Katrina and the shockwaves

12 April 2012

Over the past 20 years, James Lee Burke has written 16 novels about his New Iberia parish detective, Dave Robicheaux. In some ways, they're quite formulaic.

Robicheaux is much troubled, haunted by nightmares from his experiences in Vietnam and his own violent and alcoholic past, which keeps threatening to erupt into his life again. He mourns the loss of his Cajun background and is always aware of the brutal, racist history of the South.

The centre of his life is his home on Bayou Teche and his family - his second wife, Molly (his first having been murdered), their adopted daughter Alafair, and their menagerie, Snuggs, their cat, and Tripod, a three-legged raccoon. In each adventure, Robicheaux's own family become threatened and he resorts to desperate measures to protect them.

His regular sidekick is a former policeman, now a private investigator, the wonderfully named Clete Purcell. Clete is Robicheaux's dark side - from an even poorer background, a practising alcoholic, obese and unhealthy but enormously strong, resorting to violence on the least pretext. He is also completely loyal and fearless.

In every novel, Burke creates extraordinary villains for Robicheaux and Purcell to face - not just mafia bosses, corrupt landowners and local politicians, but crazy preachers, off-the-wall psychopaths and enraged losers. There hangs over his books an atmosphere not just of doom but of damnation: preordained fates working towards their inescapable ends. In a melodramatic way, they are clearly the product of a religious sensibility, maybe in Burke's case heightened by his own experience of alcoholism and recovery. However stylised the action, these are stories of moral struggle, about trying to behave honourably in unforgiving circumstances.

Moreover, Burke's prose is far more highly worked, aphoristic even, than that usually to be found in police procedurals.

Although it's richly descriptive of the Louisiana countryside, weather, architecture and so forth, it's never naturalistic.

These are metaphysical landscapes always, charged with meaning and ominous significance, down to the least glint of sunlight or shiver of grass in the wind.

In August 2005, New Orleans was torn apart by Hurricane Katrina - and then flooded as the levees broke. Altogether, 1,836 lives were lost. Looting broke out in the aftermath. National Guard troops were sent in to restore order.

Although mostly set two hours' drive away, Burke's novels have always cherished New Orleans, "a song, not a city".

Initially, he says, he thought Katrina was too big and depressing a subject to write about, like 9/11, but then he published a short story called Jesus Out to Sea, about a priest who stayed with his congregation in the Lower Ninth Ward and was swept away by the waters. It became the basis of The Tin Roof Blowdown.

Father Jude Leblanc, a friend of Robicheaux's, is a junkie, but one "whose only trepidation in life was his fear that the uncontrollable shaking in his hands would cause him to drop the chalice while giving Communion". On the night of the flood, he is bringing a boat to rescue people from the roof of a church when it is commandeered by looters and he disappears, presumably drowned.

Working for a bondsman, Clete Purcell is already on the trail of these looters, bailskips led by the Melancon brothers, "with busts on their sheets for strongarm robbery, illegal possession of firearms and intimidation of witnesses".

Among their other crimes, they have gang-raped Thelma Baylor, the daughter of an insurance salesman, Otis Baylor, an Alabama hardnut.

That night, the Melancon gang begins pillaging the abandoned houses near the Baylors' home. To their delight, they find a gun, "blood diamonds" and a fortune in currency hidden in one house - little realising that they are foolishly ripping off the most frightening mafia boss in the city. And after Thelma Baylor identifies two of her rapists through the window from next door, a single shot rings out as they make their getaway - and two of the looters drop, one dead, one paralysed with a severed spinal cord.

The novel works out the consequences of this night over the following weeks. Robicheaux, deputed to New Orleans, investigates the shooting, despite his sympathy for the Baylor family - while the crime boss Sidney Kovick sends his goons to get his property back from the surviving members of the gang and extract gruesome revenge.

Then there's yet another freak on the scene, Ronald Bledsoe, possibly working for Kovich, or possibly himself. Bledsoe's a horror show, "with an elongated head and a face that seemed to have melted and been remolded to resemble the back of a thumb". He's also a sadist and predator and he soon fixates on Robicheaux's daughter.

Meanwhile, the surviving Melancon brother, Bertrand, hopelessly fearful and confused, thinks his best course of action is to apologise to the Baylor family for raping their daughter by scrawling a confession to them on toilet paper - "I am sorrie for what I have did to her. I wasn't alweys that kind of person" - and telling them where to find the stolen diamonds. Remarkably, he finds some forgiveness, if not necessarily survival.

In all this mess of damage and cruelty, Robicheaux manages to impose rough justice. Daily, he says, he has to remind himself that the people he deals with did not choose the world into which they were born. "Some try to escape it, some embrace it, most are overcome and buried by it." The Tin Roof Blowdown is the novel James Lee Burke was born to write. His imagination has always tended to the apocalyptic - but Hurricane Katrina outdid his worst inventions, not only destroying the city he most loved, but exposing the degradation of its people and the ineptitude and corruption of its authorities.

The passages describing the actual flooding are tremendously powerful but Burke also weaves a fully satisfying novel into this extreme event. Yes, it's genre fiction and needs to be freely accepted as such - over the years, Robicheaux's little parish has seen ridiculous quantities of mayhem and his Vietnam flashbacks are becoming antiquated - but it's easily the equal of supposedly more literary work. Not that any literary novelists have shown any signs of being able to address such a monstrous subject..

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