Banville slips in and out of these garbs with relative ease—like Julian Barnes, he seems to almost require the challenge—but the crime novel is by far the greatest stretch for him. Banville's prose is so preternaturally lush, so smooth and lyrical, even a dampened register would go against the grain of the crime novel's blunt requirements.
Amazingly, though, in Christine Falls Banville proves he's willing to lay off the light touches and allow a story to tell itself. This is a dark, ambitious crime novel full of cliff-hanger chapter endings, barroom brawls, even long-night trucker hauls. It's going to make more than a few readers flip the book over to look at the author photo to make sure Banville's really pulling the strings.
The story is an explosive one. In 1950s Dublin, two brothers lock heads over a dead woman and a complex family legacy. Quirke Griffin is a moping, hard-drinking pathologist. He lost his wife and child in childbirth. He lost the woman he should have married to his brother, Mal, the true-blood son of a powerful Dublin judge who took Quirke in as an orphan.
Christine Falls is meant to make us wonder if Quirke really is the childless, black-sheep intruder Mal has made him to feel. As the story begins, Quirke catches Mal in the morgue fiddling with the file of a recently deceased woman named Christine Falls. Quirke does some digging and quickly discovers her cause of death was not pulmonary embolism, as Mal has it listed, but rather hemorrhaging in childbirth.
Banville unveils Quirke's not-altogether-innocent interest in the case beautifully. For the first third of the book, Quirke's loss remains implied—a penumbra of regret rather than an outright fact. The brothers' romantic competition almost strains credulity but sows the right seeds. Quirke is going to keep digging until he knows the truth, at least to have the pleasure of ruffling his brother's fussy high Catholic exterior.
Like so many crime fictions, Christine Falls paints its setting better than most literary fictions. Here is Dublin in the early '50s, when the church was the only power, and to be on the outside of that power—or pushing against it—was a dangerous thing.
How much concealment is required to maintain respectability? As Quirke realizes this is the question he's asking, day-to-day life in Dublin takes on a seedy menace. It infiltrates the warm fug of the parties Quirke attends, drinking himself into oblivion beforehand as if to announce who he really is. When thugs come to scare him away from looking further into the case of Christine Falls, they sound like an odd mixture of beat cops and overgrown altar boys.
Christine Falls' baby is evidence of all the church denied, so it's spirited away to America, where the child is adopted by a striving Irish-American couple. Halfway through the novel, Banville begins see-sawing between the two locales, his prose antsy and ropy in the American sections, noir-like and marinated in the past in Ireland. The two worlds collide when Quirke flies to America with his niece to track down his ex-father-in-law, living —with echoes of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep—in a run-down mansion full of plants.
In the early sections of the book, Banville struggles, just a bit, to keep his foot off the pretty pedal. Indeed, Quirke has a remarkable appreciation for the texture of light, clouds and all things atmospheric for a man who is hung over most of the time. But Banville gets many, many other things right—especially the kind of quick, throaty introductions crime novels need to maintain their aura of coiled violence.
Quirke's flighty niece is dating the kind of effete young man "who enters sideways through a doorway, slipping rather than stepping in." A hospital Quirke finds himself at later in the book "reminded him of the inside of a skull, with that high ceiling the color of bones and the window beside him looking out like an unblinking eye on the wintry cityscape."
Were this John Banville at the helm, and not Benjamin Black, he'd have slowed us down a bit to note how that wintry cityscape beveled the viewer's melancholy into something even sadder than snowfall. In this swift, perceptive and unguiltily satisfying novel, we move on and on until we reach the story's bitter end. Somehow it feels a little truer to life.