Christine Falls by Benjamin Black

I've mentioned various ways of differentiating literary and commercial novels here before. They're mostly tongue-in-cheek, but I think there's always an element of truth in those quick dichotomies.

Today, the way I want to look at it is: commercial novels need to have a plot. Literary novels only need to have a theme.

Christine Falls is a novel, ostensibly in the mystery/crime/thriller genre, published as by "Benjamin Black," though all the publicity materials, then and since, also made it clear that Black was a pseudonym for the literary novelist John Banville. Banville's photo is in even in the paperback edition (US Picador, 7th printing but first edition) I read. Falls came out in 2006, and was the first of nine novels with the same main character, all as by Black.

I've read a number of Banville's novels, most recently Snow, which is oddly related to the Black series. Otherwise, my readings of his literary novels was mostly some time ago, in the '90s and Aughts, when I was reading at a quicker pace and spending more time analyzing stories professionally. I've also read the Black novel The Black-Eyed Blonde, about a decade ago - that was an authorized sequel to Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep which I thought was substantially more successful than other attempts at continuing Chandler.

So I came to Christine Falls intending to enjoy it. And Banville/Black, as always, is a lovely writer of sentences and paragraphs and scenes and moments.

But Falls, like the much later Snow, is largely a message book. That message is: "the Magdalene Laundries were bad, m'kay?" This was not a shocking proposition in 2006, a decade after the initial scandal and four years after a major movie about them.

On top of that, the main character of this book, and the whole Black series, is Quirke. No first name, no middle name, no other name. Just, apparently, Quirke Q. Quirke, the quirkiest quirk who ever quirked a quirk. There are a few moments when Banville/Black nearly stumbles or fails to paper over the fact that his hero has no first name in a world where all of the other characters - most of whom are part of Quirke's family and have known him for decades - do have first names and use them all the time.

So our hero is quirky, got it? Black/Banville wants to be very very sure that you understand that.

And the way that he is quirky is that he's a very large gentleman who drinks a lot - I'm not sure if Banville thinks of it as a lot, as fish don't always recognize water - who has worked as a pathologist in a big Dublin hospital for about twenty years, who was an orphan himself, and who had a wife that died, long ago. So He Is Sad, and has been living a very small, circumscribed life for a long time - doing his work, drinking at all hours, and living in a small set of rooms full of the same old crap he's had forever.

Oh, and it is The Fifties. No more specifics than that, but it is definitely The Fifties.

But then, one day, Quirke gets interested in the case of Christine Falls - not a portentous name at all, o no! -  a corpse in his department that he notices one night during a party for a nurse who is heading to a hospital in Boston. (Boston in the US.) His pseudo-brother/brother-in-law Malachy Griffin - Griffin's father the Judge raised Quirke after rescuing him from the orphanage, and the two married Boston heiress sisters Sarah (Mal) and Delia (Quirke) - was doing something suspicious with the paperwork for Falls, and the drunken Quirke was interested.

Quirke sort-of, more-or-less, intermittently, tries to figure out what happened to Falls. He fairly quickly learns that she died in childbirth, despite Mal changing the paperwork to say it was a heart problem, and learns that there's a big Catholic conspiracy, mostly bankrolled by his father-in-law, that moves what seems to be a vast sea of unwanted newborns out to deserving families, both in Ireland and among the Irish in America. There doesn't seem to be any particular reason for this to be illegal, but it's being run by gangsters, and Quirke is repeatedly threatened and eventually badly beaten.

This all happens very slowly. The reader, if that reader has any knowledge of the wider world, has already figured out nearly all of the plot, and has correctly identified the two possible candidates for the father of Fall's baby. But Banville/Black is writing in a literary manner, so we get a long section with the adoptive parents of that baby, over near Boston - the mother is mostly the viewpoint character, and is quiet and loving and more than a little boring, while her husband at first seems just a bit loutish but turns out much worse than that.

Anyway, Quirke (James Quirke? Seamus Quirke? Aloysius St. James Roberto Quirke?) learns a bit more about the baby, including that she was carried off to Boston by the very nurse whose going-away party was the occasion for Quirke's discovery of Falls in the first place. (In a literary novel, everything must be connected. There are no coincidences.)

Eventually, after about three hundred pages of thoughtful introspection from various POV characters, Quirke is in Boston, chaperoning his niece Phoebe - who in the minor B-plot was mooning after a totally unsuitable young man, Conor Carrington, who is shock! horror! Protestant - to visit her grandfather, who is near death. 

