Being the second of a four-part profile of Benjamin Black based on an interview that Jim Ruland conducted with the author during a recent visit to Dublin. Read Part One.
Christine Falls, Benjamin Black’s first foray into existential fiction, is set in Dublin in the 1950s, at the mid-point between modern times and the day that James Joyce made famous. The skies are gray, the alleys dark and foreboding. An atmosphere of economic oppression and Cold War angst hangs over everything, like the smell of gas in a Victorian novel. And then there’s the city's famously lugubrious weather. Dublin means “black pool” and Black gets it exactly right.
“It seems to rain all the time,” the author muses, “and if it’s not raining, it’s foggy. I’ve said this many times in many interviews: if you want to write noir fiction, Dublin in the 1950s is just the place for it.”
I’m reminded of a noir-ish bit of exposition, not from Christine Falls but from Georges Simenon’s The Strangers in the House.
On the first day of January the wet pall of cloud that had hung so long over Moulins had lifted, enabling people to go about their business without hugging the walls and trying to dodge the drips, in a world that was eternally black and white, like a bad charcoal drawing.
This passage perfectly captures the post-War provincialism of northern European cities, particularly the overgrown villages that had the audacity to masquerade as cities by dint of not having been knocked down in the spasms of war. The banal scene is viewed through a phantasmagorical screen, revealing something both seedy and sinister.
“The 1950s is a curiously forgotten time,” Black opines, ”but it was an absolutely fascinating time. Of course, we were under the yoke of an iron ideology. We were told in those days that the Soviet satellite countries, behind the Iron Curtain, they are not free there. We are free. It was only in the ‘90s when we actually did free ourselves that we realized for all those years we were exactly like a Soviet country. The church and state were hand in hand just as the state and party were hand in hand there. And our lives were completely un-free.”
If Dublin’s climate makes it the perfect place for a post-noir novel, Black’s protagonist, Quirke Griffin, is just the man for the times. A criminal pathologist who is more at home in the pubs than he is in the morgue, Quirke is a long-suffering widower who drinks to excess and always seems to be smoking. He is a lumbering giant who prowls the priest-haunted streets of Dublin in an over-sized coat, calling to mind Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op or the mysterious man in the mackintosh who makes several unexplained appearances in Joyce’s Ulysses. The theme of paralysis permeates Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners and culminates with the masterpiece “The Dead”; Black gives us a character who traffics in the deceased and is tasked with prying secrets out of those who are deathly stiff. With one foot rooted in the past and another striding toward modernity, Quirke is a compelling twist on the “hero” as reluctant detective.
(James Joyce death mask, via The Modern Word.)
When asked if Quirke’s profession required a great deal of research, the author laughs uproariously.
“Not at all! I asked a pathologist friend of mine about it and when he read the book he said, 'You didn’t take any of my advice. You got everything wrong!' I’ve no interest in research. I think research, heavy research, is death to fiction because you become mesmerized by fact.”
Again, he seems to be channeling Simenon, who held similar views: “I know nothing about the events when I begin the novel,” he said in an interview with the Paris Review over fifty years ago, “I know nothing whatever about the events that will occur later. Otherwise it would not be interesting to me.”
But Christine Falls didn’t come out of nowhere. The basis for the story arose from a television script that was never going to get made and Black turned it into the novel while staying with a friend in Italy. He’d begin in the morning at around nine o’clock, and with Simenon as his muse, crank out 1,500 words by lunchtime.
“Everybody hates me when I say this,” he continues, “but I didn’t realize it was so easy. I believed novelists when they whined how difficult it was. Then when I started writing novels, you know, novel novels, I thought, What are they complaining about? This is fun! You sit and make up these stories and you’ve got these people and you push them around. It’s wonderful.”
Black’s “novel novel,” however, is no slapdash affair. The characters are vividly drawn and cloaked in mystery. Like Dublin (or it’s deceased inhabitants), they don’t give up their secrets easily and with good reason: when Quirke begins to probe the mystery of Christine Falls, the name of the woman who disappeared from his morgue under mysterious circumstances, all signs point to Quirke’s half brother, Malachy, who just so happens to be married to Quirke’s deceased wife’s sister and for whom he not-so-secretly pines for. In other words, it’s a rather complex muddle that Black must unravel.
This is not to say that Black’s method of composition, which is considerably faster than Banville’s, is not without flaws: there’s an entire subplot which takes place in the United States and involves a Yankee-without-a-cause type that doesn’t come off very well. Having escaped Dublin’s gloom, Quirke is a fish out of water in comparatively brightly lit Boston. These scenes, perhaps because they didn't come naturally to Black, seem hastily written, and leave the reader wondering how long it took to write Christine Falls.
“John Banville takes 3-5 years. Benjamin Black writes a novel in two or three months. John Banville was appalled. He said, 'By God, you slut!' John Banville never gave a damn about characters or plotting or any of that stuff. I feel like I’ve regained my virginity at the age of 60.”
Thankfully, Black continues to play fast and loose with his fiction.
Tomorrow: Whiskey in the Jar. (Photos by Nuvia Ruland.)
This is a fantastic interview. I love John Banville's work--not so sure about the 'slut' Benjamin Black but I might come round.
Also love the discussion of being 'mesmerised by fact.'
Looking forward to more!
Posted by: Lauren | December 09, 2008 at 11:21 AM