Todd brings trilogy to a gripping climax
Charles Stark weather’s 1958 murder spree through Nebraska and Wyoming has become a dark-side foundation myth of the New West, with artists ranging from Terrence
Malick ( Badlands) to Bruce Springsteen ( Nebraska) seizing on a story that seemed to herald a new kind of nihilism at loose in the land.
The torch is now picked up by Jack Todd in the final instalment of his Paint trilogy, an American West family saga spanning the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. While at pains to point out that the
killer in Rain Falls
Like Mercy is not “based on” Stark-weather — the crimes take place 10 years earlier, for one thing, and the character bears just as much a resemblance to Anton Chigurh, the psychotic existentialist of Cormac Mccarthy’s No Country
for Old Men — Todd is certainly drawing on the undertow of fear and dread Stark weather’s crimes can still evoke.
As the novel opens, the isolated world of the twin ranching patriarchs Eli and Ezra Paint and their descendants and associates is about to be exploded by the sociopath’s malignant presence and by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which pulls the United States into the Second World War and sends characters as far afield as as a warship, a POW camp in Poland and a jailhouse in East Texas.
It’s a broad canvas, but Todd manages the transitions well; if they sometimes read as jarring, well, the shift from a Wyoming ranch to a South Pacific kamikaze attack had to be jarring to those who lived it. At certain points the allotment of dramatic focus feels out of proportion, as when a bomber pilot’s European war experience is sprinted through in little more space than that devoted earlier to a whorehouse visit. But such flaws are offset by some bravura set pieces: a you-are-there account of the Pearl Harbor attack, or a rapturous evoking of a daredevil flight in an open-cockpit plane.
Todd may be a longtime Montrealer, but his Nebraskan roots shine through in descriptions of landscapes and weather that read almost like conflicted love letters. The thickening sky of an approaching blizzard “takes on a viscous texture, like mercury, and the colour shifts from cornflower blue to a dull grey and then to lead.”
Anyone drawn in by such lyricism needs to bear in mind the looming presence of that killer, the exploits and pursuit of whom almost place
Rain Falls Like Mercy in the category of crime fiction: There’s a lot of violence in this book, and some of it is gruesome. The introduction of such an extreme new element may surprise readers of the more conventionally historical Sun Going Down and Come Again No More, but it pays off, bringing an already rich story to a gripping — and disquietingly contemporary-feeling — climax.