It's almost impossible to tell someone who hasn't read it what Banville's prizewinning novel The Sea is 'about', but the problem with Christine Falls is saying anything at all without ruining a compelling novel set in the redolent, boozy, dank, stifling Dublin of the 1950s, a city dominated by a tight-lipped and even more tightly networked mafia made up of a few prominent clans, civil war diehards, the transatlantic diaspora and the tentacular arms of the Catholic church. OK, he's a superb stylist, but can he plot? This time the question is whether an author famous (or notorious) for novels in which nothing memorable happens, memorably, can keep control of his craft through the hazardous shallows and rapids of Genre Gulch.

The Book of Evidence (1989) played seductively with elements of the murder mystery as well as a scandalous real-life case of that period. In Christine Falls we have the prospect of a distinguished novelist, last year's Booker prizewinner and therefore presumably not short of cash, rebranding himself as Benjamin Black to publish a 300-page thriller which is the first in a projected series featuring a pathologist hero à la Patricia Cornwell.Īctually, John Banville has glanced down these mean streets before. More recently, Julian Barnes writing as Dan Kavanagh and Tim Parks as John MacDowell have produced thrillers (Duffy, Cara Massimina) that cast an interesting light on aspects of the authors' imaginations concerning which the novels published under their own names are reticent. Urn:oclc:872606305 Scandate 20100128211739 Scanner Chekhov's novel The Shooting Party, a moody whodunnit, introduced the sensational plot device which a rather different author with the same initials would reinvent 40 years later in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. OL15135919W Page-progression lr Page_number_confidence 94.85 Pages 392 Ppi 400 Related-external-id urn:isbn:0330445316 Urn:lcp:christinefallsno00blac:epub:85c23881-a6ea-40f2-9cfd-d509497bea0b Extramarc Brown University Library Foldoutcount 0 Identifier christinefallsno00blac Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t24b3q83w Isbn 9780312426323Ġ312426321 Lccn 00000312 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary_edition

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Christine falls novel