Elegy for April by Benjamin Black

(I do not know the photographer of this image, but it came from structurae .net, an international database and gallery of structures on 8/18/19). 

Elegy for April by Benjamin Black (the pen name of Irish mystery writer John Banville) is the third in the Quirke series.

Quirke is a pathologist living and working in Dublin in the 1950's. His grown daughter, Phoebe, lives in town and works in a hat shop. She socializes with a group of four very disparate friends: Jimmy Minor, a reporter for a Dublin paper; Isabel Galloway, an actress at the Gate Theatre; Patrick Ojukwu, a Nigerian surgery student; and April Latimer, a well-connected junior doctor at a Dublin hospital.

After Phoebe doesn't hear from April for a week, she shares her concern with her friend, Jimmy. Jimmy laughs off her concerns -- after all, their friend April is known to be a little wild and certainly impulsive. She may have left town for an short holiday. As time passes with no word of April, Phoebe slowly realizes how much she misses April and how little she knows her.

She turns to Quirke for help. Quirke, awkwardly recovering from a stint in rehab, uses his contacts in the police and medical establishments to begin to investigate April's disappearance.

After I finished this novel, I went onto Amazon to see what other readers thought of it. One reader complained about the plotting but acknowledged that if you're reading Benjamin Black, you're not reading for the plot. (As for the plot of this novel, I imagine many readers might find the conclusion less than satisfactory -- not all the ends are tied up -- but I think it's an ending entirely consistent with the novel and a drizzly Dublin winter). For as another reader pointed out, Black is a poetical prose stylist.

His poetry is hidden. It's in the colorful and sometimes abrupt adjectives he uses. Gosh, I'm so impressed.

Sometimes when I have wondered, "What is it that I love about cities? Why do I love the Near North Side or Southwark?" I try to answer myself by saying, "I love abrupt juxtapositions." Certainly, city life gives us plenty of those. And so does Black's prose.

Here's a little bit from the novel:

"The light from the lamp on Huband Bridge was a soft, gray globe streaming outwards in all directions. It glimmered on the stone arch and made a ghost of the young willow tree leaning on the canal bank there .. Dimly for a moment he seemed to catch the babbling voices of all of his dead."