A Stained White Radiance

very good

James Lee Burke doesn’t just write colorful characters, he exposes their souls and psyche and all the snakes that writhe there. I’ve read everyone of JLB’s 20 Dave Robicheaux novels and now, I’m reading them again. And I’m finding so much more in the depths of his writing that I never realized the first time around. I’m starting book six now and relishing every page. I have to say though, A Stained White Radiance is one of my favorites. He really nails the personalities of the characters. Maybe it’s because I’m 26 years older than I was the first time I read this book but I recognize more truth in story and the characters now.

James Burke (and I hope he reads his own reviews) is nearly overwhelming in his powers of description and narrative. He scatters remarkable bits of prose across one page and, seemingly, carelessly continues it on to the next. I have found myself going back to read and re-read the same paragraph just because it’s written so well.

Most of Burke’s novels seem to be set in New Iberia, LA, a small hamlet some 100 miles west of New Orleans and south of Lafayette. I have always felt that New Orleans is the most foreign-felt city in America, and you’re never far from French heritage and culture as you stray into the countryside.

Burke’s main character, David Robicheaux is a kick-ass (or be kicked) ex-cop from the New Orleans PD with all that may imply. You’ll like him.

Read James Burke.

The title of James Lee Burkes fifth Dave Robicheaux novel is A Stained White Radiance. The title has multiple meanings. The most literal is the burnt cross that Lyle Sonnier, a Louisiana preacher, rescues from a KKK event, and repurposes by covering it with metal and placing it atop the hill where hes established a bible college. More broadly, the title refers to the Sonniers, a family photo of whom would clearly illustrate the word dysfunction. Most generally, late in the novel, Burke tends to use the title to refer to the South as a whole, the stain being its history in the slavery of blacks.
The novel continues with characters Burkes readers have met before. Cletus Purcell, Daves partner in his earlier adventures, shows up early, now a private investigator in New Orleans. Bootsie, Daves wife is a long ago teen-aged love interest from his high school days whom he married in his previous book, A Morning for Flamingoes. Here she has contracted lupus, Daves concern for her health a subplot in the action. Alafair, the young child Dave had rescued from a crashed plane in the Bayou is growing up, now in elementary school. Batiste still works at Daves fishery and bait business on the Bayou. Dave remains a detective in the New Iberia Police Department.
Burke approaches Daves adventures in a more issue-focused manner in Radiance. The Sonnier family, preacher Lyle (with whom Dave served in Viet Nam), Weldon (his brother, at whose home a police officer from Daves town of New Iberia is brutally killed), and Drew, (the sister with whom Dave had been intimate as a teen-ager) are central to the major theme of the book, the after-effects of child abuse, years later, when the victims have grown up. A facially deformed homeless man living under the name Vic Benson (who may be the Sonniers father) makes occasional but important appearances. The tortured upbringing the Sonnier children had experienced at the hands of their father, and the prostitute hed hired to raise them after their mother had died are described in graphic and sometimes stomach-churning detail. Child abuse and its lingering effects are center stage in this novel, to a degree that no other issue, other than Daves on-going struggles with alcoholism, has been emphasized in Burkes previous Robicheaux novels.
One of the features that makes the Robicheaux novels unlike other detective fare Ive read is that Daves character is humble enough to remain dynamic, able to change his views and actions based on evidence and experience. His opinion of the Sonnier children changes throughout the novel. At the political and societal level, however, little has changed. The politician and former Ku Klux Kanner, Bobby Earl, survives, and seems no less the tool of the Aryan Brotherhood at novels end.
If theres one area this reader finds uncomfortable, it would be with the nostalgic portrayal of the memories Dave has when recalling the detritus he found as a child digging in the dirt: the bullets, cannonballs and such, all remnants of the War Between the States. Not being a Southerner myself, maybe its me. Perhaps Burkes touching on something that Northerners would do well to acknowledge. Similarly, Burke doesnt have the reader dig too deeply in the dirt to understand how little things have changed since that time.
Theres no longing for the white old days, though. This reader just wishes that Burke had ended with a more hopeful message that Southern culture is changing. Bobby Earls rescue from assassination, and his re-election campaign, however, show realistically that politics in the stained white radiance of the South is pretty much the same. What A Stained White Radiance lacks in a happy ending, however, is more than made up by its honesty.

“One morning, perhaps just before sunrise, you turn your eyes in a different direction and notice a blue heron rising from the reeds along the bayous edge, a gators walnut-ridged eyes moving silently through a milky skim of algae and floating twigs, a glowing radiance on the earths rim that suddenly breaks through the black trunks of the cypress trees with such a white brilliance that you want to shield your eyes.” -It does not get any richer in texture of words than James Lee Burke.

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