Holy Orders: A Quirke Novel – Benjamin Black (Macmillan Audio)

I have always been intrigued by authors who take side journeys, a busman’s holiday is the phrase that is often used, and take up writing books under another name, often in a departure from the style and character type that they are best known for. Is it just the itch of a muse that drives them or is the style switch really the direction they’d rather be taking?

 Holy Orders: A Quirke Novel is the sixth installment on the ongoing series by Irish author John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black. In this audiobook version of the tale, reader John Keating does an admirable job of bringing voice to the range of characters. While this is my first foray into the Quirke series, I found myself taking some leaps in logic to fill in for my lack of knowledge of what has gone before, because Black doesn’t spend a lot of time on backfilling the storyline.

Holy Orders is a deeply dark and brooding tale on many levels; there is the main storyline of the mystery surrounding the death of newspaper reporter Jimmy Minor, who boyish corpse is fished out of the river, leading Quirke and company to investigate an allegedly do-gooder priest, that runs parallel to the often alcohol fueled psychological meltdown that Quirke seems to be experiencing played of the background of his abusive upbringing in a Catholic orphanage.

Black/Banville do an amazing job of capturing the gloomy loam of the Emerald Isle, sprinkling in descriptive settings that have a lived in feel and just enough quirky characters to keep the reader/listener guessing where things will turn next. It’s clear that the author is not done with Quirke’s psychological torment based on the dangling story that gets left unresolved.

Divergent – Veronica Roth (Harper Audio/Unabridged Edition)

It’s easy to understand how some people have made the short leap to describe Veronica Roth’s Divergent trilogy as being similar to Suzanne Collins Hunger Games trilogy. Aside from the obvious fact that they are trilogies, both stories feature a dystopian societal setting laced with fear and primal destitution.

 

At that point, the comparison really runs out of steam. While Hunger Games runs closer to fantasy; given the divisive state we find our world in, it isn’t all that hard to fathom a society where people divide themselves into Roth’s fractured, factions, which take on splintered roles in society as a whole.

Narrator Emma Galvin is the perfect voice for heroine Beatrice “Tris” Prior, who takes the unexpected leap from the straight laced, “abnegation” faction to the X-Games style faction of the “dauntless.” While the factions seem to co-exist, Roth laces the story with a tension that clearly sets the table not only for conflict, but the next installment of the series.

While readers both young (the intended audience) and old will enjoy the fantasy storyline, were Roth falls a bit short is her dry description of the setting. Important locales get short shrift when it comes to in depth drawing of place. A good fantasy, not matter how bleak should conjure up a clear image of where the action takes place.

 

In the end, Roth leaves it to the characters to drive the story and has with all good series, she leaves you wanting to see what’s next and anticipating the new installment.