John Banville’s alter ego is back with a fourth Benjamin Black novel, the third in the Quirke series. This time, the pathologist has been in situ at an institution called St John of the Cross, drying out. When he comes home, his daughter asks him to investigate the disappearance of her best friend, April Latimer, a well-connected junior doctor at the same hospital where he works. April is independent-minded and is considered to have something of a ‘wild’ reputation in the conservative social atmosphere of Dublin in the 1950s, dictated by a patriarchal Catholic hierarchy which is headed by Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, who pops up fictionally as a confidante of April’s family. (Other real-life characters of the time also find their way into the story, which can, at times, feel like over-embellishment).
Quirke humours his daughter, and quickly gets to work doing what he does best: poking around, conducting post-mortems on people’s buried secrets and asking questions in an intensely claustrophobic city where a scandal can be hushed up with one phone call from a government minister’s office to a newspaper editor. What he eventually uncovers is deeply unsettling and, combined with Black’s superb characterisation and sense of place, ELEGY FOR APRIL will insinuate itself into the dark crevices of your mind like the novel’s ubiquitous Dublin fog. - Claire Coughlan
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