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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780312426323
ISBN number: 0312426321
Label: Picador
Manufacturer: Picador
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 384
Printing Date: January 22, 2008
Publishing house: Picador
Release Date: January 22, 2008
Sale Popularity Level: 16373
Studio: Picador
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Product Description:
The hero of Christine Falls, Quirke, is a surly pathologist living in 1950s Dublin. One night, after having a few drinks at a party, he returns to the morgue to find his brother-in-law tampering with the records on a young woman’s corpse. The subsequent morning, when his hangover has worn off, Quirke reluctantly begins looking into the woman’s history. He discovers a plot that spans two continents, implicates the Catholic Church, and may just involve members of his own family. He is warned--first subtly, then with violence--to lay off, but Quirke is a stubborn man. The very first novel in the Quirke series brings all the vividness and psychological insight of John Banville’s writing to the dark, menacing atmosphere of a first-class thriller.
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Rated by buyers 
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It is impossible to adequately evaluate Black's writing due to Timothy Dalton's narration, which varies from "over the top" silly to soporific.
Rated by buyers 
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Not to mince words, Christine Falls is a dreadful mystery. The plot is banal, the 'villain' the transparent very 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.
Rated by buyers 
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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 endeavor 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.
Rated by buyers -
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.
Rated by buyers 
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The writting in this book is much better than that of the usual mystery. It is however a very depressing story,
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