What was it Faulkner said (wrote?). (Off to Google. Back in minute.) "The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past." The more Dave Robicheux (Louisiana detective) novels I read, the more I think James Lee Burke may have devoted part of those books to proving Faulkner's statement. Always the lingering effects of slavery dictate racial relations. Members of the southern aristocracy still live in white-columned mansions and control the politics and big business of the area. From the more recent past, a recurring character is always a troubled woman whom Dave bedded at least once. Distant events of dysfunctional families trouble adults who were part of them. And memories of Vietnam haunt those who fought there.
Last Car to Elysian Fields is no exception. Dave returns to New Orleans to investigate the beating of a Catholic priest. Doing so, he encounters the usual array of hired killers, crooked politicians, greedy businessmen, prostitutes and other bottom-feeders. Put it all together and what do you get? A really good page-turner. Burke's getting better with each book.
Found one oddity in Last Car. The book begins; Atatair, Dave's adopted daughter, is away at college, and Bootsie, his wife, is dead. That starts me wondering: did I mess up the order when I lined the books up to be read chronologically, or did Burke choose not to write the book that would cover those events? I'm right curious to find out.
Last Car high points:
1) "New Orleans wasn't a city. It was an outdoor mental asylum located on top of a giant sponge." (page 118) Now I've never spent time in New Orleans, but judging from Burke's characters and his scenes in wet weather, it's an apt description.
2) "… as though he were purging himself of any intimations of his own mortality." (page 114) I love slipped-in literary references. Why, I wonder? Because they show the author reads and remembers, or because I feel smart when I recognize them?
3) Dave is questioning an elderly black man about a jazz singer who died—probably was murdered—in jail. The answer: "Ain't nothing left of him but a voice on some scratchy old records. Nobody cared what happened back then. Nobody care now. You axed for the troot'. I just give it to you." (page 116) Burke on race. How true, IMHO, of course.
4) "Ordinary people sometimes do bad things. A wrong-headed business decision, a romantic encounter in a late-night bar, a rivalry with a neighbor over the placement of a fence, any of these seemingly insignificant moments can initiate a series of events that, like a rusty nail in a foot, can systemically poison a normal law-abiding person's life and propel him into a world he thought only existed in the perverse imaginings of pulp novelists." (page 117) Damn straight. If not, what would Burke write about? And my own writing? Obviously, I need more perversions in my imaginings.
5) "There were great differences in the room, but not between the races. The black and white working men spoke the same regional dialect and shared the same political attitudes, all of which had been taught them by others. They denigrated liberals, unions, and the media, considered the local Wal-Mart store a blessing …. They were frightened by the larger world and found comfort in the rhetoric of politicians who assured them the problem was the world's, not theirs." (page 230) Ah, how today it all is.
6) "… portions of Pecan Island, preserved largely by an oil corporation as a recreation area for its CEOs, …" (page 273) Gee, I hear tell there was once a time when everyone, even poor people and grunt workers, could enjoy places of natural beauty.
7) About people pictured on wanted posters: "Like Dick Tracy caricatures, they stare out of the black-and-white photographs often taken in late-night booking rooms—unshaved, pig snouted, rodent eyed, harelipped, reassuring us that human evil is always recognizable and that consequently we will never be its victim." (page 364) How much we want to believe that, and how much more we don't want people messing with it. I say that remembering a critic who claimed the movie Shrek was bad—and wrong—because the good characters have to be the physically beautiful ones.
8) Burke does a lot with pleasant exteriors that are only facades. "… a tree-lined side street that looked like an illustration clipped from a 1940 issue of The Saturday Evening Post." (page 421) Burke no longer has to explain that it's a "how town," peopled with everyones who get hurt by shallow and even bad people. The reader simply knows.
9) "Legal definitions had little to do with morality. It was legal to systematically poison the earth and sell arms to lunatics in Third World countries. Politicians who themselves avoided active service and never listened to the sounds of a flame thrower extracted from its victims, or zipped body bags on the faces of their best friends, clamored for war and stood proudly in front of the flag while they sent others off to fight it." (page 430) Written in 2003. More and more I like what Burke has to say.
All of which means I anticipate with pleasure the remaining three fish.
