"Holy Orders" by Benjamin Black - aka John Banville

“Love was love, and always demanded more than a lover was capable of giving.”

― Benjamin Black, Holy Orders

What is so fascinating about Ireland during the Catholic Church occupation, if that is the right word? Is it that the people who lived during the 1950s want to write about that dark era or are the rest of us fascinated by the otherworldliness of it. Or is it that we want to look for all the places where the Church ended up being the bad guy, wanting to think it had no redeeming qualities? Movies like Small Things Like These, show both the excesses by individuals of the Church while also demonstrating how those excesses exist because of the stranglehold the Church has on the community. Even more stark and personal is the depiction of the women abandoned by their families to the depravity of the nuns in the movie The Magdalene Sisters. 

Growing up in rural Arkansas, going to mass 6 days a week, and having my days ruled by Sister Celestine Marie, was nothing compared to the experiences of the people living in Ireland. Our town was not even predominately Catholic, but the Church did dominate our lives growing up. I wonder how much it shaped and controlled my mothers life and how her choices were led by the Church. I don't have a quarrel with the Church with regard to her religiosity but rather with regard to her health  and how the combination of the Church's strictures, our father's sexual appetites, and the lack of contraception determined her reproductive health rather than the advice of her doctor, who after my mother's car accident in 1965, said that getting pregnant again would risk her life. What choices did she think she had based on her beliefs, the time she lived, and the marriage she was in?

Two books that I've have read recently have given me a small glimpse into the lives of those living under the dark veil of the Church in Ireland in the first half of the 20th Century. The first is Dubliners by James Joyce, a book I picked up because I wanted to eventually tackle Ulysses. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy Dubliners was to read having hear a lot about how Ulysses is so difficult. The early stories reminded me of my brothers serving as altar boys and what it was like to go to a parochial school. 

The second book is Holy Orders. It continues to surprise me that I can discover authors with long histories of publishing that I don't remember having heard of before. John Banville, writing under his pseudonym Benjamin Black, is yet another one of these. I started my journey with Banville with this 6th book in the Quirke series. Dr. Quirke is an alcoholic first and pathologist second. He has a close relationship with a Inspector Hackett, who is featured in books of his own. Quirke thinks of himself as a sometimes detective working for the Dublin Police. 

In this book, a body is found floating in a canal, and it turns out to be Jimmy Minor, a friend of Quirke's daughter Phoebe. It's 1950s Dublin, and as Quirke and Hackett try to solve Minor's murder, the investigations remind Quirke of his own grim childhood in a priest-run orphanage. 

Like other flawed characters, Quirke has a troubled relationship with his daughter and has difficulty maintaining a good relationship with a woman. Because he is a pathologist, there is little CSI in the book, but a lot more about relationships and inner musings. I found the story engaging, and can see myself picking up other Banville/Black books in the future.

.