When John Banville first took to crime-writing via his alter-ego Benjamin Black, it was considered a surprise. He had recently won the Booker Prize for The Sea, annoying much of the literary world by thanking them for finally giving the prize to a work of art, so the idea of one of the greatest literary stylists turning his hand to genre-writing was relatively unexpected.
It could be said that he initially dipped his toe into crime with his masterful novel The Book of Evidence, which played tantalisingly with elements of the period thriller as well as true crime. With Christine Falls, he showed that he might be famous for his use of language, but that he wasn’t too shabby with a complex plot either.
Christine Falls is a compelling literary mystery set in the dank, secretive and oppressive Dublin of the 1950s, a city dominated by a network of businessmen, the judiciary the transatlantic diaspora and of course, the Catholic Church. Black’s is a city of secrets, where the truth is as easily found in the pub as it is in official records and remaining tight-lipped is the order of the day.
Dr Quirke is a large, brusque but likeable pathologist in the Holy Family hospital. Orphaned at birth, he grew up in a boy’s home before he was fostered by the wealthy and prominent Judge Garrett Griffin, a brother to his natural son Malachy. Malachy is an obstetrician, working in the corridors of the same hospital and in the ‘30s the two men spent a year in Boston, where they met and married the well-heeled Crawford sisters. Malachy won Sarah, the sister that Quirke really loved while his own wife Delia, died in childbirth soon after returning to Ireland. Theirs is a complex family dynamic, with Sarah and Quirke holding an obvious torch for one another, Malachy continuing to resent the preference his father showed to Quirke and Phoebe, the daughter of Malachy and Sarah, sharing more with her uncle than with her own parents.
As the novel opens, Quirke, who is sleeping off a hangover in his office, comes across his brother falsifying the records of the eponymous young woman named Christine Falls, a domestic worker who has died in mysterious circumstances. Did Christine really die of a pulmonary embolism, as Mal has recorded? And if so, why is he tinkering with her death certificate?
When Quirke discovers that Christine has died in childbirth, the mistress to a powerful man, he feels compelled to investigate what happened to her and discovers a dark world of secrets and power, where the sinister Knights of St Patrick, with their links to wealthy Irish Bostonians, seem to be involved in the transportation of babies from Ireland. Worse still, it looks like his own family may also be implicated.
He had the hot and guilty sense of having tinkered with something too delicately fine for his clumsy fingers.
The resulting narrative has satisfying twists and turns, introducing and interweaving a plot strand about a couple in Boston who have just adopted a baby with considerable skill. If it occasionally verges towards melodrama, which it does, particularly at the end, it never feels clumsy, given it’s noirish setting in a credible and atmospheric world. Quirke is a fascinating and likeable character, haunted by the past and depicted with a rich depth, while the relationships between himself and his family provide as much drama as the mystery itself. Banville has a sure hand with pacing and he uses that control to drive the narrative to a bleak yet moving conclusion.
While not as prosaic as his non-crime work, the prose here as effortless and fluid as you would expect from Banville, yet he never allows it to overshadow the plot. There is still an awful lot of pleasure to be enjoyed from passages like this one:
He was afraid, but at one remove, as if his fear had conjured up another version of him for it to inhabit, and he, the original he, was obliged to attend to this other, fearing self and be concerned for it, as he would be, he imagined, for a twin, or a grown-up son.
Noir fiction is often less concerned with building complex and believable characters than with creating a medium in which murder and mayhem can thrive, yet Banville manages to do both here. Place is also essential to noir and his dank, gloomy portrait of 1950’s Dublin is the perfect setting for Quirke to operate in. Banville throws in some interesting themes, particularly the treatment of women and children by the Catholic Church in 1950s Ireland, along with the nature of grief, what it means to be orphaned and how far someone will go to protect family.
Overall, I found Christine Falls to be a dark delight and look forward to visiting Quirke’s world again very soon.
If you are wondering if Christine Falls is for you, you can read an extract here, published in The Irish Times. The book has also been adapted by the BBC and stars Gabriel Byrne as Quirke.
Jose at A Crime is Afoot has reviewed Christine Falls as has Kim here and this month as part of our Year with John Banville, she will be reading Birchwood.
