Elegy for April: A Novel - Hardcover

Black, Benjamin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805090916 ISBN 13: 9780805090918

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 2010

Synopsis

Quirke—the hard-drinking, insatiably curious Dublin pathologist—is back, and he's determined to find his daughter's best friend, a well-connected young doctor

April Latimer has vanished. A junior doctor at a local hospital, she is something of a scandal in the conservative and highly patriarchal society of 1950s Dublin. Though her family is one of the most respected in the city, she is known for being independent-minded; her taste in men, for instance, is decidedly unconventional.

Now April has disappeared, and her friend Phoebe Griffin suspects the worst. Frantic, Phoebe seeks out Quirke, her brilliant but erratic father, and asks him for help. Sober again after intensive treatment for alcoholism, Quirke enlists his old sparring partner, Detective Inspector Hackett, in the search for the missing young woman. In their separate ways the two men follow April's trail through some of the darker byways of the city to uncover crucial information on her whereabouts. And as Quirke becomes deeply involved in April's murky story, he encounters complicated and ugly truths about family savagery, Catholic ruthlessness, and race hatred.

Both an absorbing crime novel and a brilliant portrait of the difficult and relentless love between a father and his daughter, this is Benjamin Black at his sparkling best.

About this title

Review:

'Quirke is an endearing hero and, as in the previous two novels in which he appears, the Dublin of the 1950s - wet, cold, foggy, sinister - is evoked with harsh realism and nostalgia... A beguiling read' --The Times

'It is Dublin itself, half hidden by fog, that is the novel's truly sinister force here, a city suffused with illicit desires and suppressed racial, religious and political tensions, and in whose dank, coiling shadows strangers all too easily lurk. Banville, whose supple, easy writing glitters here like frost, layers tension with unhasty stealth... this excellent novel feels like a requiem for a cursed city as much as anything, its inhabitants' inner lives doomed to remain as locked away, unhappy and unknowable as whatever lies buried in the fog' --Metro

'Set in 1950s Dublin, it opens in a vivid and ghostly echo of Bleak House, with the city shrouded in a muffled silence of fog . . . The novel is brimming with memorable characters . . . The pace of the story is perfectly controlled, with an incrementally tightening grip of tension, and the plot delivers enough unexpected turns to satisfy the genre's aficionados . . . The author also brings to the telling of the story all the qualities that we associate with him: a supreme ability to evoke time and place, astute psychological insight and an elegant and sophisticated crafting of language that is a constant source of pleasure. The imaginative richness of the language, however, is never indulgent or gratuitous and in a particularly disciplined way is always made subservient to the flow of the narrative. It allows him not only to unravel the central mystery of the missing woman but also to explore the delicate subtleties of a tentative parent-child relationship, the damaged Quirke's search for healing, and today, when some of Ireland's economic and spiritual secrets the seeds of a sour fruit are being increasingly released, the novel offers an uncompromising insight into the abuse of power . . . Ultimately, Elegy for April is a novel that transcends any limitation of genre or categorisation, stands supremely confident in its achievement and, to this reader at least, reveals itself as good enough to take its place with anything John Banville has ever written' --The Irish Times

'Black has returned to Fifties Dublin and the lovable, ursine pathologist Quirke, who is just out of rehab and investigating the disappearance of his daughter's doctor friend, April. As always, Black's Ireland is simultaneously drab and darkly dangerous, but as his fans (or those of his more rarefied alter ego John Banville) will expect, flinty humour lightens the darkness and diamond sharp prose puts the quotidian in a new light' --Daily Telegraph

'Elegy for April, the third crime novel by Benjamin Black (a.k.a. literary writer John Banville), is everything any mystery fan could want, and a lot more. This book is the best of the Blacks so far. It's also as good, or better, than any of Banville's mainstream works, including his Booker Prize-winner, The Sea. Black's elegantly elaborate prose takes Quirke along the byways of Dublin with bits of back story, side stories, old history and Dublin's secrets . . .This is a gorgeously written, beautifully constructed story that will remain with you long after the final page' --The Globe and Mail, Canada

'Engrossing... A suspenseful whodunit... his depiction of a fragile father-daughter relationship is as powerful as the unsettling truth behind April's disappearance' --Publisher's Weekly

'Gorgeously precise and expressive prose' --Guardian

'Both Black and Banville are equally serious and stylish, blackly or bleakly comic and wonderfully sly. . . Really sharp-eyed readers will notice that the dust jacket features an atmospheric photograph by Life magazine's Tony Linck of Bachelor's Walk, looking westward on a bright but foggy day in winter. There is, amongst other vehicles, a "sit up and beg" Ford Prefect in the foreground with a sleek Alvis alongside and some pedestrians on the pavement. In all kinds of absorbing ways, Elegy for April is a set of variations on that captivating photograph' --Irish Independent

'Another quirky and page-turning book from Banville/Black' --Irish Post

'The writing has an elegance and nimbleness that surpass almost all other genre fiction. Black evokes Dublin -- which he knows inside out -- with an almost bitter love, and his feeling for the city's class and religious divisions and its urgent, albeit repressed, sexual atmospheres helps his characters spring from the page . . . The feel of Elegy for April and indeed the other Benjamin Black stories owes much to Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler and Georges Simenon, great mystery writers of the period in which Banville has chosen to place his own excursions into genre . . . Elegy for April is filled with thematic gloom, yet the writing sparkles. John Banville, writing as John Banville, is a deep-dish writer, always dazzling, sometimes overwrought; when adopting the Benjamin Black persona, he relaxes, though the results, stylistically speaking, are no less striking' --LA Times

Book Description:

The new Quirke novel from John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0805090916
• ISBN 13: 9780805090918
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 293