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Holy Orders: A Quirke Novel, by Benjamin Black
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When the body of his daughter's friend is brought to his autopsy table, Quirke is plunged into a world of corruption that takes him to the darkest corners of the Irish Church and State.
"At first they thought it was the body of a child. Later, when they got it out of the water and saw the pubic hair and the nicotine stains on the fingers, they realized their mistake."
So begins Holy Orders, the latest Quirke case set in Dublin at a moment when newspapers are censored, social conventions are strictly defined, and appalling crimes are hushed up. Why? Because in 1950s Ireland the Catholic Church controls the lives of nearly everyone. But when Quirke's daughter Phoebe loses her close friend Jimmy Minor to murder, Quirke can no longer play by the Church's rules. Along with Inspector Hackett, his sometime partner, Quirke investigates Jimmy's death and learns just how far the Church and its supporters will go to protect their own interests.
Haunting, fierce, and brilliantly plotted, this is Benjamin Black writing at the top of his form. His inimitable creation, the endlessly curious Quirke, brings a pathologist's unique understanding of death to unlock the most dangerous of secrets.
- Sales Rank: #77296 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-08-20
- Released on: 2013-08-20
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Booklist
Postwar, corruption-laced Dublin is as much a character in Black’s strikingly detailed, psychologically intricate crime series as his hard-drinking, brooding hero, Quirke, a pathologist who, as his equally ruminative daughter, Phoebe, puts it, can’t resist playing at detective. The sixth installment begins with the gruesome murder of Phoebe’s friend, pint-sized reporter Jimmy Minor, a key character in the earlier books. The ensuing investigation is as slow and sticky as molasses as Quirke and shrewd if grubby Inspector Hackett visit an imperious priest at the spooky Trinity Manor and an almost mythological tinker encampment. Quirke is in a bad way. Not only is he wracked by guilt over his inability to express love, his grip on reality is slipping under an onslaught of disorienting hallucinations and anguished memories of his boyhood abuse by priests. Phoebe, meanwhile, comes under the spell of Jimmy’s alluring and alarming twin, Sally. Though most intrigued with the mysteries of the mind, Black succeeds brilliantly in delivering piquant social satire and chilling revelations of the church’s unholy power over the justice system and the press. --Donna Seaman
Review
“Absorbing...The murder mystery is solved, after its startling fashion, in due time---but not before Mr. Black has worked his lyrical magic at fine length, in scenes that unfold with a poet's grace.” ―The Wall Street Journal
“Sophisticated...[Black] is arguably one of the finest prose stylists writing in English today.” ―The Wire
“It is doubtful that anyone can write as well as Benjamin Black when it comes to a psychological mystery.” ―The Washington Times
“[Holy Orders] starts and ends as strongly as the best of the Quirkes.” ―St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Outstanding...[Black] has turned in his most complex plot yet in Holy Orders.” ―The Star-Ledger (New Jersey)
“Gripping, terrific...Although it shares the vivid settings, evocative mood, and striking characters of the earlier Quirke novels, Holy Orders has a tighter, more intricate plot.” ―Tampa Bay Times
“Even if Gabriel Byrne weren't starring in a new BBC series based on the Quirke novels by Benjamin Black (John Banville's alter ego), fans will be clamoring for this latest in the popular series.” ―Library Journal ("Barbara's Picks" for August 2013 fiction)
About the Author
Benjamin Black is the pen name of the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville. The author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed series of Quirke novels―including Christine Falls, A Death in Summer, and Vengeance―he lives in Dublin.
Most helpful customer reviews
21 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
Best in the series so far, if his bleakest
By John L Murphy
With the sixth installment in John Banville's busman's holiday writing as Benjamin Black, pathologist Quirke with a side pursuit as amateur detective risks resembling a brooding houseguest intent on staying. Banville's erudite, Continental-style novels of ideas, with characters trapped within history by their own haunted compromises, continue to differ thematically from his mysteries set in 1950s Dublin. However, as Black's "Quirke novels" have met with a wider following than his mannered, dour ones, loyal readers such as myself may sense Quirke merging with Banville's louche protagonists.
Black's prose which initially appeared to distinguish "genre" from Banville's "literary" fiction has evolved by now more similarities than contrasts. What still may set this protagonist apart from his creator's other characters may be his troubled, resilient self. It sustains Quirke through more tales than those given Banville's anguished men--although some of those revive or reappear in Banville's novels, which continue apace (I have reviewed most of Banville's novels and all of the Black installments with Quirke--I reviewed this from an advance copy.)
Jimmy Minor, April and Phoebe's friend, had worked as a junior reporter for a Dublin paper. His boyish corpse, fished out of the River Liffey, opens this latest novel. With the suggestive title of Holy Orders, the connivance of a compliant, cowed government with the lordly Church in this oppressive era of postwar Irish history looms; it's very difficult to shake the sensation that this novel is not happening over a half-century later, amidst continued revelations of clerical abuse and conspiracy.
Black conjures doom compactly. It resounds through the calmly told chapters of this confident novel. Quirke's vertigo and hallucinations pierce this novel to prickle to the reader's response to mystery.
