The novel reads like a turning point in the series, for those who have read its predecessors, with resolution saved for...
The sixth in a series of Irish mystery novels resolves its ostensible mystery, but deeper mysteries remain.
The latest novel from Black (Vengeance, 2012, etc.) featuring the pathologist Quirke is not the place to start for those new to the series. Its plot relies heavily on characters from previous novels and developments that transpired within those, and it doesn’t sufficiently elaborate on Quirke’s relationships with his daughter, his girlfriend or even with the corpse whose discovery propels the narrative. Yet plot has always been less important than character, atmosphere and style within these novels from the alter ego of celebrated literary author John Banville (Ancient Light, 2012, etc.), who has typically been less concerned than most mystery writers and readers with whodunit than with mortality, identity, Ireland and other themes shared with his literary fiction. As a pathologist rather than an investigator, Quirke mulls the possibility that he had initially been drawn to his profession “in hope of penetrating nearer to the heart of the mystery,” but he’s since realized that “[e]very day he dealt with death and yet knew nothing about it, nothing.” While mortality permeates the novel, its real mystery is the mind of Quirke, one he no longer trusts as he suffers panic attacks and disorientation while trying to come to terms with a murder that puts the Catholic Church at odds with an exploitive, sensationalistic press. Oddly, neither the murder victim nor the mastermind behind the crime exerts much of a presence in the novel, which focuses more on the abuses Quirke suffered as a young Catholic and on the way the investigation forces him to revisit places in his memory that are as uncomfortable as they were formative. “[E]verything Quirke did, so he felt, was predetermined by laws laid down he did not know when, or how, or by what agency,” writes Black. “He was a mystery to himself, now more than ever.” For Black, the mystery of the human condition remains impenetrable.
The novel reads like a turning point in the series, for those who have read its predecessors, with resolution saved for subsequent volumes.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9440-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
PROFILES
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.
Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952
ISBN: 0142004235
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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