“Benjamin Black” is the pseudonym of John Banville, a winner of the Man Booker Prize and author of a number of acclaimed novels under his own name. As Black, Banville has produced a detective series set in Dublin in the 1950s that features an alcoholic pathologist named Quirke. With his friend, Detective Hackett, Quirke investigates the violent deaths of the unfortunates who end up on his dissection table.

Holy Orders, the sixth in the series, is a dark and murky tale about the place the Catholic Church occupied in Ireland at mid-century. Young journalist Jimmy Minor, a friend of Quirke’s daughter Phoebe, is found dead, having been beaten senseless and dropped in a canal.

A visit to Jimmy’s employer reveals that he had been working on a story involving “tinkers,” Ireland’s traveling gypsies, and a social-activist priest, Father Michael Honan — “Father Mick” to his flock — who has dropped out of sight. Attempting to track him down, Quirke and Hackett visit Trinity Manor, the headquarters of the Trinitarian Fathers, of which Father Mick is a member. There they encounter the proverbial stonewall, and Quirke experiences a flashback to his childhood in a Church-run orphanage that leads to a full-blown panic-driven hallucination. This episode and its psychological aftermath occupy 42 pages of the novel.

A contrived subplot involves Phoebe and Jimmy’s twin sister, Sally, who has come home to Dublin from London to explore Jimmy’s death. After Sally follows Phoebe around Dublin for several days, they become involved in a way that undermines Phoebe’s entire sense of herself and her relationship with Quirke’s assistant, David Sinclair, a man as emotionally distant as her father.

Ultimately, it is the tinkers who resolve the mystery of Jimmy’s death, revealing their connection with Father Mick and the Church’s interest in keeping it quiet.

What could be more engaging than Dublin in the 50s, a sinister and secretive religious order, tinkers and a murder? A good many things, it turns out. Loose threads, red herrings and interminable scene-setting abound, getting in the way of the story.  

There are far too many editorial lapses: Page 18: “…he experienced a sudden, swooping sensation in his chest, as if his heart had come loose …”; page 96: “[h]is heart was beating very fast; it felt as if it had come loose somehow …” In the first chapter, Jimmy’s body is found by a man and woman walking by the canal. Much is made of these two and of the illicitness of their being on the scene. Yet they disappear from the story. If their sole function is to discover the body, why expend so much of the reader’s time on them? In chapter 2, Quirke buys a bunch of violets, “his daughter’s favorite,” but he never gives them to her; they too disappear, never to be heard of again. And it’s hard to imagine why anyone would need 42 pages to convey a panic attack.

Those issues aside, Black masterfully evokes an Ireland in the iron grip of Mother Church, where the rural population lives in grinding poverty and ignorance, and the educated city dwellers outwardly obey and inwardly resent their fealty. Quirke, a product of his environment, is a fascinating character: lonely, isolated, desperate for intimacy yet shunning the self-exposure that makes intimacy possible, he suffers an existential alienation that rings emotionally true. That he has difficulty forming and sustaining relationships is an artifact of his childhood. His emotional void engenders his detachment from his daughter and his distant relationship with his adoptive brother.

Alcohol is anodyne for Quirke’s pain; he is functional, but barely — between the alcoholism and the panic attacks, he is afraid for his life. And to add to his misery, the women in his life are witless, dithering or unlikable. Isabel, his actress girlfriend, is unfortunately all three and passive-aggressive to boot. Poor Phoebe just needs a thorough shake and perhaps a gentle smack upside the head.

Faithful followers of this series will most likely forgive the faults in Holy Orders. Readers coming to the series for the first time would be well advised to start with the first novel and build up a tolerance. This book bears the hallmarks of an editor intimidated by the fame and accomplishment of its author. It is self-indulgent and thus disappointing: With its strong story, interesting (male) characters and lovely sense of place, it could have been so good.

Mara T. Adams is a lifelong bibliophile, editor, writer and generally hard-to-please critic. She lives on Cape Cod. 

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