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Christine Falls Quirke Benjamin Black Books

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Christine Falls Quirke Benjamin Black Books

Commenting more on the quirk series than on this specific novel.

These walk the line between noir genre and literature more generally. They are set in Dublin in the 50s. Quirk is wealthy but ireland is not, and even the scenes with rich people have a drab and gray feeling. Nobody is capable of honest and effective communication. People interact but fundamentally don't connect. Quirk is a medical examiner but he hardly ever has to work or even to show up. He has no career ambitions, or romantic objectives. Despite being a very passive person he is magically attractive to women, but his relations with women are marked by an inability to fully connect. Feelings are always withheld. The past is grim and dark and haunts the present. Poor Pheobe is never going to be happy. Seems very irish to me.

Quirk is sometimes funny--once he buys a car even though he can't drive, and humor takes place. Hackett is amusing. They don't really "detect" anything, they just kind of blunder along and stuff happens. Quirke and Hackett have a bit of a holmes and watson thing going on: Hacket is the exceptional good guy in the series in that he actually accomplishes things. But the overall tone is regret, the weight of the past, and a kind of enervating gloom. "A Death in Summer" takes place in the long irish summer days, and involves a hotty frenchwoman, but it still always feels like a gray day in October.

Black is a very good writer and the Celtic gloom isn't oppressive or depressing. There's kind of a kafka-esque thing going on, where we are invited to laugh at the absurdity of human tragedy. Christine Falls is probably the bleakest of the series--they get lighter as they go along.

I have a feeling he's done with Quirk--at the end of the last novel things were looking up. Pretty sure if there is another one all that will have to change.


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Christine Falls Quirke Benjamin Black Books Reviews

Dr. Garret Quirke (you won't learn his first name in this book) is a hulking presence, a man built almost larger than life. When interacting with him, men and women of normal stature tend to look up and adopt a tilting posture that consists of "the backward leaning stance, the vigorous straightening of the shoulders and the craning of the neck."

More comfortable with the dead than the living, Quirke is a pathologist in 1950s Dublin affiliated with the Holy Family Hospital. His postmortems take place sheltered from daylight, in a body room two floors below the pavement of central Dublin. Quirke enjoys being removed from the city's life and bustle. Working alone where it is always night gives him "a sense of being part the continuance of ancient practices, secret skills, or work too dark to be carried on up in the light."

At the end of a night of heavy drinking he returns to his office and stumbles upon his brother-in-law Mal altering the autopsy records of a woman, Christine Falls, who like Quirke's wife Delia, died in childbirth. Quirke's inherent curiosity and his feelings of ethical responsibility for the dead engage his interest.

He begins to ask questions and the answers, as they always do, lead to more questions and Quirke soon finds himself enmeshed in an investigation that is dangerous and best left alone. Someone is tortured. Someone is murdered. New-born babies disappear. The only obvious common denominator is the Roman Catholic Church, the church hierarchy in Dublin and Irish Catholic Boston, and the powerful, secretive lay organizations that support Catholic charities.

Black is the pen name of Booker award-winning author John Banville. "Christine Falls" (2006) is his first in a series of four Quirke stories. It is followed by "The Silver Swan" (2007), "Elegy for April" (2010) and "A Death in Summer" (July 2011).

Like the other Quirke crime-busters, "Christine Falls" is character driven. The story holds our attention, but the characters' struggles to find meaning in a shadowy, morally ambivalent world is what Black is so good at conveying and what in the end becomes compelling.

The Quirke stories are infused with a Catholic sensibility; "Christine Falls" more so. Like Grahame Green's antiheroes, Quirke is preoccupied with the issues of evil, sin and doubt. He shoulders responsibility for the souls of the bodies he cuts up. We see Christine Falls only as a corpse. She is someone who died for having given birth and Quirke on her behalf bears witness.

This is a shadowy tale full of atmosphere that unfolds dreamily in a moody, fog-shrouded city where interiors are as dark as the weather; where the woodwork is "thick with many coats of a bilious yellow stuff, glossy and glutinous, less like paint than crusted gruel."

"Christine Falls" is noir fiction at its best, a simple tale told directly that is wrapped in beautifully written images. Banville is writing as Black to enjoy himself in a new genre. He's created a character bulky in the extreme, morose and eponymously quirky in a manner that makes me want to follow him around Dublin as he discovers more secrets and uncovers more treachery.
[Give it 4.5 stars]
A looming and somber man driven by a cloud of questions leads the reader of CHRISTINE FALLS into the gloom of 1950s Irish Catholicism. There are secrets in the pathologist's morgue, in his family, in the Church, and in his soul. Quirke's unraveling of the story of baby smuggling from Dublin to Boston, though relentlessly tragic, is told in brilliant prose. The words chosen have such precision that images glow on the page. For example, there are these "a version of the Sphinx high, unavoidable, and monumentally ridiculous" -- "frost smoke" -- "a leaden line in front of lavender-tinted fog" -- "grinning in that way she did when she was excited, showing her upper gums" -- "old brown paintings" -- "black birds spurted raggedly from behind the rooftops and twirled..." -- "the gaunt hospital room reminded him of the inside of a skull...."

This writing talent presented as that of "Benjamin Black" belongs in fact to John Banville, a Booker Prize winning author (2005, THE SEA). CHRISTINE FALLS debuts a new branch of his work, a series featuring the pathologist Quirke. Categorized by the publisher as a "psychological novel," it is also called a "new kind of crime novel" and a "suspense novel." In my mind, it also belongs to historical realism, even the emotions of the characters, reminiscent of late 1940s films like THE SNAKE PIT and JOHNNY BELINDA, which commented on shortcomings in institutions without being documentary. Analyses aside, the novel is enjoyable for its well-drawn characters, so deeply motivated by personal circumstances to make a transition from poverty stricken Ireland to a bright and promising United States. It was not as easy as one might think.
Commenting more on the quirk series than on this specific novel.

These walk the line between noir genre and literature more generally. They are set in Dublin in the 50s. Quirk is wealthy but ireland is not, and even the scenes with rich people have a drab and gray feeling. Nobody is capable of honest and effective communication. People interact but fundamentally don't connect. Quirk is a medical examiner but he hardly ever has to work or even to show up. He has no career ambitions, or romantic objectives. Despite being a very passive person he is magically attractive to women, but his relations with women are marked by an inability to fully connect. Feelings are always withheld. The past is grim and dark and haunts the present. Poor Pheobe is never going to be happy. Seems very irish to me.

Quirk is sometimes funny--once he buys a car even though he can't drive, and humor takes place. Hackett is amusing. They don't really "detect" anything, they just kind of blunder along and stuff happens. Quirke and Hackett have a bit of a holmes and watson thing going on Hacket is the exceptional good guy in the series in that he actually accomplishes things. But the overall tone is regret, the weight of the past, and a kind of enervating gloom. "A Death in Summer" takes place in the long irish summer days, and involves a hotty frenchwoman, but it still always feels like a gray day in October.

Black is a very good writer and the Celtic gloom isn't oppressive or depressing. There's kind of a kafka-esque thing going on, where we are invited to laugh at the absurdity of human tragedy. Christine Falls is probably the bleakest of the series--they get lighter as they go along.

I have a feeling he's done with Quirk--at the end of the last novel things were looking up. Pretty sure if there is another one all that will have to change.