James Lee Burke is back to referee another battle between good and evil
“Another Kind of Eden” by James Lee Burke (Simon&Schuster, 245 pages, $27).
The novelist James Lee Burke is renowned for 24 books he has written about Louisiana lawman Dave Robicheaux. He has also completed a number of novels about the Holland family. The inspiration for those stories comes from Burke’s ancestors.
He recently published the 10th Holland novel, “Another Side of Eden.” His protagonist in this one, Aaron Holland Broussard, was previously his main man in another novel, “The Jealous Kind.” That book was set in Texas during the 1950s. This new one takes place in Colorado in 1962.
In a recent interview, Burke told me he chose this timeline because it was just before the Cuban Missile Crisis, which he recalls as one of the most frightening moments in modern history as President John F. Kennedy
engaged in some provocative power plays with the Soviet Union. Burke believes we came dangerously close to a full on nuclear war during that period.
As our story opens, Aaron Broussard has just alighted in Trinidad, Colorado. He’s been living a migrant life when he decides to stay put for a while working as a laborer on a farm that has dairy cows and grows produce. He reflects on this lifestyle: “Know why migrants are migrants? There’s no yesterday and no tomorrow, anonymity is a given; migrants come with the dust and go with the wind.”
Broussard has been suffering what he describes as “nonalcoholic blackouts.” This is a situation the author knows about. During our recent conversation, Burke explained that he has had experiences like that — he’ll read something he has written and will have no memory of writing it.
Aaron and his co-workers were out in one of the farm trucks. They stopped at a restaurant, and as they were leaving a group of men attacked them in the parking lot. Apparently, this violent assault was instigated by something these assailants had noticed on their truck — a union sticker.
We just met the bad guys, or at least some of them. Broussard finds himself embroiled in a conflict between ranchers. And he is attracted to Jo Anne, a waitress at that restaurant. When he tries to get to know her better, he realizes she’s involved with an art professor at the local college.
Aaron’s instantly on his guard. This professor seems like a bad dude. When Aaron meets the bus load of beatniks that the professor is hanging out with, he gets even more alarmed. This reviewer’s issue with our professor was something more anachronistic: The guy was driving a red Ford Mustang. This was 1962. The first Mustangs came out in 1964, yes? Quite suspicious.
That futuristic red Mustang is a mere quibble. Aaron’s bottling up a lot of rage. By the end of the book he is facing down a legion of Satanic cult members. Burke tends to mine the classic texts, and there’s something biblical about his final showdown. It is apocalyptic, good versus evil and is downright supernatural. His more recent books have been trending in that direction.