There are a lot of mystery-novel-esque elements to close out the book, including a death that could be called murder if you want and a rape that is deeply thematically important. (2006 seems awfully late for a Significant Rape in a novel, but Banville is of the older generation.) The old man funding the whole scheme - Quirke's father-in-law, Phoebe's grandfather, who has a Big Sleep-esque hothouse and wheelchair, speaking of thematic elements - does die, as we all know he would. Quirke learns some things, including one shocking truth that is almost immediately retconned into something he always knew - so I suppose he drank it out of his mind for twenty years? Maybe you can do that if you're Irish enough - but does not solve any crimes or act like a detective in a detective novel at all.

In fact, he's very much a literary-novel protagonist. He's in the middle of a family situation that's more complicated than he realizes, he pulls at threads that lead to things he wasn't ready to learn about the people closest to him, and the most important changes in the book are internal to Mr. Quirke Q. Quirke, Lord of Quirkiness.

Again, Banville/Black tells this story in exquisite prose and has a fine hand for characterization - though Quirke himself is a bit more of a black box than he should be, to make those end revelations work. But it feels like a novella's-worth of matter stretched out to novel length for no good reason, to tell us all that something we already know about was Really Bad.

Um, yeah, OK, I guess. What else have you got?

Robots, Demons & Dayjobs by David Kantrowitz

I regularly read books of funny comics by creators I'm not familiar with. This is usually great - new funny stuff! new perspectives! potentially new favorites! - and there are lots of books out there by lots of funny people.

But then I come to write about them here, and I worry that I'm saying exactly the same thing each time: this is a newish book of funny stuff, by somebody I hadn't heard of previously, and it is funny, and you might want to check it out.

For example: Robots, Demons, and Dayjobs. It's a 2025 collection of comics by David Kantrowitz, who has worked for Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and other places - these nine things seem to be all personal work, and there's no sign they were published anywhere else first before this book. (Though they easily could have been.)

So it is a newish book of funny stuff, by someone I hadn't heard of previously, and it is funny, and you might want to check it out.

(See what I mean?)

Most of the pieces here are short stories in comics form - the Table of Contents entry "Twelve Single Panel Cartoons" being an obvious exception.

The first and last pieces are in a pseudo-storybook layout, with big blocks of typeset text, and tell stories about a character based on Kantrowitz - one about finding a big trash can full of trophies, and one about accidentally wearing a red shirt to Target (and the horrors that ensued).

But most of the book is in more normal comics-format, with various odd creatures - a skull-headed restaurateur, a log-limbed ball-bodied dude named Wizard Dinks, two hard-working monsters, a succession of overly polite robots - getting through their days however they can.

Kantrowitz has mostly worked in kids' media, I think: he has the sort of sensibility, art style, and concerns that you see in creators who have toiled on big corporate stuff for younger readers and are now doing more personal work. His art is expressive and mostly pretty crisp, though he varies his style quite a bit in these stories. The subject matter is not aimed at kids, but it's also not "adult" (in the sex & drugs sense), either - there's a feeling that he may be talking to adults more here than he's used to, but it's all accessible work, with a mostly broadly comic sensibility.

I will note that this book is not available in the usual hegemonic retailer that I typically provide links for. I linked above to the Hoopla library app, where I read it. (Your local library might include Hoopla access: if so, I greatly recommend it.) It's also available directly from the author. I didn't see an ISBN, so it may not be more widely available, but Kantrowitz is LA-based, so, if you're in that part of the world, you might see him at a show somewhere, selling these. Take a look.

Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum & Jon Buller

The "and" in the author line above is doing more heavy lifting than usual: Joshua Slocum and Jon Buller didn't work together in any sense on this book. They never even met.

Well, they couldn't: Slocum disappeared in 1909, and Buller, I'm pretty sure, wasn't even born then. (I can't find biographical details online, but he's a modern illustrator and cartoonist whose career seems to stretch back to about the turn of the century - this century - so he's likely in his forties.)

The original Sailing Alone Around the World was a non-fiction book by Slocum, loosely based on letters he wrote during, yes, a three-year period when he sailed 46,000 miles alone in his sloop Spray from Massachusetts to Massachusetts, the hard way. It was published in 1899, and is one of the standard classics of the adventure-travel genre, on that short shelf with books like The Worst Journey in the World and The Long Walk.

