The Daily Sabbatical

John Banville, whose Booker Prize winning novel The Sea had critics speaking of an Irish Nabokov, has started churning out noirish mysteries under the name of Benjamin Black. Christine Falls is his first foray into genre fiction, and its success has been undeniable: it has probably gathered him more readers than all of his more literary books combined. It is far from his best book, however, and I suspect his pen name reminds us that it is not to be judged in the same class. The quality of its language is, to be sure, several orders above that of most genre fiction, and its characters are, for the most part, quite compelling. Nevertheless, the true literary writer’s coyness and unwillingness to cater to the reader shows in a lack of snap and suspense that ultimately keeps Christine Falls from comparing to the best of the genre.
The plot starts rolling when Quirke, a pathologist with a fondness for the bottle, discovers that the records of a young woman’s death have been falsified and that someone has apparently absconded with her newborn child. His curiousity leads him to discover that the circumstances of her death were far from regular, and that his own adopted family might be deeply involved. In the end, Quirke feels his way through the tangles of two mysteries–the one of the dead girl and her child, and the other the complicated thicket of secrets that constitutes his own family life.
Quirke is a satisfying protagonist who will no doubt serve Banville/Black well in the future. (He has already made a reappearance in Black’s The Silver Swan, and more will surely come.) If the plot is ultimately a little weak (and less than mysterious–I felt the most interesting parts of the solution were guessable at a very early stage), the characters are not. My suspicion is that Banville will only get better at this game, and that now that the foundations are laid we can start getting to work with some real mysteries. I’ll keep reading, but I’ll also keep preferring Banville to Black.