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| Excerpt from US Navy photo http://www.navy.mil/view_single.asp?id=27553, an aerial view from a United States Navy helicopter showing floodwaters around the entire downtown New Orleans area. The Louisiana Superdome is in the center. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
An unexpected thought occurred to me
yesterday as I finished reading
two of James Lee Burke’s novels about Cajun life in Louisiana. Even
though Burke so vividly describes the landscape in which the Cajuns pass their
lives, even though his characters are so compulsively drawn that one almost
feels they could leap off the page into one’s lap, even though his tough guy
prose and attitudes are underlaid by a persistent strain of homey philosophy, could it be --- in spite of
all evidence to the contrary --- that everything he writes does not depict any
life actually to be found in Louisiana, that none of this is real, but is
rather a complete world drawn from Burke’s vivid imagination?
I began to think about this when,
recommending these books to a friend, I had to admit I have never met anyone
who even remotely resembles the characters who inhabit Burke’s pages. Certainly
it is hard to think there has ever been a real live detective anything like his
hero Dave Robicheaux, and it is certainly hard to imagine anyone with the
peculiar mix of characteristics --- a love of violence and willingness to use
it, a dedication to a kind of warped idea of justice, an ultimately maverick carelessness about what he
does ---- like Robicheaux’s closest friend, Clete Purcell.
Burke wrote his first book when he was in
his twenties, and I am pretty sure that was the one that set me off on reading
his works. Unless my memory betrays me, it was about a man who was unjustly
locked up in an horrendous Louisiana chain gang kind of prison, and it was so
real it made my flesh creep.
Since then, through dozens of novels,
most dealing with crime, and in the form of thrillers or mysteries, Burke has
dazzled reviewers with the fluency and vivacity of his prose, the aptness of
his descriptions of people and their works, and the sheer passion with which he
records the usually nefarious works of his characters.
The two books I have just read are The
Tin Roof Blowdown in which he has used the tragic destruction
of New Orleans by the twin forces of Hurricane Katrina and the neglect, and
possibly malicious inaction of the U.S. federal government, as the background
for a tale of almost majestic hjuman folly and nastiness. As thousands of people were swept away,
overcome by the breaking of the neglected levies that were supposed to hold
back the flood, and those who remained suffered, James Burke describes how
looting and theft by the criminal and low-life elements of Louisiana society
compounded the misery and overwhelmed even the few honest forces of law and
order.
Specifically the book is built around two
events: the first is when a junkie priest, who is a friend of Robicheaux’s, is
trying to hack his way into the attic of a flooded home in which twenty or thirty people are
trapped by the still rising waters, a family of petty criminals, who have just
raped two young women, hack the priest to death and steal the boat from which
he was working. The second incident concerns what these low-life people did
with the boat they had stolen: they used it to enter an abandoned home, where
in an insensate attack of looting, they ripped the walls apart and found hidden
stores of counterfeit dollars, blood diamonds (imported from Africa) and drugs
of various kinds. When they learned that the house they had robbed belonged to
the region’s main mafia connection, their fate was sealed, and Robicheaux was
only hoping he could get to them on the rape charges before they were wiped out
by the hired guns of the houseowner.
This book has been described as the novel
which established Burke as one of America’s outstanding writers. His
description of the Katrina hurricane and its consequences is probably the
finest written so far, and its use as a backdrop for Burke’s grimly imagined
events makes a continuum that is totally gripping. The book is studded with
aphorisms, like this one:
“If you
have stacked a little time in the can, or beat your way across the country
bucking bales and picking melons, or worked out of a Manpower Inc. day-labor
office on skid row, you probably already know that human beings are infinitely
complex and not subject to easy categorization…I’m always amazed at how the
greatest complexity as well as personal courage is usually found in our most
nondescript members. People who look as interesting as a mud wall have the
personal histories of classical Greeks. I sometimes think that every person’s
experience, if translated into flame, would be enough to melt the flesh from
his bones…”
One gets his point, although the method
of describing it is entirely original. Or here is another one:
“William
Blake described evil as an electrified tiger prowling the forests of the night.
I wondered if Blake’s tiger was out there now, burning brightly in the trees,
the pads of its feet walking softly across a lawn, it's slattern breath and the
quickness of its step only seconde away from the place where children played
and our loved ones dwelled.”
Sufficient to say that someone turned up
who was hired by a prominent man to take care of his problems by whatever means
he wanted. This person began to stalk Dave and his family, and Burke posits the
confrontation as one between evil and good.
The second book, published in 2005, is
called Crusader’s Cross and it concerns the
memory of a young girl for whom Dave’s brother fell twenty years before when
they were both sixteen. He discovered, too late, that she was already working
as a prostitute, and just as he was about to run away with her, she disappeared
and was never seen or heard of again.
The brother turns up, recalling to Dave memories of this unfinished
disappearance, and the book is about a search for her to confirm or deny the
brother’s belief that she was never killed, as most authorities believed. This
one involves the full panaply of Dave’s peculiarity: a recovered alcoholic with
an on-again, off-again relationship with police work, he finds the weight of
this search so heavy that he goes on a bender which puts his job at odds again,
and which finishes with him losing such self-respect as he was managing to
carry through his life. The denoument is so life-like it is almost
unsatisfactory. The girl turns up, but in circumstances that none of them could
have envisaged. Dave has been following leads, and blaming the wrong people
throughout the book, and he ends it with an almost customary outburst of social
philosophy:
“Capitalists
are hanged by the rope they sell their enemies. Mystics who help formulate
great religious movements writhe in sexual torment over impure thoughts a shoe
salesman leaves behind with adolescence. A Crusader Knight in search of the
True Cross returns to Marseilles from Palestine with a trunkful of Saracen robes,
inside of which is a plague-infested mouse. My experience has been, like George
Orwell’s, that human beings are possessed of much more courage and
self-sacrifice than we give them credit for, and when the final test comes,
they usually go down with the decks awash and the guns blazing. Our moral
failure lies in the frailty of our vision and not in our hearts. Our undoing is
in our collective willingness to trust those whom we shouldn’t, those who invariably
use our best instincts against us. But as a police officer I also learned long
ago that justice finds us in its own time and of its own accord, and in ways we
never, and I mean absolutely never, anticipate.”
A very remarkable writer is this James Lee Burke, who stands
somewhere between the low-lifes about whom he writes, and the justice he would
like to believe in.
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