Buller has published a long list of books for children, along with his wife Susan Schade - she writes and he draws mostly early readers and middle-grade books. The two of them did a comics project a few years back, the intriguingly-titled Nudism Comes to Connecticut. But this one seems to be all Buller, working from Slocum's original book.

His version of Sailing Alone Around the World translates Slocum's book into comics form, with mostly big square panels with cleanly-ruled borders and large sections of Slocum's text as captions. His art has a lot of cross-hatching, and his people are slightly cartoony in a vaguely Edward Koren style - both of which both reflect his story-book experience and work well for a story set over a hundred years ago.

Joshua Slocum was a seasoned seaman in the early 1890s, in his mid-forties with years of experience as a master of sailing ships around the world. He'd run off to sea (the time it finally took; he'd tried before) at the age of sixteen in 1860, and had been working since then. But, with the rise of steam ships, his skills were less and less valuable, and it looks like he had a period of unemployment.

So he decided to refurbish a small sloop, the Spray, and plan for that round-the world trip. Buller starts by adapting the work Slocum did to refurbish and rebuild Spray, which took two years - that gets us through the first twenty pages of the book, and then Slocum sets off on his trip.

His initial plan is to go east, and he gets to Gibraltar without too much incident. But there a friendly British ship tells him the southern coast of the Mediterranean is still full of pirates, making Slocum's intended path to the Suez Canal much too dangerous.

So Slocum instead went the other way, recrossing the Atlantic at its narrowest point back over to Brazil and going down the coast of South America and through the Straits of Magellan, where bad weather delayed and diverted him for more than a month.

But he did make it through, and got across the broad Pacific to Australia. He spent some time there, meandering up the east coast and across the north, before setting on across the Indian Ocean, stopping in South Africa and then finally heading back home across the Atlantic a third time.

Along the way, he saw a few pirates - mostly at a distance, mostly in small boats, and mostly "natives" - put in at Juan Fernandez to honor the memory of Alexander Selkirk (the original of Robinson Crusoe) and ran into a lot of seamen he knew from his earlier career or that knew him by reputation. He also ran aground at least once, and had to do extensive repairs in harbor (various ones, all along his journey) multiple times - par for the course for a wooden sailing ship on a long, rough trip.  For a book about sailing alone, there's a fair bit of convivial dinners and 19th century pleasantries, including dialogue that I assume is straight out of Slocum's book.

Sailing Alone is the kind of book that in the reading feels like it was much easier than the work was in reality, so the reader starts to think "I could do this! That would be grand!" in his best 19th century diction. But it was an impressive accomplishment, and Slocum got a fair bit of fame from doing it. His book was a bestseller, making him enough money to buy a farm on Martha's Vineyard, where, of course, he ended up not spending much time, since he preferred to be at sea. It was on the Spray that Slocum disappeared, about a decade later - the assumption is that he died in a rough sea, but, like Ambrose Bierce, his body was never found, so readers can make up any pleasing stories they want.

All of This and Nothing: Get It On

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

This week's song is not from the 1960s. It might sound that way, but it's actually a 2008 song by an Australian band, The Chevelles.

This is Get It On.

It was the lead single from a record designed to launch them in the US, Barbarella Girl God - they leaned into the '60s thing, I think, at least somewhat - and that record has a bunch of other good songs, too. She's Not Around, C'mon Everybody, and Every Moment I particularly like.

I don't think the launch "took" the way everybody hoped, which is why I'm classifying this as one of my Obscure songs this year. But a good song is a good song, and ones you haven't heard before are wonderful, so, if this one is new to you, you're welcome.

It sounds to me like yet another "rock band on the road" song, with verses loosely about specific US West Coast cities - no details, just the "here's what's next" of a band on the road in a blur of shows and highways:

Well, I'm seein' things in the highway lights
Twenty-four cities
I don't see the sights
Too far from home
Forgot my own life

And those kind of songs are fun. For those of us who don't go on tour with a rock band - which is the vast majority of us - they encapsulate the great parts of that life (excitement, cool music, novelty, moving on quickly) and avoid the less-pleasant bits (living in a van with 2-5 people you used to like, long hours on the road, eating whatever's available on those highways, etc.).

This is a good one; it gives the feel of that road rolling on, with something new around every corner. The feeling that you might as well Get It On.

Quote of the Hour: What Doesn't Change

I like to think about things that have always been the same, from remote human history up to and including now. People's heads have always been about as hard as they are today and have hurt about the same amount when they bumped together. Horses have always shaken flies off themselves, whether waiting to pull Pharoah's chariots or standing at a kiddie ride at a county fair. Meat cooking on a fire has smelled delicious in exactly the same way forever.

