When I first stumbled across the title Christine Falls, I thought that "falls" was a verb. Christine falls--off a cliff? Christine falls--like Adam and Eve in Eden, thanks to the serpent? Given that one character concludes that "We all have our own kinds of sin" (325), the latter misreading may not, after all, have been all that far-fetched. Benjamin Black/John Banville's neo-noir, set in 1950s Ireland and America, conjures up a very postlapsarian world indeed, in which characters do evil in the purported service of some greater good. The novel's glum pessimism about human nature is all very noir; so too is the hard-drinking, alienated protagonist, the femme fatale (not really very fatale), the criminal conspiracy, the not overwhelmingly happy conclusion. To what end does Black/Banville revisit a genre haunted by the likes of Dashiell Hammett?
Quirke, our protagonist, has no idea why he is so interested in the deceased Christine Falls, whose death in childbirth has been covered up by Quirke's brother-in-law/foster brother, Malachy. The novel charts Quirke's search for his own motivations--which, strictly speaking, he doesn't find. Instead, when Inspector Hackett asks Quirke to explain his decision to go through with the prosecution that will effectively demolish his foster family, Quirke replies, "I don't know, Inspector [...] Maybe because I've never really done anything before in my life" (340). While complex motives for action are themselves a hallmark of noir--think of Sam Spade, stuck investigating his partner's murder despite his actual contempt for the man--Quirke's explanation, which substitutes abstract choice (a shift from passivity to activity) for a motive with content, is frankly untrue. Many years previously, he did "do" something, not revealed until near the novel's end; moreover, this action effectively sparks the novel's plot. The investigator turns out to have inspired the crime, however accidentally! The ending, which promises a future revelation, thanks to the machinery of justice, also involves its own act of concealment. In that sense, we are left wondering about exactly what it means to act, to take responsibility, given Quirke's refusal to acknowledge his own action.
This question of action arises again when it comes to the children. Perhaps the greatest evil in this novel lies in the characters' willingness to treat both babies and older children as puppets or pawns, reducing them to mere objects. The novel strongly hints that Quirke, an orphan raised at first by the Christian Brothers, was abused, sexually and otherwise. Phoebe, Quirke's niece, finds her proposed marriage blocked by her family. The babies sent to America for fostering will be given no choice in their future careers (they are all destined for religious vocations); even the fate of Christine's daughter is sealed by her foster father's inability to handle her infant need for human contact. What kind of mindset does this suggest? Quirke's foster father declares that "Some people are not meant to have children. Some haven't the right" and further insists that "We decide" who these people are. Quirke "wearily" interprets this as playing "God himself" (335). To which an irritated reader might respond: isn't that conclusion a bit of a cliche? Well, Quirke has not shown himself to be an original thinker. Nevertheless, the novel's villains all extend their theory of right to other areas, such as their right to use physical violence in order to gain their ends and, indeed, their right to shape the lives of those under their control; one might say that only they have the "right" to free will. In fact, the villains are defined by their full confidence in their own actions--not for them Quirke's near-total passivity (that one crucial action aside). And yet, in this novel, if passivity allows evil to persist, action itself is associated with evil-doing. Hence the significance of that quotation about sin: this is not a novel in which justice comes untainted.
Now, however, we're circling back to my original question: does the novel do anything new with noir? Is it even a particularly successful noir? The possibility of evil lurking within justice, for example, is already a feature of noir, with its often amoral and sometimes extremely violent protagonists. Sam Spade is not a "good" person (let alone Mike Hammer!). Jake Seliger pointed me to Banville himself on this very issue: "'It would be a much better world if the priests and the politicians and the novelists just dropped this facade," he said. "Even the best of us are monsters, horribly selfish people. Noir simply admits this.' Which, he continued, explains the sense of relief, of glee almost, we have in reading it." What Banville has done, then, is write a comforting novel--not comforting in the sense of warm fuzzies, but in the sense of living up to expectations. The paradox of Banville's experiment is that it is not experimental.
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