Review: James Lee Burke on a paradise lost
James Lee Burke (Photo by James McDavid)In August 2019, America ran a cover story headlined “The God-Haunted Characters of James Lee Burke.” Written by a senior editor, Edward Schmidt, S.J., the profile discussed a “theology” of Burke, the influential crime novelist who since 1965 has churned out 41 novels and two short-story collections. While Burke might not admit to having his own theology, the author certainly brings a sense of awe, mysticism and transcendence to his many works.
In Another Kind of Eden, Burke furthers his literary speculations on the presence of evil in a fallen world—a post-Eden existence that nonetheless makes occasional stabs at goodness and light.
Set in the southwestern United States in the early 1960s, the novel features Aaron Holland Broussard, one of the central characters who serve as Everyman in the Burke story-spinning canon. Another Everyman character for Burke is Dave Robicheaux, a tortured, fading and alcoholic deputy sheriff who patrols the seedy environs of northwestern Louisiana in the latter decades of the last century. Although the Broussard and Robicheaux characters have never appeared in the same story, they both speak and act for the author, reflecting his observations on the ongoing struggle between good and evil in the United States in recent decades.
“I’ve seen enough evil in people without looking for the devil,” Aaron Broussard says early in Another Kind of Eden. “They’re people who look like the rest of us, but they feed on evil. Are they born like that? No one knows. They take their secrets to the grave. My own guess is they make a conscious choice to murder the light in their souls. They never come back from that moment.”
The recognition of the light in human souls, however dim, is more than a metaphor. In many of Burke’s stories, even the most sinful of characters strive for a final act of goodness before leaving the world forever.
James Lee Burke furthers his literary speculations on the presence of evil in a fallen world—a post-Eden existence that nonetheless makes occasional stabs at goodness and light.
In Another Kind of Eden, Broussard is a Korean War veteran struggling to come to terms with the horror and bloodshed he witnessed during that conflict. He is also a failed writer and news reporter who, between writing gigs, finds work on a Denver-area tomato farm.
Broussard’s adventures as a fledgling writer and itinerant farm worker mirror Burke’s own writing history. Burke published his first novel, Half of Paradise, in 1965, but he languished in literary limbo for years before his fiction began to resonate with new readers. Burke also worked in a variety of jobs—teacher, social worker, oil pipe layer—before turning to full-time writing.
Another Kind of Eden, however, is more than a fictionalized portrait of Burke’s career as a writer who has special insights into the darker side of human nature. Broussard’s experience of violence, conflict, abusive human relationships and exploitation of powerless farm workers melds effectively with the themes in most of Burke’s fiction.
Burke’s stories often focus on the presence of evil, either within individuals or as made manifest through structures of power and oppression. Consider, for example, Broussard’s interior monologue partway through the novel:
I learned early in life that human beings are capable of inflicting pain on one another in ways that are unthinkable. I’m talking about a level of cruelty that has no peer among animals or the creatures of the sea. Once you witness it, worse, participate in it, it takes on a life of its own, much like a virus finding a host. It burrows into your soul; robs you of your sleep and clouds your days.
Burke’s latest novel, like many of his more recent works, makes use of paranormal characters who bring a dream-like aspect to the narrative. The reader is often forced to decide if these creatures really exist or are just phantoms from the narrator’s troubled imagination.
The book also reiterates Burke’s steady focus on the problems of exploitation and injustice in society. His themes of atonement for despoiling a near paradise on Earth are especially relevant today, with contemporary efforts to address the failings of a materialistic society rife with racism and the abuse of vulnerable, voiceless people.
At one point, Mrs. Lowry, who owns the tomato farm with her husband, warns Broussard that “if you have money, people will do everything they can to take it from you. The Irish sailed here on the coffin boats and were treated like bilge when they arrived. Then they died in front of Confederate cannons, and not for the slaves, either, but to protect the profits of the textile mills.”
Burke’s characters understand that violence and injustice are never completely overcome. They simply exist and will continue to hold some sway in earthly affairs.
Further, she says, her husband’s Puritan ancestors “got off the Mayflower and set about murdering and spreading disease among the Indians, and when they ran out of Indians, they hanged their neighbors. That’s the bloody truth. Don’t be deceived by the nonsense you were taught in public schools.”
Another Kind of Eden builds to a climax in which the worst of the evildoers come to a violent end. It is as close as Burke will get to showing good triumphing over evil. Burke’s characters understand that violence and injustice are never completely overcome or even understood. They simply exist and will continue to hold some sway in earthly affairs.
A resigned Broussard notes at the denouement: “I’ve acquired little knowledge and even less wisdom in my life, but early on, I learned not to argue with the world.... I also learned that madness is madness, and we should not question its presence in the majority of the human race.”
The author repeatedly returns to the notion of a paradise lost because of the thoughts and actions of its first stewards. Another Kind of Eden picks up on the image of an earthly paradise lost that Burke conjured up in Half of Paradise. “I wondered if Eden had been like this,” Broussard reveals. “I also wondered if the founders of our country had this very scene in mind when they envisioned the agrarian republic. And I wondered if they regretted staining it, just as Eden had been stained, when they placed a portion of the human family in shackles and chains and murdered unknown numbers of indigenous people.”
Burke is not quite ready to rest on his writing laurels. Another novel, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood (a reference to Is 9:5) was released last May. It also features Aaron Broussard, now an established novelist who struggles with the death of his daughter and agonizes over the embrace of despotism in national affairs. Burke describes this next work as his “most powerful and most extraordinary.” While it will almost certainly feature some of the fragile redemptive elements Burke regularly includes, it might also serve as a warning that modern America is encroaching on dangerous ground.
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