“The Silence” by Dennis Lehane, Boston in the time of hatred – Liberation

2023-04-20 17:05:32

The author of “Mystic River” or “Shutter Island” mixes the quest of a mother whose daughter disappeared in the racist riots which inflamed, in 1974, the city where he grew up.

“I am Irish. We drink guilt for breakfast”, posed the American Dennis Lehane three weeks ago at the Quais du thriller festival in Lyon, during a videoconference. The feeling (very Catholic?) of having sinned, badly done, failed, and its counterpart, the quest for redemption, for redemption, in fact irrigate his production. Antediluvian Good and Evil cohabit there through interposed characters or, frequently, within protagonists, resulting in inner tragedies. The Bostonian stages communities from individuals whose portraits he chisels, especially psychological ones, his novels become sagas carried by often tiny lives twisted by dilemmas which make them waver.

In The silence, the main character is Mary Pat Fennessy. A working-class mother from the Irish neighborhood of South Boston, who tinkers with her life like everyone else, she sees her bearings and certainties crumble when her 17-year-old daughter disappears during an evening with friends from “Southie”. . Badass who drinks, smokes, swears, gets into fights on occasion, Mary Pat will move heaven, earth and secrets to find her adored Jules, to open breaches in the wall of silence that each other faces his quest. Especially the local Irish mafia.

Quietly racist

Its boiling will mingle with that which crosses the city: it is in 1974, a federal judge decided the forced desegregation of the public schools of Boston, by transferring daily by bus children from neighborhoods (popular) mainly white towards neighborhoods (popular ) predominantly black, and vice versa. The inhabitants of the white neighborhoods are upwind against this «busing», they organize, demonstrate, violently. Mary Pat is one of them, wonders why the mobsters do not act: “Why don’t you fucking shoot that judge? […] You are paid for ‘protection’. So protect us now. Protect our kids. Stop that.” Mary Pat is understandably, quietly, racist.

The night Jules disappeared, a young black man was found dead on some rails. Mary Pat concludes: “The article doesn’t say that this black guy was a drug dealer, but it’s reasonable to assume that, otherwise why would he have been there? Why would he come to their neighborhood? And she unfolds, straight in her boots despite the absurdity of her reasoning: “She stays on her side of town, on her side of the fucking line, so is it too much to ask that they do the same? Why do they have to come and bother us? You go downtown, well, fine, that’s where everyone mixes, blacks, whites and Puerto Ricans. They work together, they bitch about their bosses, the lives they lead, the city as a whole. But afterwards, everyone goes back to their neighborhood and sleeps in their own bed, until the moment when they have to get up in the morning and do the same thing again”. At one of her two jobs, Mary Pat befriended a black woman whose nickname she only knows, she never had the curiosity or the desire to know more.

Seismograph

Dennis Lehane was 9 years old when the “busing” ignited Boston. He remembers attending “all that despicable stuff that followed” and to have been “terrorized” by the outbursts of violence. “At nine, I couldn’t reconcile people throwing rocks at buses yelling the word ‘nigger’ and the people I saw at church or at a barbecue with the neighbors. They were the same though.”, he says in a promotional interview. His Mary Pat is perfect in its ambiguity, arouses repulsion as much as attachment, reminds us of the inconsolable and vengeful mother played by Frances McDormand in Three Billboards: The Billboards of Revenge. The way her angst mounts will speak to anyone whose loved one hasn’t returned as planned – this phone call where Mary Pat overhears “she’s there”, more «elle» is not Jules. These details confirm Lehane as a very fine, sensitive, thrilling seismograph – we have known this for Mystic River or Shutter Island.

The implosion of Mary Pat and her vigilante mother outfit is poignant, sometimes jubilant – that she can single-handedly stand up to a battalion of crime pros is pure fiction but amusing, with feminist echoes. The dive into the Irish mafia (recurring character in Lehane) is also successful, close to Peaky Blinders. We will nevertheless issue this caveat: The silence is sometimes talkative, would have benefited from being more concise, lively and direct, one wonders a little what the good cop character is for, for example.

“Le Silence”, Dennis Lehane (translated by François Lappe), Gallmeister, 448pp, 25.40 euros, to be published on April 27.