Stephanie Jones: Book Review - Wayfaring Stranger By James Lee Burke

It seems not only unfair but trifling to presume to offer a critique of the work of James Lee Burke, the Montana writer who began his career by conquering 111 separate rejections of his novel The Lost Get-Back Boogie, which upon its 1986 publication was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. (Burke was probably inclined to inject his work with a particular wryness even before this irony, but the experience can only have reinforced his sense of humour.) Consider the following, then, simply a humble entreaty that you read his new work Wayfaring Stranger, and any of his back catalogue.

Unlike last year’s bleakly majestic Light of the World, Wayfaring Stranger is set in the mid-20th century – the majority of Burke’s productions feature stalwart sheriff’s detective Dave Robicheaux in the present day – and presents a comparatively hopeful view of the human condition. This is not to say that reading Burke is a depressing experience or one that promotes pessimism. Rather, it offers the strange reassurance that as mad and bad as events may be, there is nothing new under the sun. Perhaps there is also a natural, if obscure, order to things.

Later, after Weldon has crossed the world, made and risked a fortune and seen the dregs of his species, and fallen in love with Rosita Lowenstein, the “brave and beautiful” descendant of the House of Jesse, the men’s hard-won wisdom bonds them further, and Hackberry acknowledges the empathy and quality of conscience that carried his grandson through abandoned Nazi camps, dicey business deals with oilmen and the tarnished glitter of Tinseltown. As he tells a fretful Weldon: “The wrong people always worry. The people who are the real problem never worry about anything.”

 As always, Burke’s story-craft is flawless, his characters so utterly human, flawed and striving, that you’d hardly be surprised if they stepped out of the pages and stood in front of you. In a novel that encompasses the linked journeys of Weldon and his wife, Weldon’s best friend, business partner and fellow World War II veteran, Hershel Pine, Hershel’s adored but flighty wife Linda Gail, and a coterie of grasping opportunists who want more than the plenty they already own, Burke maintains a disciplined narrative.

Throughout Wayfaring Stranger Burke evokes the explosive idealism and avarice that succeeded 1945, the ambition of those returning to the New World from the bloody European continent, the venality of those among the older generation who cannot quell their acquisitiveness: the worm in the heart of the rose that is the American Dream.
This notion is reinforced in the early life of Weldon Holland, the grandson of famed Texas lawman Hackberry Holland, who becomes the boy’s primary caretaker when the Depression wreaks havoc on the family. Hackberry is a human tornado possessed of a “self-destructive irrationality” that guides most of his actions, a man with enormous appetites and a penchant for referring to his grandson as ‘Satch’ for the “satchel ass” he says is the Hollands’ genetic legacy.

Hackberry is also legendary for having apprehended the outlaw John Wesley Hardin, and the family mythology is enhanced when young Weldon, on encountering a travelling gang he identifies as including the bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, shoots at their departing vehicle.