Christine Falls: A Novel

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Customer Reviews:

Farewell, Me Boyo [Posted on 2008-06-25]
A mysteriously high amount of praise has been afforded to John Banville's CHRISTINE FALLS, his first mystery novel published under the nom de plume Benjamin Black. The protagonist of this novel (and of its follow-up THE SILVER SWAN), a Dublin pathologist in the 1950s, has been given the sole name of Quirke, which Banville seems to have fallen in love with because all the other characters hail him by his name almost constantly and in almost every sentence they address to him ("How are you today, Quirke?", "Well, Quirke, I have something to tell you...", etc.). That's just one of the many highly affected quirks in this disappointing mystery novel which seems mostly to be a kind of re-working (a tribute?) to Raymond Chandler, since it features many of the stock types associated with the Philip Marlowe novels, particularly THE BIG SLEEP: a scheming and corrupt aging millionaire with sinister plans involving his daughters; his beautiful and highly sexed younger wife; a spoiled heiress wanting to marry an ineffectual man; her sleazy and violent chauffeur; a pair of freakish goons who work the hero over; and so forth.

Removed from its Los Angeles context the whole thing seems a bit odd, especially since Banville also retains a sort of Greek tragedy structure for the whole thing. It certainly plugs along, and Banville's flair for the ringing phrase is always evident, but there's not much new or even all that interesting here.

great writtin depressing book [Posted on 2008-06-29]
The writting in this book is much better than that of the usual mystery. It is however a very depressing story,

Wildly disappointed [Posted on 2008-07-03]
Black employs some lovely imagery--the frequent references to the wind surrounding the characters and other climatic descriptions are exquisitely phrased, which makes it all the more disappointing to read the hyper-melodramatic cliches tumbling from his characters' mouths. Every character seems to get the same treatment, a tormented psychological backstory, no matter how trivial he or she is, so you keep expecting them to reappear and fulfill an important role in the plot (but you're frequently disappointed).
And as for that plot, it's also full of the moldiest cliches: the Church--too powerful! Its members--sometimes (gasp) corrupt! Illegitimacy in a Catholic country in the 1950s--disapproved of!
I might have been more impressed, but I couldn't work up any concern or interest in any of the sighing, whimpering, twitching characters, so it was hard to be moved by any of the ridiculous things befalling them.

Lost Souls [Posted on 2008-07-07]
Christine Falls is the name of a young woman who dies just before the start of this mystery story that begins in Ireland in the nineteen-fifties. The principal character Quirke, consultant pathologist at a Dublin hospital, finds his brother-in-law Mal Griffin in his office writing up her death certificate. Mal is also a consultant at the hospital, a society obstetrician. Quirke, an antisocial alcoholic widower, seems to have moved down as his former childhood friend has moved up. Although he does not challenge Mal's cover-up, he doggedly persists in an attempt to discover the truth. This book is the result.

Benjamin Black is the pen name of John Banville, who won the Man Booker Prize for his novel THE SEA. I recently reviewed an earlier Banville novel, ATHENA, which also has elements of mystery. Both these books are distinguished by a richly ornate style which creates a fog of unknowing just by itself. Can Banville write simply enough to lay out a mystery that is created by facts, events, and characters, rather than by words? The answer is yes; CHRISTINE FALLS is easy to read, its people and settings lucidly described. And yet I do feel that even as Benjamin Black, Banville cherishes mystery almost as an existential state, deliberately delaying the release of information that the reader has probably seen coming a long way back, and having his protagonist wallow in uncertainty: "Why was he persisting like this? he asked himself. What were they to him?... And yet he knew he could not leave it behind him, this dark and tangled business. He had some kind of duty, he owed some kind of debt, to whom, he was not sure."

Fortunately, such overt Banvillean moments are relatively rare, and I would have given this four stars as a readable mystery, and perhaps five for its unusually well-rounded characters. But two things hold me back. One is the drinking. I don't know why it seems de rigueur in an Irish novel for most of the characters to spend their lives in bars. But a mystery reader must be able to trust the perceptions of the leading characters; instead, I find myself trying to keep count of the whiskeys. More seriously, as a non-Catholic at least, I cannot buy into the motives that lie behind the plot that Quirke uncovers in Dublin and later in Boston. There are certainly crimes committed in the course of this book -- murder and assault for starters -- but they are incidental to the more pervasive wrongdoing which they are intended to cover up. And while this is certainly a spiritual sin, it is not clear that it is a crime in the eyes of the law. In the last chapters of the book, I sense the author trying to reconcile spiritual aspects which are the province of the novel with criminal ones that are the concern of a mystery; I am not convinced that he succeeds.

The Lemming Effect [Posted on 2008-07-18]
Not to mince words, Christine Falls is a dreadful mystery. The plot is banal, the 'villain' the transparent first choice. The 'conspiracy' is not fully developed, and it is not even apparent why the author sees it as as inherently evil as he evidently believes it to be. Early on, one of the minor characters is the victim of a homicide. The author never clarifies who is responsible, or just what the culprits (whoever they are)hoped to accomplish by the murder. The prose, which is highly praised in the mainstream reviews, is quite ordinary. We are not talking Raymond Chandler or Ross MacDonald here - not by a country mile.

What is going on, not to mince words again, is that the critical community is keeling over at the spectacle of a Booker Prize winner trying his hand at genre fiction under a pseudonym. Whoop-de-doo - the Lemming effect, as we sometimes see in film criticism, when the critic obviously looks no further than the name above the title.

Other than that he can't plot, his hero has no vitality or interest - did I forget to add that the book is relentlessly downbeat? - and that he has not even managed to create a credible conspiracy, the author succeeds.

This is, plainly and simply, a flat, dull, terribly uninteresting book.

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