While the eerie atmosphere of the autopsy room and the lambent light in McGonagle's pub show the author's ability to conjure up mid-century Dublin at best (or worst) in its somber moments, the orphanage scenes and those with the Scituate moss mansion's dwellers pale by comparison. Not for nothing does our protagonist feel that he's trudging along, so resigned to the weary beat he follows that he lures himself into acting like he's found rest in the long march itself, rather than its respite.
Now, while Banville-writing-as-Black certainly knows how to create powerful studies of characters caught in their own manipulations and machinations, the plodding pace of this novel, staying mainly upon Quirke, too often drifts into sameness and thickens into dullness. Given that this is priest-ridden, dreary 1950s Dublin, I expected the gloomy mood would infuse the prose. I wasn't disappointed but I wasn't elevated. I rarely open a mystery, but I've enjoyed most of John Banville's fiction (see my reviews on Amazon), so I came to this with high expectations. "Benjamin Black"'s "Christine Falls": Book Review
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