Rating: 4/5
Review:
Thoughtful and readable
This is a consciously "literary" crime novel. How you respond to it will depend upon whether you like the sort of heightened language employed by Benjamin Black (the Man Booker winner John Banville writing under a well-publicised pseudonym). I do like it and so I did enjoy the book, although I thought it had its flaws.
To illustrate the style of the book, Banville describes a buffet table which has "at its centre, a mighty salmon, succulently, indecently pink, arranged on a silver salver..." Or as another example, "The priest was studying him closely again, running ghostly fingers over the Braille of Quirke's soul." I found all this atmospheric and evocative - which is just as well, because there is a lot of atmosphere and character and a great deal of Fine Writing but, frankly, not all that much plot. What plot there is, is a bit thin and covers very well-trodden ground - child abuse, the wealthy believing they can behave as they wish and so on - and it flagged pretty badly in places. However it serves well enough as a vehicle for conveying the author's character analyses and sense of the mores of 1950s Ireland, which seems to me to be the real point of this book
I thought Inspector Hackett (only a relatively minor character, sadly) a wonderful creation, and there is one prolonged interview scene conducted by him which is utterly compelling and quite brilliantly done, I thought. Although less engaging, Black's other characters seem very real and well-drawn to me and I thought he made some penetrating observations about the way people think and behave.
In short, this is not really a whodunit sort of crime novel, but it is a very well written, thoughtful book and an enjoyable, intelligent read.
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