Christine Falls : a novel /

JOHN BANVILLE has chosen Benjamin Black as the pen name for a project that may be his own guilty pleasure - a classic, hard-boiled crime novel. More than a seamless performance in fulfilling the demands of its genre, "Christine Falls" is executed with what feels like authorial delight. Mainstream literary novels succeed or fail on the strength of characterization, but noir fiction is less concerned with building complex and believable characters than with creating a medium in which murder and mayhem can thrive. Place is essential to noir, character less so. While the voluptuous atmospheric flourishes of "Christine Falls" suggest how much fun Banville is having as Black, they also provide the book's center of gravity, the force that holds all the other elements together. Sometimes they make an entirely adequate cast seem little more than perfunctory. The novel is set in a dank and fog-draped 1950s Dublin that oozes existential dread from its very mortar; even the walls are "thick with many coats of a bilious yellow stuff, glossy and glutinous, less like paint than crusted gruel." Inanimate objects suggest the life, albeit repellent, that people lack: the sheet used to cover a corpse has "a human feel, like a loose, chill cowl of bloodless skin"; the "curved arms" of a chair seem "to tighten their grip on" its occupant. A "smoke-dimmed" pub invites a clientele composed not so much of human beings as of props conveying decadence and ruin: "a large, florid woman in purple," swilling stout, her smile "gapped and tobacco-stained"; her companion, "lean as a greyhound, with colorless, flat, and somehow crusted hair." Fittingly, for a story with so ambivalent a life spark, the main action in "Christine Falls" begins "long after midnight" in a morgue, in "the shadowy dark of the body room." The reluctant, brooding hero, playfully named Quirke, makes a career of performing autopsies. He prefers the dead to the living - they're less withholding and commendably docile - and as Black (also playfully named) observes: "In the pathology lab it was always night. This was one of the things Quirke liked about his job." Yes, dark it is, with the very occasional "beam of sunlight falling slantways" from above, for the less-than-acute reader who might need to be reminded just how shadowy a tale he is about to enter. This is a world in which light itself behaves peculiarly, appearing "to vibrate minutely, a colorless, teeming mist." From the beginning, things are not as they appear. While making a cursory examination of the most recent arrival, a young woman whose toe tag bears the name "Christine Falls," Quirke notices "the dark roots of her hair at forehead and temples: dead, and not even a real blonde." It's a small observation, meaningless to the plot, yet it demonstrates the pathologist's unreasonably idealistic nature. Quirke is offended by even so small and inconsequential a lie as coloring one's hair. His expectations are sufficiently high to ensure that he will always be disappointed. Quirke - whose tough-guy veneer covers the wound left by a tragic loss - becomes an accidental detective when Christine Falls's corpse disappears before he has a chance to investigate the cause of her death. Missing bodies are problematic, of course, but more perplexing and ominous is the fact that Quirke's adoptive brother, Mal - pay attention to the names - who is also a physician, has tampered with her death certificate. Did Falls die of a pulmonary embolism, as Mal has recorded? No, she was a fallen woman. The mistress of a powerful man, Christine Falls died in childbirth, a turn of events that would present less opportunity for intrigue today than it does in the rigidly Roman Catholic Ireland of the 1950s. Delving into hidden places - not just squalid neighborhoods but parts of the body only a scalpel can reveal - Quirke's inquiry into Christine Falls's death and the fate of her illegitimate child draws him further and further into the underworld. He discovers the kind of sordid corruption that such a cynical character might have expected - were he not, under all his stylized defenses, a damaged romantic. "I've cut up a lot of corpses in my time," he proclaims in true hard-boiled style, "but I've never found the place where the soul might have been." Perhaps not, but he was still looking. Isn't cynicism the flip side of sentimentality? The archetypal noir hero, Quirke is a loner, a man with acquaintances rather than friends. When he needs information, he trolls a familiarly depressive dive called McGonagle's, where he drinks a great deal but is only rarely too drunk to penetrate criminal intentions or defend himself when attacked. Sleuthing shows him a world in which everyone has his price, with greed and corruption so pervasive that the most admirable men are merely those who have farthest to fall. Unfolding in tandem with the mystery surrounding the death of Christine Falls and the disappearance of her child is the slow striptease of Quirke's past, which has left him in a dark place, drinking hard, fascinated by "the mute mysteriousness of the dead. Each corpse carried its unique secret." Of these, none are more surprising than the one his departed wife, Delia, was keeping. Quirke's grief, the force that drives his dark interests, has him completely in its thrall. "When Delia died," he knows, "an instrument that he carried at his breast, one that had been keeping him aligned and synchronized with the rest of the world, had stopped suddenly and never started up again." Like most examples of sentimentality, this feels not only like ersatz emotion but a veil drawn before an absence of feeling. BECAUSE Quirke and his supporting cast are types rather than fully realized characters, they're immune to the kind of analysis, or significance, imposed on a Moses Herzog or a Rabbit Angstrom or, for that matter, a Freddie Montgomery, the protagonist of John Banville's novel "The Book of Evidence." But it's hard to dismiss what emerges as a particularly insidious strain of misogyny in "Christine Falls" - insidious because it masquerades as Quirke's concern for the fate of unwed mothers and their babies. The injustice done Christine Falls is revealed; the movement of the novel is from darkness into light; men in positions of authority are shown to lack the very morals they profess to uphold. But these corrections don't compensate for the fact that this is a story in which women die, seemingly a punishment not only for their sexuality but also for their gender. Arguably, they die of being female. Even Mal, a celebrated obstetrician entrusted with countless female lives, has a smile, "more of an undertaker than that of a man whose profession it was to guide new life into the world." This doesn't make "Christine Falls" a less interesting book. Quite the opposite: it adds a sinister fascination to the adventures of Dr. Quirke that will be offset or magnified in the future. Black has a sequel in the works - more than one. Kathryn Harrison's most recent book is a novel, "Envy." A pathologist becomes an accidental detective when a woman's corpse goes missing from the morgue.