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| Christine Falls: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Authors: Benjamin Black, John Banville
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
Buy New: $8.21
You Save: $16.79 (67%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  67 reviews
Sales Rank: 666302
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.2
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.92
ASIN: B001714Z0C
Publication Date: March 6, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Another 5-Star Red for Mystery Lovers March 14, 2007
11 out of 16 found this review helpful
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?
 John Banville on an earner December 14, 2007
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
John Banville is a superb author of cold, complex novels, he is not noted for the creation of empathetic characters. In interviews lately he has spoken of the ease with which he has slipped into the Benjamin Black persona, and how much quicker it is for him to write as Black. This is his first novel as Black, in which he introduces a lone, heavy-drinking pathologist named Quirke. Oh dear! A pathologist, a heavy drinker, a loner, an amalgam of best-seller types.
Nonetheless, there is novelty in the fact that the story is set in 1950's Dublin, among the affluent Catholic middle class. Their world is well described, with a keen eye for detail and interaction. One strand of the story unfolds around the illegal transportation of the children of Irish single mothers to the USA to `good' i.e. Catholic homes. The other main strand concerns Quirke's extended family and its interactions and discoveries. Quirke's life seems over complicated - he was adopted by a medical family, became a rival to the son of the house, loved, but lost the woman who became the son's wife, married the sister of the woman he loved, oh dear.... And it gets even more complex. In fact there's a bit about Quirke's daughter, that I found quite frankly unbelievable, as well as unnecessary.
As I read on, I found myself getting more and more irritated by the book - the minor characters - Conor Carrington, Barney Boyle - why not make some effort at inventing non-alliterative names; even the depiction of the weather - " the wettish morning reeked of smoke and fumes", " the sky was heavy with the seamless weight of putty-coloured cloud" - yes, yes, but a bit indulgent perhaps?
So, overall a pity, it seems like an effort to dumb down, and perhaps make some money by writing a series - Quirke becomes another Rebus or Scarpetta. So delighted was Banville with the ease of production, that in an interview with the (London) Sunday Times he said he had dashed off the third Quirke novel in three weeks, whereas, as John Banville, he might spend an afternoon over a sentence.
Morality sunk by melodrama December 20, 2007
11 out of 13 found this review helpful
Solid writer of obscure though occasionally prize-winning literary fiction turns his hand to the crime novel. It sounds like a great idea that solves the 'problem' of both styles: such a novel would have the suspenseful, page-turning plot that literary fiction often lacks, and yet it would be handled with the depth of character and richness of language usually absent from genre fiction. Sadly, the result is more like decorating a suburban bungalow in the style of Louis XIV: ill-advised and more than faintly ludicrous, but salvaged by its winking self-awareness as something not to be taken entirely seriously. Banville claims he was inspired by rediscovering the novels of Georges Simenon. There is something of that here, though not quite enough of the existential anxiety (which Martin Amis, in a similar mode, to my mind nailed perfectly, terrifyingly, in the much-maligned "Night Train"). For me, the central problem here is that the moral claustrophobia of Banville's tale - which needs to be about real, credible characters to move us - is consistently undercut by ludicrous melodrama, the sheer silliness of some sequences, and the relentlessly cliched depiction of characters such as Andy Stafford. None of it felt real to me, so neither did the moral angst around which the plot turns. I understand this began life as a television script, and that's precisely how it feels: worth spending 100 minutes with over a cup of tea, but not worth slogging through 400-odd pages. I like Banville. I like good crime fiction, too. This is neither.
terrific 1950s medical thriller March 8, 2007
10 out of 17 found this review helpful
In Dublin after a few drinks at an office going away party for a nurse, pathologist Garret Quirke enters his prime work area the morgue only to be stunned by what he sees in spite of being drunk. His stepbrother Dr. Malachy Griffin was sitting at Quirke's desk writing in a file that the pathologist noticed is that of Christine Falls. Too tired to think any further Quirke leaves a nervous Mal behind.
After several hours of sleep, Quirke wonders why Mal was at the morgue instead of home with his wife Susan. He begins to look closer at the death of the young maid, Christine Falls, who died during childbirth especially since he knows Mal changed the file. However, whenever he raises a point, he finds the Irish medical establishment protecting one another while the clues take him to Boston.
This is terrific 1950s medical thriller that constantly pulls the rig out from underneath the reader with fabulous unexpected yet plausible twists. The subplot in Dublin is foggy and mysterious as the audience alongside the obstinate hero wonders what is going on. The shift to Boston turns more detective like in tone and less sinister, as the clues begin to come together though spins still will fool the reader. Benjamin Black provides a superior medical investigative tale that will have fans clamoring for more work by quirky Quirke.
 Good intentions pave the road to hell April 3, 2007
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
As several of the reviewers here have pointed out and at least one on the back cover of Christine Falls, this novel is not so much a murder mystery as a novel about sin. To that most prevalent theme I would add those of selfishness and corruption, of nostalgia that is in no way wistful. I came to this novel as a lover of Banville's other novels, especially The Sea, and the pellucid style (to use one of his favorite words) that distinguishes his writing is still present here, although more subtly. Christine Falls does not have the intensity of The Sea, at least in part because its narrative is spread out across a number of characters rather than one first-person narrator. But each of these characters is nuanced, marked by Banville's unusual perceptiveness of a person's "tender damage" (to quote another of his novels). And his focus on character is not to say this isn't a damn good yarn. Christine Falls moves more slowly than a usual murder mystery, however, with more of a sense of consequence. It is a dark, affecting novel - and if this is how John Banville has fun, then I can't wait to read his next serious effort.
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