Ten minutes into the first episode of Quirke (BBC One), the new pathologist detective drama adapted by Andrew Davies from John Banville’s novels under the pen name of Benjamin Black, I thought I was in some sozzled dream of Dublin in the Fifties. It was permanently dark, or raining, people were always drunk, or drinking, and I kept hearing people say the words of the episode’s title – “Christine Falls” – without any real sense of who or what they referred to.
Gabriel Byrne was on screen though, being Gabriel Byrne, being Quirke. Byrne’s presence almost guarantees Banville’s pathologist a quiet intensity and an air of life lived and love lost. Christine Falls, I gradually came to realise, was a pregnant woman, who had died and found her way onto Quirke’s post-mortem table. It had happened before the drama began. Quirke didn’t agree with the cause of death given, and he particularly didn’t like the fact that it had been given by his adoptive brother Malachy (Nick Dunning), who appeared to hate him. He wanted to know what had happened to the baby.
The list of important characters kept growing: the woman whose house Christine Falls had been in when she died (soon to be dead herself); the brothers’ powerful grandfather Judge Garret Griffin (Michael Gambon); Malachy’s daughter Phoebe (Aisling Franciosi). She was in love with Quirke, who she thought was her uncle, but who turned out to be her father.
For a literary adapter of Davies’s talent (Pride and Prejudice, Bleak House), it was fearfully hard to follow, and at a 90-minute run time that felt very long, it would be hard to argue that extreme compression was the cause.
The whole drama decamped to Boston for the last half hour, to introduce more new characters and explain the fate of the baby, who had been shipped out as part of a trade in babies born to the poor women of Cork and Dublin, but who had been killed by a chauffeur, who turned out to be a potential rapist.
There was just too much plot, too much gloomy stylised direction and too many strings on the soundtrack, bringing a surreal melodramatic quality to some of the most serious moments. Byrne gave the drama that warm burr and powerful charisma that can transfix the attention, but it wasn’t enough to make up for its flaws. It was heavy going to get to the end.
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