6/1/2023 0 Comments Christine falls bookAn equivalent here is the Mother of Mercy Laundry. But before he passes out, he has taken note of an oddity: his close relation, obstetrician Malachy - Mal - Griffin, in the act of falsifying a young woman's death certificate.Įveryone now has heard of the Irish Magdalene homes and their hellish regime. Quirke first appears in a state of partial drunkenness, and sleeps it off on the floor of his morgue. The sense of futility and desolation comes off the pages like the reek of corruption. The central character is a pathologist named Quirke, an expert in death, and victim of a mysterious oppression of spirit, which, indeed, afflicts almost every character. In Christine Falls, it's the atmosphere of 1950s Dublin: dishevelled streets, pungent hostelries, an overwhelming churchly murk. The strange and unnerving atmosphere of his early work is replicated by Benjamin Black, with only a slight shift of emphasis. Banville's has always been a dark and dangerous world, replete with mysteries and melodramas, and with that opposition of chaos and order which is central to the detective genre. Christine Falls is a thriller, but you only have to consider earlier Banville novels - The Book of Evidence, Mephisto - to see that the thriller element was never far away. As with Rendell, the departure proves not to be too radical. Like Ruth Rendell with her "Barbara Vine" persona, John Banville has adopted a new name - Benjamin Black - to signal a departure from his usual mode of writing.
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