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Awaiting Katrina, the residents of New Orleans do what they can to prepare. Those of means, like insurance man Otis Baylor, fit storm shutters to their antebellum mansions and make sure they have sufficient fuel for the gasoline generators in their carriage houses. Others, less fortunate, head for the Superdome or for their local church. None are prepared for what the storm will bring or what physical and moral demands it will make on them. As the wind drops and the waters rise, several young black men in a commandeered motorboat break into the house next door to Otis Baylor's, where they strike the motherlode – the walls are stuffed with money, cocaine, and a gun. The rooms are filled with flowers, which should have been a hint. The house belongs to Sidney Kovick, florist and serious mobster, and he will not be best pleased at the assault on his home. Unsurprisingly, most of these young men rapidly come to extremely sticky ends, but the one left standing may know something that Dave Robicheaux is anxious to learn – the fate of his friend, Father Jude LeBlanc, "junkie priest" and cancer victim, last seen heading for the Ninth Ward and his parishioners sheltering in the attic of a church. Dave has been seconded from his home base in New Iberia to New Orleans to lend a hand in coping with the wave of lawlessness that overtook the city in the wake of the storm, and it is through him and his sidekick, Clete Purcel, that all the sprawling plot lines in the book will eventually be gathered up. Admirers of James Lee Burke have been looking forward with great anticipation to his "Katrina book." They will probably not be disappointed, since all the familiar elements are present – the passionate, pressure cooker prose, the wounded, guilt-ridden hero, the quest for redemption, the existential, tragic failure. Whether readers less impressed with Burke's Southern Gothic mode will find THE TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN particularly successful in making some sort of sense out of Hurricane Katrina is another matter. The novel opens not with the storm, but with a flashback to events that took place 35 years earlier, in Vietnam. Throughout the book, the post-storm horrors irresistibly thrust both Dave and Clete back to Nam, with the peculiar effect of deflecting the reader's attention away from the actual victims of the colossal failures of community and government in the wake of Katrina to the suppurating wounds left by Vietnam on the psyche of the protagonist. Ultimately, I felt like crying out, "Dave, this is not about you," but I don't suppose he'd listen. His wife, Molly, says much the same somewhere along the way, and he doesn't pay a lot of attention to her either. As the flood waters recede, the book climbs onto the firmer ground of Burke's characteristic thematic obsessions. There is a psychopathic embodiment of evil, Roland Bledsoe ("My name is Roland, what's yours?"), who must be overcome. There is a guilt-ridden character who seeks, and may or may not find, redemption. There are mysterious lights flickering beneath the waters where the parishioners of the Ninth Ward church drowned. There is a bloody climax with a moral meaning. In short, this is a good Dave Robicheaux novel. Whether it is a good Hurricane Katrina novel is another question.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, September 2007
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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