BiblioAddict

On good timing, falling for Christine, and pretending to be a god you’re not:

Christine Falls: A Novel
By Benjamin Black
Picador USA / Jan. 2008
384 pgs. / $14.00

It’s an old saying that there’s a time and a place for everything, but it has only recently occurred to me that this old adage could apply to reading certain books as well. Has this ever happened to you: you’re reading a book which you fully expected to like, but for some reason you just can’t get that into it. You put it down and come back to it days, weeks, months, or even years later and suddenly you can’t turn the pages fast enough. Nothing about the book is significantly different, but it’s as if in the interim you managed to attain the right mood or disposition required to appreciate the particular novel or subject.

It took me months to finish Christine Falls by Benjamin Black. Initially, I was excited to finally have a paperback copy of this novel I’d heard so much about. As soon as I bought it I promptly dived in and… was just unmoved. I couldn’t figure out. The writing was fine, the story was interesting I just couldn’t get into it. Every time I picked it up I wanted to be reading something else.

So I essentially put it down, though I left in my bookmark and continued to carry it around in my bag, hoping for the day when the mood would finally strike. Christine Falls and I walked around with each other for two months until last week when, as I was unpacking my bag of books at the end of the day, I looked at it, opened it to the last page I’d read, and couldn’t put it down.

I’ve said it already but the prose style wasn’t as good for me as Kate Atkinson’s, and I sometimes found the characters’ motivations inscrutable. But the story was a good one, though not very much of a mystery. Part of the mystery is explained half-way through the novel and the other part is nothing you probably won’t have already figured out on your own. Yet, the way that Black unfolds the story slowly and methodically with prose that is understated but never uninteresting, makes this book well worth reading.

And it is an engrossing study of the main character Quirke, the pathologist whose investigation into the death of Christine Falls sets the novel’s events into motion. The way that Quirke develops over the course of the novel was the most interesting aspect of the book to me. In the beginning, he’s a bit of an irresponsible alcoholic who’s more concerned with cracking his next joke than righting any wrongs. By the end of the novel, however, an aggrieved old acquaintance tells him, “You’re not funny anymore.” And indeed he’s not. He’s become stubborn, more surly than usual, and open to the idea that there’s nothing wrong with righting a few wrongs even if the outcome doesn’t directly affect you.

I thought it an amazing coincidence that I finally finished reading this novel only weeks after I watched “Gone Baby Gone” for the first time. Both the movie and the novel raises some interesting questions on the moral right that someone does or does not have to take a child without their parent’s consent because they think they’re capable of providing the child with a better and happier future than they’re likely to get a home. Both the film and book agree that no one has the right to take a child from their parents unless the child is being abused, and if they are, that proper and legal channels should be taken to ensure their safety.

But “Gone Baby Gone” to a slightly greater degree than Christine Falls forces you to reside in that gray area of uncertainty. It forces you to admit that you don’t really know how the future will turn out for any child. Pretending you know is pretending to be God. And men pretending to be God in both the movie and the novel only leads to trouble.