Dennis Lehane blesses us with new novels all too infrequently. Small Mercies, published in April, is the first in six years and a powerful reminder of just what we've been missing while he's been in Hollywood writing, among others, the screenplays for Black Bird, The Outsider and Mr Mercedes.
Small Mercies takes Lehane back to his roots in South Boston and to the violence, secrets and claustrophobia of a closed, intense community being opened, very much against its will, to an outside world it distrusts and hates. It is 1974 and the eve of the busing crisis brought about by the forced desegregation of the Boston school system. As South Boston fries in the heat of a sweltering summer its citizens boil with rage as the City prepared to mix the pupils of its predominantly white-Irish school with those of the predominantly black Roxbury High School, three miles and a world away.
One of those selected to go is Jules Fennessy, a 17-year-old reluctant to take the bus. But Jules doesn't make it to the first day in Roxbury as she goes missing shortly before, following a night out with friends. On that same night a young black man from Roxbury is killed in a Southie subway station.
The disappearance of Jules spurs her mother Mary Pat into a desperate search for her daughter that brings her into conflict with friends, family, the Boston Police Department and the Irish mafia that controls the city's streets. Having already lost two husbands, her son and her own self-worth, Mary Pat, a chain-smoking profane alcoholic, clings ferociously to the last thing of any value to her, and in her anguish upends the balance of a neighbourhood never far from discord and violence.
Mary Pat will haunt your dreams. As she confronts the loss of Jules, she undergoes an exhaustive and traumatic self-appraisal, revisiting every aspect of her life that leads her to this crisis. Even as she does so, she finds unknown reservoirs and strength and determination, as her anger, disappointment and spirit dominate the story.
Loss, disappearance and the sins of the past are a familiar theme in Lehane's novels, and Small Mercies evoked two of his best known works, Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone both of which centred around the search for lost children and which were made into good movies by Clint Eastwood and Ben Affleck respectively.
Like those novels, Small Mercies relentlessly examines the ties of family, friendship and kinship. And if Mary Pat is the book's soul, its heart is South Boston, around which a mythology arose in which a community of poor working class Irish Catholics told themselves and everyone else the neighbourhood was safe and good as it looked out for its own. Lehane, as he and others have done before him, exposes the flaws in the story, showing a social fabric that is being strained by violence, crime and corruption that comes from within, and in which it is dangerous to step outside of the myth.
The weaving of Mary Pat's tale with the unfolding desegregation crisis that explores the city's racial politics is a master stroke. Southie's gangsters and other vested interests can point to an external threat to their way of living and create enemies of politicians, judges and black students, and in doing so solidify their strangle hold over the real dangers to people's lives that they propagate from within: prostitution, drugs, protection rackets.
The book's third key character is Detective Michael "Bobby" Coyne, who leads the investigation into the young black murder victim, Augustus Williamson. Coyne, a survivor of Vietnam and a similar upbringing to Mary Pat, represents a combination of hope and decency, the chance that Boston's downtrodden souls on both sides of the racial divide can put aside their differences and build a better future, although at every turn Lehane makes clear the size and challenge of the obstacles.
Small Mercies is a gut punch of a novel. It will take your breath away with its early salvoes and hold you in its thrall as Lehane takes you on a journey through dark side of humanity. The story-telling is fast and furious, its violence raw, its sense of time and place strong and convincing - South Boston is a living, breathing monster, largely devoid of comfort and compassion. And yet there are moments of tenderness and humour, even for Mary Pat in her pain, and there is great insight in Lehane's fine tight prose. It's as good a novel as I've read this year.
It also reminded me just how much I enjoyed his early work, and the Kenzie / Gennaro private investigator series, of which Gone, Baby, Gone is a part, which launched with A Drink Before the War (did ever a crime novel have a better title?) way back in 1994. It's time to revisit them and hope that Lehane doesn't keep us waiting another six years for new material.