Home »
Burke one of the best authors writing today
Book Review
By Derryll White
Burke, James Lee (1988). Heaven’s Prisoners.
“…the innocent who suffer for the rest of us become anointed and loved by God in a special way; the votive candle of their lives has made them heaven’s prisoners.” James Lee Burke
This is the second novel in Burke’s Dave Robicheaux series. I like the fact that Robicheaux is a Vietnam vet, returned to his old stomping grounds of the New Orleans Police Department and Louisiana’s bayou country. He has quit the force and is being torn apart by the memories of the atrocities committed by America in Vietnam.
Burke always brings two things to these novels: character and setting. He is beautifully descriptive in a language that often verges on poetry. At the same time the characters are strong, raw and economic in their dialogue, harking back to the hardboiled language of old masters such as Raymond Chandler and Donald Westlake. Burke combines a lot of action with moments of still reflection, and always he has a humanity in his novels that causes the reader to stop and reflect.
Burke writes in an imagistic manner that is visceral. For anyone accustomed to violence he lays down a sense of foreboding that is subtle but unmistakable. You know someone is going to get hurt long before the pain begins. I don’t mean he is violent – he isn’t particularly. The poetry of his words however – the sensuous blending of the inherent violence of nature and the puniness of man on that landscape – produce a clammy feeling in the reader’s mind that all is not well. But, at the same time, the images are beautiful and evocative of a world that could be. There is always hope embodied somewhere in Burke’s writings.
James Lee Burke, in ‘Heaven’s Prisoners,’ brings the horrific realities of Vietnam back to America and wraps those bloody memories into the present ones haunting his own country – usury, drugs, exploitation of women. When his adopted daughter Alafair falls out of the sky in a downed smuggler’s plane, Burke brings the Third World’s agony home to Louisiana, and America. It is so artfully done that the reader is swept away in the agonies that perhaps most do not want to realize exist below the calm façade of contemporary society.
Dave Robicheaux has a code to live by. It is very old and elemental, and it makes him a misfit in the modern world. He knows what evil is, from Vietnam in ’65, from the world of his youth when his shanty-dwelling Cajun father taught him to be tough and trust nature and not much else. So when Robicheaux stands against brutality and usury, draws a line in the sand, the reader is forced to come to terms with whether or not he or she can be that kind of citizen. I suspect not many can.
In ‘Heaven’s Prisoners’ there are very dark moments, often encased in the violence and turmoil of Dave Robicheaux’s brain. No character in contemporary literature harbours more ghosts and night sweats than Dave – from his own Louisiana childhood, from Vietnam, from the terror of America’s sick crime underworld. But, as in a very good noir movie, out of the violence grow gardens of hope, beautiful blossoms of the good in some of the basest people. Quite simply, I think James Lee Burke is one of the best authors writing today.
****
Excerpts from the novel:
LOVE – Maybe I had grown foolish, or perhaps fond is a better word, in the way that an aging animal doesn’t question its seduction by youth. But her love wasn’t a seduction; it was unrelenting and always there, even after a year of marriage, and she gave it eagerly and without condition.
VOICE – It was late afternoon and still raining when I woke to the sound of the child’s crying. It was as though my sleep was disturbed by the tip of an angel’s wing. I walked barefoot into the bedroom where Annie sat on the edge of the bed and held Alafair against her breast.
HARD LIFE – Smiling Jack’s was on the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse. If Robin Gaddis was still stripping there, and still feeding all the dragons that had lived inside her since she was a little girl, she’d be at the bar for her first vodka Collins by six o’clock, do some whites on the half-shell at six-thirty, and an hour later get serious with some black speed and shift up the full-tilt boogie. I had taken her to a couple of AA meetings with me, but she said it wasn’t for her. I guess she was one of those who had no bottom.
PLACE – That night I rolled along the I-10 causeway over the Atchafalaya flood basin. The willows and the half-submerged dead trunks of the cypress trees were gray and silver in the moonlight. There was no breeze, and the water was still and black and dented with the moon’s reflection.
MORTALITY – She didn’t ask what had happened to her mother; she asked instead where she had gone. So we drove her to St. Peter’s Church in New Iberia. I suppose one might say that my attempt at resolution was facile. But I believe that ritual and metaphor exist for a reason. Words have no governance over either birth or death, and they never make the latter more acceptable, no matter how many times its inevitability is explained to us.
FOREBODING – Saints don’t heed warnings because they consider them irrelevant. Fools don’t heed them because they think the lightning dancing across the sky, the thunder rolling through the woods, are only there to enhance their lives in some mysterious way.
REFLECTION – But I digress into my own historical myopia. Her story is more important than mine because I chose to be a participant and she did not. I chose to help bring the technology of napalm and the M-16 and AK-47 meat-cutters to people who harvested rice with their hands. Others elected Alafair and her family to be the recipients of our industrial gifts to the Third World.
TRUST – “My father used to say that a catfish had whiskers so he’d never go into a hollow log he couldn’t turn around in. I don’t trust those people at Immigration, Sheriff. Play on their terms and you’ll lose.”
“I think maybe you’ve got a dark view sometimes, Dave.”
“You better believe it,’ I said.
HARD – I had learned most of my lessons for dealing with problems from hunting and fishing and competitive sports. No book could have taught me what I had learned from my father in the marsh, and as a boxer in high school I had discovered that it was as important to swallow your blood and hide your injury as it was to hurt your opponent.
VIOLENCE – Most people think of violence as an abstraction. It never is. It’s always ugly, it always demeans and dehumanizes, it always shocks and repels and leaves the witness to it sick and shaken. It’s meant to do all these things.
GRIEF – As always, when one unexpectedly loses someone close, I discovered how kind people could be. But after a while I almost wanted to hide from their well-meaning words of condolence, their handshakes and pats on the back. I learned that grief was a private and consuming emotion, and once it chose you as its vessel it didn’t share itself easily with others.
RADICAL LEFT – I was always fascinated by the government’s attempt to control political protest by the clergy in this country. Usually the prosecutor’s office would try to portray them as naïve idealists, bumblers who had strayed from their pulpits and convents, and when that didn’t work they were sent up the road with the perverts, geeks, and meltdown cases, which are about the only types that do hard time anymore. However, once they were in the slam, they had a way of spreading their message throughout the convict population.
MEMORY – Why?
I can’t answer. Maybe because it’s unholy to wash away the blood of those we love. Maybe because the placement of a tombstone on a grave is a self-serving and atavistic act. (Just as primitive people did, we weigh the dead and their memory safely down in the earth.) Maybe because the only fitting monument of those who die violently is the memory of pain they’ve left behind.
JUSTICE – A dark meditation? Yes. Guns kill. That’s their function. I had never deliberately kicked a situation into the full-tilt boogie. The other side had always taken care of that readily enough. I was sure they would again.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
Lotus Books is pleased to sponsor book reviews by Derryll White. If you are interested in a book that Derryll has reviewed you can shop online at http://lotusbooks.ca/, call us at 250-426-3415 or please visit us at 33 10th Ave. S. Cranbrook, and we would be happy to help you find a great read.