My sis sent me a copy of Lehane’s Moonlight Mile, which for some reason I hadn’t read, and although it’s a very good book, it left me for some reason unsatisfied, and I can’t quite put my finger on why. I might have been asking it to be a different book than it was.
Moonlight Mile came
out in 2010, which means after The Given
Day, the first of the Coughlin trilogy, and before Live by Night, the second novel, which picks up Joe Coughlin’s
story as a
I mean Lehane no offense, but of course if it were me, and he made a similar comment about something of mine, it would get my back up. We can’t know what impels a writer.
In any case, we’re revisiting unfinished business. Gone, Baby, Gone ends on an ambiguous and very uncertain note. Moonlight Mile is, quite explicitly, a reading of that moral temperature. I can’t say much about the plot, which takes off at right angles from Gone, Baby, Gone – not without giving too much away, if you’re unfamiliar with the previous book. We are back in the world of human trafficking, heartless as before, although not quite as horrific. And maybe the stakes simply don’t seem as high. There was an edge of nausea in Gone, Baby, Gone that’s just not present, here. A sense of the absolute is missing.
It’s
not too much to say that evil itself has often been Lehane’s theme. Sometimes it’s frighteningly specific, and sometimes
it’s a planetary influence, felt but unseen -
David, I just listened to a podcast drama. After trundling along for an hour, it abruptly wrapped up in a matter of a few sentences. Huh? What happened to Mrs Havisham? And Colonel Grouch? Unsatisfying didn't beging to describe it.
ReplyDeleteThat is a case of the author tiring of the story, perhaps can't decided how to end it, and lets it die. But even worse is a story that abruptly changes its mind in the middle of a story. Wilbur Smith's Shout at the Devil started out as a light-hearted caper/romp, when suddenly the bad guys kill the hero's daughter. Without warning, the entire tone changed within a matter of seconds, both the movie and the book. That was disconcerting!
You and I lived in Greater Boston. I knew characters exactly like those in Mystic River, which made that novel very unsettling to me. Like a Greek tragedy, I knew how it must play out. A couple of years ago, I learned one of my friends from that era had died literally drinking hemself to death, leaving his wife bitter and angry at the needless waste.
Some days it doesn't pay to read.
David, Prayers for Rain is the sequel to Gone, Baby, Gone. Lehane didn't write another Kenzie/Genarro book until this one for several years because, as he said on a panel once, "Patrick stopped talking to me."
ReplyDeleteI've always considered Moonlight Mile one of Lehane's weaker books, which means it's only very good. It feels to me like he was simply giving the duo closure several years after their earlier adventures. Now they're married and have a child, and Patrick leaves the PI job at the end. Kind of a letdown.
I think his most recent book is Small Mercies, and that puts him back in his usual stamping ground. And it has all the pain and power of the early works.