Indeed, while Burke's portrait of the downtrodden Welsh/Jamaican/Italian/Arab/etc. waterfront community of Butetown is interesting, none of the characters are developed very well, nor do they have very clear motivations for anything. The bleakness and despair are powerful, to the point where everyone seems to be adrift in this hopeless purgatory of drugs, violence, and awful sex. Which is not to say that every book must have a hero, but it would be nice if there was someone to at least care about. It is not even really about the loss of friendship or trust, since the relationship between Jack and Jess is shown as a sham from its earliest days. Nor is Jack's marriage to Victoria ever shown to have held any happiness. Everyone and everything seem doomed and decomposing.
There is mood to spare, but the story lacks pace, plotting, and character, all of which makes more sense now that I know that Burke is an lit/philosophy academic. Let me put it another way, when someone's first two books are The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida and Authorship: From Plato the Postmodern, it shouldn't come as a surprise when their debut crime novel does not quite cut it.
When Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" first opened at the local multiplex, it played to an audience of twenty. As we left the cinema, each member of the audience wore a mask of what can only be described as haunting, horrified bliss. There was a sense of excitement that we had witnessed a fresh and dangerous talent but also a certain unease - the rules had been changed and the crime genre would never really be safe and comfortable again. Readers of Sean Burke's debut novel "Deadwater" are in for a similar treat.
The premise of the novel is simple. A young prostitute is murdered and the next morning Jack Farissey, an alcoholic self-medicating pharmacist, wakes up covered in blood and unable to remember a thing about the previous night. In a conventional thriller Farissey would be one step ahead of the police, desperate to prove his innocence before the handcuffs were slapped on but this is a novel that rarely chooses the obvious path. The police, led by detective Hargest, have little or no interest in the truth. They are pursuing a different kind of justice and begin a relentless campaign to frame local gangsters, the Baja brothers, for the murder. Things are complicated when Jack's wife Victoria returns and joins the Baja's defense team. Although the plot twists and turns like a Russian gymnast on speed, the reader though frequently breathless is never left behind. There is a lyrical despair to the writing and a depth of characterization one doesn't find often in thrillers but this is more than just a thriller, it is a deep and penetrating look into the soul of the marginal, disenfranchised and desperate inhabitants of Butetown, an area of Cardiff which makes the mean streets of New York look like EuroDisney. Imagine "Heart of Darkness" written by Raymond Chandler and set in Cardiff and it becomes possible to glean some idea of a book that is doomed, haunting and unforgettable; a book that makes the darkness seem bright in comparison. "Deadwater" is a novel that is both literary and gripping and, in Sean Burke, readers of James Lee Burke, Ian Rankin and James Elroy have found another name to put on their shelves.
