By Patrick Anderson,
whose e-mail address is mondaythrillers@aol.com
Monday, April 2, 2007

CHRISTINE FALLS

By Benjamin Black

Henry Holt. 340 pp. $25

Most writers are plodders, not poets. We struggle to put one simple declarative sentence after another, with Hemingway our hero and clarity our goal. Only a few writers are true stylists, dazzling the reader with word-magic. Among this blessed few, in their different ways, are the likes of Fitzgerald, Updike, Styron, Capote and Chandler. The Irish novelist John Banville is also a member of the fraternity. Banville, who is in his early 60s, is recognized as one of the most stylistically gifted novelists at work today, a status reinforced when he won the Man Booker Prize in 2005 for "The Sea." Now, changing directions, he has written, under the pen name Benjamin Black, a crime novel, "Christine Falls." If there is such a thing as a literary thriller -- if that is not an oxymoron -- this surely is it.

But what is it?

It's a brilliant but sometimes frustrating hybrid in which style is every bit as important as plot -- sometimes competing with it for our attention. It may be churlish to complain about luminous prose, but in fiction, as elsewhere in life, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. Style aside, Banville's plot is one that takes us deep into the Irish culture. In Dublin, in the 1950s, two doctors who were raised as brothers -- one was adopted -- come into conflict over a woman who has died in childbirth. Their names are Quirke and Mal, and the dead woman's name is Christine Falls. A lesser writer who served up those all-too-meaningful names (and called himself Black) might be accused of putting on airs, but since this is Banville we will excuse them as a bit of erudite fun.

Quirke does have his quirks, although ones common in crime fiction. For one thing, he drinks and smokes more or less constantly. For another, he refuses to stop searching for the truth about Christine Falls's death, even after the police have deserted him, his brother has warned him off, and some thugs have beaten him half to death. Undeterred, he soldiers on and learns about a scheme whereby illegitimate Irish babies are taken from their helpless mothers and shipped to America. Quirke himself journeys to the United States -- Boston, of course -- and deep into his family's darkest secrets before the story is done.

I want to quote Banville's prose at length because to a great degree it is what the novel is about. "Mal had a way of bulging out his eyes and drawing upward sinuously his already long, thin form, as if to the music of a snake charmer's flute." A priest is "bog-Irish to the roots of his oily red hair . . . all smiles and stained teeth but the little yellowish-green eyes cold and sharp as a cat's." "A gust of wind caught the skirts of the detective's overcoat and made them flap around him like furling sails, and for a moment it was as if the man inside the coat had vanished, vanished entirely." An amorous nurse helps Quirke down the corridor and lets "her breast brush with fond negligence against his sleeve." "The high bogs were hidden under snow but already there were newborn lambs on the slopes, spindly, dazed-looking scraps of white and black with stumpy, clockwork tails." An old Irish American mobster, "his frail head wobbling on its stringy stalk of a neck," is kept alive by "a thin bitter gruel of memories and imaginings, of malice and vindictive amusement." A dying man's "breaths came in long, laborious rattlings, as if he were hauling on a chain inside him, link by painful link." Foghorns sound like "the forlorn and hopeless calls of great wounded animals crying in pain far out at sea."

I admire fine writing as much as the next fellow, but there are hundreds more lines as rich and distracting as these, and sometimes I felt overwhelmed by them. And sometimes Banville is just too literary. He gives us a rape scene beside the ocean and -- just as "a big head of blue-black water with a flying white fringe along the top of it was surging in" -- well, you can guess what's happening in the back seat of the Buick as the tide crashes in. Banville's stylistic fireworks are most obtrusive early in the book, where perhaps he was feeling his way. In the final chapters, when his plot has taken hold, his writing quiets down and his story becomes fast-moving and exciting. Readers who love gorgeous prose and aren't in any rush to find out whodunit will savor this novel. Others, of the just-the-facts-ma'am school, will be happier with more conventional writers. Banville has said in interviews that he was moved to write "Christine Falls" by his admiration for writers like Chandler and Simenon, and that this is the first of a series about Quirke. It will be interesting to see if he tones down his prose along the way.