Holy Orders by Benjamin Black
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Noir With a Conscience
But a fraud.

Peopled by characters you might not invite to dinner but who are nevertheless comprehensible as human beings: the alcoholic, emotionally damaged protagonist Quirke, his co-dependent, suicidal girlfriend Isabel, and his sympathetic but not terribly clever daughter Phoebe.

Set in a theocratic Dublin of the 1950’s, with a few blatant Irishisms and just a subtle touch of the sod in the voices of the more rural characters, there are brewery drays and wind-up telephones for colouring. But really the only colour is some shade of terminal drab. Every room is cold and every day is damp. Clothes never fit properly except if the wearer is a cad. No social intercourse happens unless lubricated by Jameson’s whisky in an atmosphere of Player’s cigarette smoke (Port is what one who is on the wagon drinks and the only non-smokers are those trying to quit). Seedy, louche provincialism, in the form of yokels, tinkers, criminals and clerics, continuously threatens to overwhelm urban civilisation. The mystery is more the ultimate direction of various interacting neuroses, including ecclesiastically inspired ones like homophobia, than it is the identity of the murderer.

Benjamin Black can't entirely resist the erudition of John Banville. So we are treated to some typically arcane vocab. Words like 'parp' and 'boreen' (to be fair, an assimilated Irish word), as well as a handful or two of gypsy bon mots defined in a handy appendix. But are these worth the price of admission?

I don't think so. The problem I have is this: if you're going to use a weak murder mystery on which to hang a greater mystery of the complexity of psyches, then the reader is owed a resolution; this we don't get. Clearly the author expects us to buy the sequel in order to find out what happens. Bad form in the worst tradition. No more Quirke for me I'm afraid.

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