 - Ian Frazier, Paradise Bronx, p.24

Quote of the Hour: Can He Handle It?

As the bus sailed away with Harry safely on the top deck, she held Candy up so she could wave goodbye to him. He wasn't stupid, he was never going to stop asking questions. Perhaps she should tell him the truth about everything. Truth was such a novel ideal to Crystal that she found herself still staring after the bus had disappeared up the road.

 - Kate Atkinson, Big Sky, p.315

Quote of the Hour: Explaining the Unexplainable

I have never wanted to write about my drawings, and I still don't want to, but it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to do it now, when everybody is busy with something else, and get it over quietly.

 - James Thurber, "The Lady on the Bookcase," p.657-58 in Writings & Drawings

Quote of the Hour: Stout Denial

He eyed her apprehensively, like some rat of the underworld cornered by G-men. Painful experience had taught him that visits from Connie meant trouble, and he braced himself, as always, to meet with stout denial whatever charge she might be about to hurl at him. He was a great believer in stout denial and was very good at it.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Pigs Have Wings, pp.10-11

Quote of the Hour: American Cuisine

Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, p.693 in Later Novels & Other Writings

Quote of the Hour: If They Call It Tourist Season, How Come We Can't...

It is a long abandoned belief that tourism, like competitive athletics, makes for international friendship. The three most hated peoples in the world - Germans, Americans and British - are the keenest sight-seers. There are very few English villagers who have seen an Egyptian; very few Egyptian villagers who had not seen an Englishman; the result is that the English generally are well disposed toward Egypt, while the Egyptians detest us. Sympathy for foreigners varies directly with their remoteness.

 - Evelyn Waugh, Robbery Under Law, p.722 in Waugh Abroad

Quote of the Hour: Decisiveness

It is one of the great advantages of being a tycoon that your life trains you to take decisions at the drop of the hat. Where lesser men scratch their heads and twiddle their fingers, the tycoon acts.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Spring Fever, p.15

Quote of the Hour: The Unsleeping Eye

I seem to remember I went to a cinema that night. Or it might have been a casino. The cinemas blur in my mind, and so do the casinos. The only safe thing to say is that I didn't go to my solitary, expensively riverside home. I wasn't sleeping anymore. If you didn't sleep in it, what else is a home for?

 - D.G. Compton, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, p.47

Quote of the Hour: Fans are Slans

Of course, there was a kind of fandom, and I knew them, but they were all real weird freaks, and they were unpalatable to me because they did not read the great literature. There wasn't anybody that read both. You could either be in with a group of freaks who read Heinlein and Padgett and van Vogt and nothing else, or you could be in with the people who read Dos Passos, Melville, and Proust. But you could never get the two together. And I chose the company of those who were reading the great literature because I liked them better as people. The early fans, they were trolls and wackos. Being stuck with then would have been like the first part of Dante's Divine Comedy, I mean, up to your ass in shit. They really were terribly ignorant, weird people.

 - Philip K. Dick, Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods! edited by Richard Wolinsky, p.140

Quote of the Hour: Understanding Pigeons

People who do not understand pigeons - and pigeons can be understood only when you understand that there is nothing to understand about them - should not go around describing pigeons or the effect of pigeons. Pigeons come closer to a zero of impingement than any other birds. Hens embarrass me the way my old Aunt Hattie used to when I was twelve and she still insisted I wasn't big enough to bathe myself; owls disturb me; if I am with an eagle I always pretend that I am not with an eagle; and so on down to swallows at twilight who scare the hell out of me. But pigeons have absolutely no effect on me. They have absolutely no effect on anybody. The couldn't even startle a child. This is why they are selected from among all birds to be let loose, with colored ribbons attached to them, at band concerts, library dedications, and christenings of new dirigibles. If any body let loose a lot of owls on such an occasion there would be rioting and cat-calls and whistling and fainting spells and throwing of chairs and the Lord only knows what else.

 - James Thurber, "There's an Owl in My Room," pp.216-217 in Writings and Drawings

Quote of the Hour: Theory of Lies

"It's a funny thing - I suppose you've noticed it - the people who lie the most are nearly always the clumsiest at it, and they're easier to fool with lies than most people, too. You'd think they'd be on the look-out for lies, but they seem to be the very ones that will believe almost anything at all."

 - Gilbert Wynant in Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man, p.861 in Complete Novels