"He went out to the living room. A parallelogram of insipid sunlight lay on the floor under a window like the parts of a broken kite. He stood and looked about himself, feeling dazed. The morning's watercolor tints lent a novel sheen to familiar surfaces. Everything was as it always was, yet somehow he could recognize nothing. It was as if all that was formerly here had been swept away in the night and replaced with a shiny new version of itself, identical in every aspect, yet one-dimensional and hollow, like props in a fantastically detailed stage setting." (160)
Phoebe notices her father's altered state, accentuating his habitual tendency to peer out at the world as if through the eyes of the disappointed child he was in the orphanage. While the novel relies on an indirect omniscient narrative via Quirke, Black sidles into her perspective. Through her unease with Jimmy's twin sister, Sally, Phoebe's own self fractures. "She felt as if one whole side of her life was shearing off and toppling into the sea."
Hints of Joyce's Ulysses linger: cocoa, cinnamon, and pineapple entice Dubliners from their slump. Beckett's inquiring light which troubled some of his own trapped characters enters, too, more ominously, onto Quirke's mental stage to illuminate his enigmatic inner vision. By now, readers of a sixth book need no sixth sense to be told why. Quirke simply soldiers on, with handmade Italian shoes trudging the mud of a down-and-out campsite, tracking down if not legal justice than moral recompense, despite his ennui.
Deceit, suspicion, jealousy, doubt: Banville and Black join, through Quirke and Phoebe, the ageless concerns of storytellers. Holy Orders freshens them. May my lack of plot details encourage you to encounter their treatment for yourself, for their evocation proves this to be the most powerful Quirke novel yet. Black's return from gentry pursuits to Quirke's inward search, and his concern for what Quirke's former lover tells him he has, not her husband's "heart" but the rarer quality of a "soul", endures to enrich this sixth tale of this haunted Dubliner's lonely hunt for answers--or partial clues.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
A mystery to savor for its gorgeous prose
By Mal Warwick
How often have you started reading a book in which the first several pages were beautifully written, only to notice that the prose grew progressively plainer and less interesting as you proceeded? Perhaps you’ve never been aware of that, but I sure have. It’s a sign that the author struggled to produce lyrical and evocative language in the opening chapter that went to the agent or publisher with an outline for approval — but lapsed into pedestrian prose once the project received a green light.
That phenomenon is especially notable in genre fiction — mysteries, science fiction, romance — but you won’t find it in any of the writing of Benjamin Black, a pseudonym for the Booker Prize-winning Irish author, John Banville. Banville is sometimes compared to Vladimir Nabokov — and you can see why even in his genre fiction. Holy Orders, the sixth of Banville’s novels (writing as Black) about the tortured Dublin pathologist who appears to be named only Quirke, is a textbook example of dazzling prose. Here, for example, are a few of the images Black sprinkles so generously through the pages of the story:
As he watched her, with people and cars flashing past, he experienced a sudden, swooping sensation in his chest, as it his heart had come loose for a second and dropped and bounced, like a ball attached to an elastic.
It was his experience that people always knew more than they thought they did. Things lay torpid at the bottom of their minds like fat pale fish in the depths of a muddy pond, and often, with a bit of effort, those fish could be made to swim up to the surface.
[T]he trees shivered and shook like racehorses waiting for the off, and fresh green leaves torn from their boughs whipped in wild flight down the middle of the road or plastered themselves to the pavements as if hiding their faces in terror.
After immersing myself in such glorious prose for the duration of this deeply satisfying tale, I now learn that Banville considers his crime writing to be “cheap fiction” and a craft as opposed to the art he brings to his other fiction. He professes to spend little time on these lesser efforts — though that’s very difficult to believe! — but, then, Banville has been quoted in a British magazine trashing all his own books (“I hate them all … I loathe them. They’re all a standing embarrassment.”). And this is a man who has been winning literary awards by the dozen since 1973 and is widely regarded as one of the true masters of English style.
With all this said, I must concede that any reader looking for nonstop action and sheer excitement won’t find them in Holy Orders. Black is concerned more with character development and scene-setting than with the usual conventions of the mystery genre. The story involves Quirke, his daughter Phebe, and his pal Inspector Hackett of the Garda (the Dublin police) in a complex plot with Irish “travelers” (called “tinkers” in Ireland in the 1950s, when the Quirke novels are set) and a passel of very unpleasant priests and their enforcers. This is not a happy tale, but reading it you’ll learn a good deal about the warp and woof of life in Dublin in that difficult time in the wake of the Second World War.
14 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
not really a detective story
By kb from la
As another reviewer noted, Benjamin Black's Quirke mysteries are coming to resemble Banville's literary novels. In Holy Orders, murder and detection play second fiddle to the drawn out portrait of a self-absorbed and angst ridden Quirke. As in so many current mysteries, the original sin that sets everything into motion is child abuse.
My complaint isn't about the quality of the book, but the fact that it is not really detective fiction. The murder and its solution seem tacked on to a narrative that is about something else entirely--a victim of child abuse, now a middle aged man struggles with the psychological blow back of his horrific childhood. He's an alcoholic, can barely relate to his family and lover and is beginning to experience terrible panic attacks. Although superbly written, it is not a narrative I find interesting. For me the best part of Holy Orders deals with the life crisis of Quirke's daughter Phoebe. She is involved in the murder story in a much more authentic way than Quirke.
I can see the problem of an admired writer who creates genre fiction that becomes a runaway success. He must resent all of those readers (I confess to being one of them) who love Benjamin Black but have a hard time with John Banville. Maybe Holy Orders is an attempt to lure us into reading the author's more literary output. Or maybe it's just retaliation because we aren't willing to make the effort.
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