describing Billy Hunt as having "that smell, hot and raw and salty, that Quirke recognized at once, the smell of the recently bereaved." (6) Billy's late wife grew up in conditions rather less elegant than Quirke's crowd currently enjoys. "Worst of all, thought, worse even than the cold in the low rooms and the plumbing that was always breaking down and the dirt everywhere, was the smell that hung on the stairs an din the corridors, summer and winter, the brownish, tired, hopeless stink of peed-on mattresses and stewed tea and blocked-up lavatories - the smell, the very smell, of what it was to be poor, which she never got used to, never." (13) A river is noted by its "usual greenish stench," (66), a summer evening is noted for its "clear, iodine-scented air." (171) They're never lovely, these smells, but they are essential to their place or person. "At times the policeman gave off a whiff of something - it was as tangible as a smell, chalky and gray - that hinted of institutions. Was there perhaps a Carricklea in his far past, too? Were they both borstal boys? Quirke did not care to ask." (67)
This all sounds a bit grim, and it is - with about the bleakest ending I've read in crime fiction to date. Nonetheless, it is gripping, largely because of Black's leisurely unfolding of the plot and spectacular control of language.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Christine Falls
When it comes to crime fiction, "atmospheric" is a tricky compliment. Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January series is atmospheric, but chokingly so, as are many novels and series set during World War II. Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko novels (maybe more on them later) could use more atmosphere at times, although since Renko operates first in deepest darkest Soviet Russia, then in the brittle and harsh new Russia, it is hard to say what constitutes atmosphere there, unease and depression appearing to be the major chords. Renko is no Dr. Zhivago, after all. In any case, atmosphere is an elusive quality, one that I particularly adore but it is hard to get right. So when the review blurbs Benjamin Black's Christine Falls (Picador, 2006) tout the novel's "masterful atmospherics" and "evocative settings," one might proceed with caution.
That would be a mistake, however, since Christine Falls is a great read. Set in Dublin and Boston in the 1950s, the plot is just a little bit ripped from the headlines, being a dark (as in horrible) and dank(as in it is always raining or snowing or misting or somehow precipitating) tale of orphaned babies, the Catholic Church, and people whose faith came to be in their God game, rather than their god. The sad story of Irish orphanages was first exposed by journalist Mary Raferty in the late 1990s, and her death this past week brought a reminder that the world Black creates really did exist, and that the scheme that his flawed characters developed could easily have been real.
One might also think that this would be a mean, low story, given the first sentence on the back of the book: "The hero of Christine Falls, Quirke, is a surly pathologist living in 1950s Dublin." The word surly may be off here - depressed, yes, making poor choices, yes, but surly implies nasty which Quirke is not. What he is through the entire story is more or less drunk, depending on the hour of the day. And while it is kind of pleasant to read a story in which people smoke with abandon, by the end one feels a bit like Quirke's ashtray, deeply in need of a bath. Anyway, he finds out about something bad, or at least finds some parts of something he thinks is something bad, and can't quite stop himself from doing something about it. I don't know that surly folk tend to do the right thing in the end. The other mild surprise is that for all the basement pathology scenes and cabbage-and-laundry smelling orphanages, Quirke actually moves in the higher levels of Dublin society, being family to a famous judge, a renowned obstetrician, and in love with his brother's wife, who was the sister of his own late wife, who are daughters of a wealthy Boston, Mass. businessman originally transplanted from Ireland (and of course, best buds with the aforementioned Judge - ultimately these close bonds suggest the claustrophobia of that life).
In fact, this novel really is all about the atmospherics. I've not read anything else by the author, who is actually a respected novelist named John Banville, but he is a terrific writer. (You can read an interesting interview with himfrom a few years ago in the Paris Review.) Black/Banville uses light to set his scenes, but it's not theatrical or artificial. The "greenish air of evening" (21) is the backdrop for the introduction of young Phoebe; there is a "spark of tawny light" (49) at the bottom of a glass of whiskey (there are a lot of glasses of whiskey; it is Banville's talent that puts that spark at the bottom of only one); the sky is "heavy with the seamless weight of putty-colored clouds" (182); and the scene of Quirke's meeting with Punch and Judy involves a "streetlamp's rain-pocked reflection in a puddle" and ends in "wet, glistening darkness." (197) There is a lot more of this, and it really is masterful, comes on just strong enough to support the mood of the scene, but doesn't overwhelm.
You can kind of figure out where the story is going, but it remains compelling to the end, largely due to the fine writing. One might enjoy sitting down with a whiskey after this, but while I am often inspired by books to take my cooking in a particular direction, I can say this one did not suggest anything tasty.
That would be a mistake, however, since Christine Falls is a great read. Set in Dublin and Boston in the 1950s, the plot is just a little bit ripped from the headlines, being a dark (as in horrible) and dank(as in it is always raining or snowing or misting or somehow precipitating) tale of orphaned babies, the Catholic Church, and people whose faith came to be in their God game, rather than their god. The sad story of Irish orphanages was first exposed by journalist Mary Raferty in the late 1990s, and her death this past week brought a reminder that the world Black creates really did exist, and that the scheme that his flawed characters developed could easily have been real.
One might also think that this would be a mean, low story, given the first sentence on the back of the book: "The hero of Christine Falls, Quirke, is a surly pathologist living in 1950s Dublin." The word surly may be off here - depressed, yes, making poor choices, yes, but surly implies nasty which Quirke is not. What he is through the entire story is more or less drunk, depending on the hour of the day. And while it is kind of pleasant to read a story in which people smoke with abandon, by the end one feels a bit like Quirke's ashtray, deeply in need of a bath. Anyway, he finds out about something bad, or at least finds some parts of something he thinks is something bad, and can't quite stop himself from doing something about it. I don't know that surly folk tend to do the right thing in the end. The other mild surprise is that for all the basement pathology scenes and cabbage-and-laundry smelling orphanages, Quirke actually moves in the higher levels of Dublin society, being family to a famous judge, a renowned obstetrician, and in love with his brother's wife, who was the sister of his own late wife, who are daughters of a wealthy Boston, Mass. businessman originally transplanted from Ireland (and of course, best buds with the aforementioned Judge - ultimately these close bonds suggest the claustrophobia of that life).
In fact, this novel really is all about the atmospherics. I've not read anything else by the author, who is actually a respected novelist named John Banville, but he is a terrific writer. (You can read an interesting interview with himfrom a few years ago in the Paris Review.) Black/Banville uses light to set his scenes, but it's not theatrical or artificial. The "greenish air of evening" (21) is the backdrop for the introduction of young Phoebe; there is a "spark of tawny light" (49) at the bottom of a glass of whiskey (there are a lot of glasses of whiskey; it is Banville's talent that puts that spark at the bottom of only one); the sky is "heavy with the seamless weight of putty-colored clouds" (182); and the scene of Quirke's meeting with Punch and Judy involves a "streetlamp's rain-pocked reflection in a puddle" and ends in "wet, glistening darkness." (197) There is a lot more of this, and it really is masterful, comes on just strong enough to support the mood of the scene, but doesn't overwhelm.
You can kind of figure out where the story is going, but it remains compelling to the end, largely due to the fine writing. One might enjoy sitting down with a whiskey after this, but while I am often inspired by books to take my cooking in a particular direction, I can say this one did not suggest anything tasty.
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