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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Plenty of summer left for these gems

By: John Sullivan

Posted: 08/14/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

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The Glass Rainbow is a new pinnacle for Burke. (BLOOMBERG )

Still cottage season, still time to exercise the brain cells free of workaday cares. So, three certified winners and one work of either rampant genius or extreme folly, maybe both.

Despite its vast overuse, there's a singular cultural paean that now, with The Glass Rainbow (Simon & Schuster, 448 pages, $34), rightly anoints Louisiana wordsmith James Lee Burke and his trademark creation, Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux: iconic.

Lyrically immersed in the steaming New Iberia bayous, home to both septuagenarian author and his battered, world-weary sleuth, this staggering 18th chapter in a venerable series once again pits Robicheaux and explosive sidekick Clete Purcel against forces of decayed Deep South privilege and depravity.

At first blush, it's sheer Burke formula: a series of sadistic murders, nefarious land manipulations, a sinister patrician family, and the abduction of Robicheaux's adopted daughter to make it personal.

But the visceral realization of character and uncanny, mystical evocation of place elevates this to Faulknerian tragedy. Shaming previous accolades, it's a new pinnacle for Burke, securing him a place as one of America's greatest living writers.

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Free Form Jazz (Castle Street, 320 pages, $12) was written by Lee Lamothe's evil twin. No other way to describe the Toronto author's first foray into straight-up crime writing after two anti-genre gems, 2003's ultra-violent romance The Last Thief and last year's The Finger's Twist, ironically nominated for best Canadian crime novel.

It's all quite conventional -- two discarded and disaffected cops, cynical brass, oily politicians, a sadistic druglord and his homicidal henchman, all wrapped in the bloody search for a meth superlab and a missing ex-cheerleader.

But that's where the conventions end and the contrary Lamothe emerges, delivering a superbly crafted morality play where the scurrilous become wrenchingly sympathetic and the plot is just along for the "free-form" ride. Lamothe now has a genre-stretching hat-trick. Pray for more.

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Dubliner John Connolly also relentlessly pushes the envelope with the latest in his Charlie Parker series, The Whisperers (Atria, 416 pages, $30), a mash-up of PI fic and supernatural horror that should carry a "creep-out" warning tag.

Best blog bets have Parker as some kind of fallen angel fighting for memory and redemption, and he sure attracts a motley crew of otherworldly adversaries -- a half-dead assassin guided by a wraithlike Captain, the sinister, obscurely motivated Collector, ancient demons murmuring bloody enticements from a golden Pandora's Box.

But it's Connolly's merger of these demons with those plaguing the traumatized Iraq War vets who stumble on the box that grounds this tale with relevance and moral force.

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Dark comedy, faith polemic, off-the-charts New Weird urban fantasy -- China Miéville's Kraken (Del Rey, 528 pages,$31) is all this and more, destined to be one of the most debated novels of the year.

If you thought last year's The City & The City -- which won Miéville an unprecedented third Arthur C. Clarke Award for best Brit fantasy/science fiction book of the year -- was an over-the-top take on crime fiction, this one forces suspension of every ounce of disbelief.

Posit a London that literally lives and breathes beneath the familiar, workaday world, a "knacked" city of restless gods and magical cults with competing prophesies, afterlifes and armageddons. Imagine the theft of one of these little gods, a preserved giant squid, somehow threatening to set off a fiery end-of-days.

Enter an "everyman," Billy, the squid's curator and perhaps unknowing prophet, plunged into a manic quest for the captive and the culprit against a myriad of competing forces, notably a dead wizard and a living, criminal tattoo.

Not enough? How about writing that doesn't just flow, but rips and ripples and thrashes about on a wild concept-driven soar, forcibly mashing words and phrases and sentences that have no business together, whole passages so arcane as to be barely accessible without serious thought.

Then Miéville yanks it back and you think you might grasp what he's on about -- until, whoosh, off into the stratosphere again.

If it's all nonsense and artifice, it's compelling nonsense and very, very artful artifice. Up for a challenge? Do not miss this one.

John Sullivan is editor of the Free Press Autos, Homes and Travel sections and specialty websites.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 14, 2010 H9

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