Stephanie Jones: Book Review - World Gone By by Dennis Lehane

The story of Joe Coughlin began with his older brother, Boston patrolman Danny, in 2008’s The Given Day, Dennis Lehane’s vibrant story of the city’s 1918 police strike. Four years later, Joe emerged as the central character in Live by Night, in the course of which he turned away from his father’s outward legitimacy, as a senior player in the Boston Police Department, and towards a life of corruption.

In World Gone By, Joe’s story of risk and consequence picks up in Tampa, the overheated Florida town with well-formed clans of mafiosi that, at the end of 1942, are battling to maintain profits and transport lines amid global chaos, and to seize the opportunity bred by Europe’s latest mad season.

Joe has gone straight, and while his backstory is no secret, his reinvention as a philanthropist and businessman is accepted because he plays it smart. Joe gathers VIPs for tony fundraisers that support hospitals, soup kitchens and libraries.

If he is seen by the authorities as the consigliere for the entire criminal syndicate run by the Bartolo Family (the controlling stakeholder of one of the country’s richest ports along with narcotics, trucking and gambling), well, so it goes. For his part, Joe endearingly describes himself as simply “a businessman who’s slightly more corrupt than average.”

As legendary hitman Saint Viv, so called because of the number of men who have prayed to him before dying, points out much later in the story, everyone likes Joe. Which makes it surprising when he is told by a contract killer that there is a bounty on his head, and the date for his assassination has been set: Ash Wednesday. According to the code of ethics that governs the Bartolo Family, now headed by Joe’s childhood friend Dion, there is no rationale for the killing. After all, Joe embodies “the highest ideal of a man in their business – he made money for his friends.”

As we find Joe in mid-life, a 36-year-old widowed father of one, he is bedeviled by the irrevocability of his past actions and the realities of his present and presumed future. He will never escape “our thing”, as he and his colleagues term their pursuits, but he is given to indulging in magical thinking, telling his fretful paramour that he is “not the kind of guy who gets shot”. The inconsistency of Joe’s worldview is illustrated by his choice of lover, who is the very last woman a man of his particular vulnerabilities should do more than shake hands with.

Death stalks the pages of World Gone By, and it seems only a matter of time before Joe confronts the reaper. Lehane, surely at the peak of his artistry, plots his antihero’s arc to perfection, and amasses a cohort of complex people within a setting of incontestable authenticity.

In a novel of many highlights, a scene in which Joe boards a yacht in Havana Harbour for a meeting with real-life gangsters Meyer Lansky and Carlos Marcello is a gem. Another writer might treat such an interlude as stage-setting, a flashy by-product of exhaustive research: in Lehane’s hands, it serves as an integral curve of the narrative and an embodiment of the psychology behind this quasi-suicidal occupation.

Whether World Gone By represents the rounding-off of a trilogy is hard to say; each successive novel has projected such vitality that it’s possible Lehane is just getting started. There’s more story left in the Coughlin name, in the form of Joe’s young son Tomas, who has a vengeance tale worthy of Shakespeare and a genetic legacy that encompasses the United States and Cuba, which at the conclusion of World Gone By is stepping fully into its mid-century role as America’s playground. In any case, this electrifying Coughlin instalment is proof positive of Lehane’s boldness and ingenuity.