Christine Falls
by Benjamin Black
Published by Henry Holt and Company
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Reviewed by Nick Capo, Assistant Professor of English, Illinois College
In Christine Falls, Quirke is a sad pathologist who lives in Dublin. An orphan and widower of twenty years, he survived a descent into alcoholism, yet always teeters close to another fall because of his fondness for whiskey. After a party celebrating a nurse's departure, he walks into the morgue and catches his brother-in-law revising Christine Fall's file. Later, troubled by a fog of drunken memories of seeing the young woman's body, Quirke tries to learn why people are concealing the truth about Christine's death.
Writing as Benjamin Black, author John Banville displays the talent that won him the Booker Prize for an earlier book. The descriptions of place and character are lean and elegant, and the details and minor characters all matter. With its complicated network of characters and careful recreation of Dublin and Boston society in the 1950s, Christine Falls is a novel that a reader can sip and savor much like Quirke does the whiskey in his glass.
Many of the characters are members of the Griffin clan, an influential Catholic family, and all inhabit the tangled web of their shared pasts, terrible secrets, and strands of bitterness and loyalty. Garrett Griffin, the patriarch and a respected judge, is the man whom Quirke best knows as his surrogate father. Malachy Griffin, the judge's son and Quirke's hostile brother-in-law, suspects that Quirke is in love with his wife Sarah, whose deceased sister was once Quirke's wife. A young niece, Phoebe, who seems to be infatuated with Quirke, completes the family circle.
An engaging feature of the novel is the way it sometimes allows us to know more than Quirke. At times, we almost can complete a section of the puzzle that Quirke is still struggling to understand, but then a final detail surfaces and that section clicks together for both Quirke and the reader. There are many disturbing and satisfying surprises in this story.
Christine Falls is a rewarding read for lovers of mystery fiction, a story in which the criminals are people we know well and, in different circumstances, might expect to trust and respect.
Armchair Interviews says: Do you know these characters in your own life?
Author's Web site: http://living.scotsman.com/books.cfm?id=1556892006