The Glass Rainbow, by James Lee Burke, reviewed by William Doherty

 The literary dictatorship to which Book Group members voluntarily submit can sometimes corral them onto strange, previously unexplored pastures which they vow to try.  Last month my group chose to eschew the avant-garde, the English Classics and those watershed texts which signposted major changes in the tastes of the reading public, in favour of the well-trodden path of American crime fiction.  Strictly speaking, James Lee Burke’s The Glass Rainbow did not qualify as "pastures new" for me as I had previously read at least a dozen of Burke’s works. Treating this as an exercise in Critical Reading gave me the chance to view this novel with fresh eyes.

The narrative structure follows a conventional third person path, albeit leavened with copious passages of earthy, direct speech.  The central character, Dave Robicheaux, has featured in 17 earlier novels which have a contemporary, American setting.  After a varied working life in law enforcement, he is now a mature deputy sheriff in New Iberia in South-West Louisiana.  Place is critical in shaping the cultural contours of these stories.  The town lies near Bayou Teche, a 135 mile stretch of water which was once the course of the Mississippi before the river opted to turn sharp left then right and empty into the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans, thereby creating a setting that even unfettered geography has elected to avoid.  The town sits in the administrative subdivision (parish) of Acadia which reinforces the distinctive ethnic framing of Robicheaux as a Cajun, a group with their own unique cultural, linguistic, musical and gastronomic heritage. Acadie was a 17th century French colony in what are now the Atlantic Provinces of Canada and was named after the Peloponnesian region which became a mythological symbol of an idealised pastoral wilderness.  The Yin and the Yang of 18th century European wars saw them becoming British subjects by the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) and then being largely ignored until their expulsion in the 1750s as the British laid the groundwork for their conquest of France’s St. Lawrence-based North American settler colony.  Scattered along America’s Atlantic seaboard, thousands of these Acadiens made their way to the French colony of Louisiana and settled on its Gulf coast. The transformative, corrupting power of speech has turned them into Cajuns.  Their precipitous flight from Nova Scotia meant few arrived in the slave colony of Louisiana with the capital to enter the dominant plantation economy and they were destined to join the ranks of the poor whites.  The Louisiana Purchase saw the huge nominally French Mississippi - based colony of Louisiana sold by Napoleonic France to the USA in 1803.  The Cajuns were further scarred by the defeat of the Confederacy in the American Civil War which pitched their state into a military occupation, the aborted Reconstruction project, murderous racial strife (the Colfax Massacre), the Jim Crow laws and 150 years as one of the poorest states in the Union.  Our hero draws on this emotive backdrop, making reference to historical incidents, and Burke exploits the unsettling topography and climatic conditions to inject disruptive dramatic notes into the narrative melody.  Water courses move slowly through swamp, harbouring alligators and deadly cottonmouth snakes, and fashion the distinctive landscape of bayous, levees and coulées with the whole intermittently transformed by violent thunderstorms suddenly sweeping in from the Gulf.  The sense of place is more powerful than Morse’s Oxford or Taggart’s Glasgow and is consciously introduced as a pillar to support the narrative. 

Robicheaux, tuned in to all these nuances, is a sure-footed traveller through this landscape, driven by a strong, if understated, moral imperative; he is aware of, but immune to, racial and social distinctions and has an innate ability to spot a delinquent, even those fêted by wider society.  His ancestry frees him from guilt as either an engineer or beneficiary of the racialised social structure of Louisiana.  Flawed like so many modern heroes, he is a recovering alcoholic, a Vietnam vet. subject to post-traumatic stress disorder, taking the form of wartime flashbacks, and a protective family man, a role which can morph into a vulnerability when the family becomes a target.  The partner is often a necessary adjunct in serial detective novels and Clete Purcel adds further ethnic colour to the novel’s cast.  He is descended from the Irish “navvies” brought to dig New Orleans'  Basin Canal in the 19th century and combines alcohol addiction with an explosive irascibility but like Robicheaux at bottom has a strong moral core.  The duo’s outspoken natures and willingness to verbally engage with the rogues’ gallery in the plot results in vivid, lengthy passages of dialogue whose sexual, anatomical inventiveness might draw plaudits in the changing room of a University Rugby team but might dissuade more fastidious readers from engaging further with the story.  Setting a story in the Deep South always gives an author licence to draw his villains from the Grand Guignol section of Central Casting and the varied ranks of the book’s malefactors range from the physically and morally repellent to those clothed in an ominously sinister detachment.  Briefly, to avoid issuing a spoiler alert, the plot hinges on our two protagonists’ investigation of the murder of two teenage girls whose backstories differentiate them from the prostitutes and drug addicts who constitute the rest of this file.  This takes them on a Dante-esque journey through circles of evil and the bodies pile up with the dispensing of contrapassi   The pace of the tale markedly quickens in the violent, detailed recounting of the action sequences.  Notoriously, the Ku Klux Klan wore white bed sheets to symbolise the ghosts of the Confederate dead whom they believed  rode with them and the author draws from this well of eccentric Southern spirituality as the ghost world seems to summon Robicheaux when, in  moments of danger, he feels seduced by the quasi-suicidal hallucination of a 19th century Mississippi paddle steamer complete with Southern belles and ship’s officers on deck, an audible orchestra and an insistent ship’s horn, all drawing him to submit to crossing over to a nether world.  The title The Glass Rainbow echoes two instances in the book where a character comments on the transformative effect of viewing people in light which has passed through stained glass and conceivably, by extension, how our judgement on someone can be influenced by the filter we use on the lens through which we view them.  This would apply to the spectrum of characters from the atypical murder victims to the socially prominent but deceptive villains.   

Some of Burke’s descriptive writing verges on the lyrical, inviting comparisons with Le Carré raising the spy thriller to an art form and the text is liberally sprinkled with intermittently perceptive, introspective philosophising.  This and his tendency to luxuriate in verbal and physical violence makes for an increasingly tenuous relationship with the plot lines.  It is almost as if his Muse has been transformed into a literary Frankenstein’s Monster careering round the script and inserting characters and incidents purely as vehicles to display the author’s virtuosity.  More stringent editing could have made this more than the decent read that it is, leaving this reader to ponder if Burke’s literary canon should be added to the South’s Lost Cause myth.