'The Given Day,' by Dennis Lehane
BOOK REVIEW
"HAVE YOU ever noticed that when they need us, they talk about duty, but when we need them, they talk about budgets?" Spoken today, those words could apply to any number of hot-button issues on the country's mind: war, the notion of service, the collapsing economy. The words, however, emerge from the mouth of a fictional young police officer living in Boston about 90 years ago, about to take part in brutal events that are shaped by and will shape the course of history.
They are fighting words, just a handful of many that form the backbone of Dennis Lehane's "The Given Day," his first novel in more than five years and a messy, emotional work of admirable ambition and scope. On the surface, a 700-page epic about the Boston police strike of 1919 seems as much of a curveball as the kind Babe Ruth might have swung and missed at, a head-scratching decision for fans who stubbornly cling to the belief he'll bring back his beloved but beat-up private eyes Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro for a sixth go-round. But the secret of Lehane's body of work is how he stretches himself within a tight framework, revisiting key themes over and over in different forms. It is what makes him a standout writer of commercial fiction, regardless of genre guise.
Lehane's crime novels, series and stand-alone, rely on authority clashes for their visceral power, and there is plenty of the same in "The Given Day." Danny Coughlin, one side of the novel's mirrored protagonists, runs into stormy conflict with his police bosses, a young J. Edgar Hoover on the lookout for potential terrorists, and the organized efforts of union enthusiasts -- echoing similar battles Lehane has waged all the way back to 1994's "A Drink Before the War." But Danny's greatest battle of wills is reserved for his father, whose status as decorated police captain creates a large shadow for the younger Coughlin.
The state of their relationship also embodies an ongoing strength and weakness in Lehane's work, his penchant for dramatic flourishes drawn from centuries past. Echoing Greek tragedy, both "Mystic River" and "Gone, Baby, Gone" brilliantly brought to light how past events doom families, while the serial killer at work in "Darkness, Take My Hand" had a Jacobean-style thirst for blood. And "Shutter Island," like a cross between Horace Walpole's Gothic tale "The Castle of Otranto" and Agatha Christie, wraps layers of psychological import around a logic puzzle paying off only in the final pages.
