This is the second book I’ve read in the Benjamin Black crime series featuring pathologist Dr. Quirke. Black is the pen name of the award-winning Irish writer John Banville. The series is set in Dublin in the 1950s. As it was in A Death in Summer, the story is horribly unpleasant, and Quirke’s behavior is awfully irresponsible and self-destructive.
Having just completed a long stint in a facility to overcome his alcoholism, Quirke wasted little time getting back to it despite admonishing himself not to drink. At dinner with his daughter he said to himself that he must not order a second bottle of wine; moments later he signals to the waiter.
Almost immediately after coming home, he decided to buy a car, though he could not drive. He chose an Alvis, which I have learned was a very fancy, expensive car that looks like a Rolls Royce to me. He learned to drive and without bothering to get a license or insurance, began motoring all around Dublin. One of my favorite moments of the book is this:
As he approached the car, he had the distinct impression as he frequently had, that it was regarding him with a baleful and accusatory aspect. There was something about the set of the headlamps, their cold, alert, and unblinking stare that unnerved him and made him feel defensive no matter how respectfully he treated the machine, no matter how diligently he strove to make himself familiar with its little ways, the slight yaw that it did on right turns, the extra pressure on the accelerator it called for when going into third. The thing resisted him, maintaining what seemed to him a sullen obstinacy, only on occasion on certain open stretches of the road did it forget itself and relinquish its hauteur and leap forward with eagerness, almost it seemed with joy.
An image I want to remember involves Quirke’s take on the telephone when he is awakened from a dream by the telephone ringing.
It was the telephone. He struggled out of sleep, rising on his side and flailing one arm wildly to find the machine and stop the awful noise. He found the switch of the bedside lamp. It always seemed to him a ringing telephone should be hopping but there it sat on a little locker by the bed, quite motionless, squat as a frog, yet making such a racket.
I ask myself what it is that makes me inclined to read a book with such an ugly story at its core. Of course I didn’t know about that at the outset but now having read two from this series, I am forewarned. The crime story itself was not the main focus; it is Quirke and his relationship with his daughter that is central. And while Black (John Banville) is a captivating writer, I will think twice about reading another one.
Benjamin Black, Elegy for April, Henry Holt and Co., 2010, 293 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available in the public library.