Tin Roof Blowdown

I post regularly on a small, private forum devoted largely to chat about classic horror movies, SF, books, NASA news, Godzilla, MST3K, cryptozoology, and other misc sundries of interest to myself and other middle-aged geeks. There is a reviews board there, mainly devoted to horror/sf/fantasy movies & fiction, but I posted this review a year ago because the novel so thoroughly impressed me. It isn't often that one stumbles across crime fiction that transcends over the borders into "literature", but this was one extremely moving and powerful novel. I thought I would copy/paste it here today, given that we're all now counting the hours until Gustav makes landfall, to see if once again New Orleans is going to be devastated. So, my review:

Tin Roof Blowdown, a novel by James Lee Burke

Amazon link

"Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well."
-FEMA Director Michael Brown, Sept. 1, 2005

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this [she chuckles slightly]is working very well for them."
-Barbara Bush, 2005

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."
–President Bush, on "Good Morning America," Sept. 1, 2005, six days after repeated warnings from experts about the scope of damage expected from Hurricane Katrina

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
–President Bush, Sept. 2, 2005

"We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."
–Rep. Richard Baker (R-LA) to lobbyists, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal

James Lee Burke's "Tin Roof Blowdown" is RIVETING. It is part of a mystery series, but it isn't cute characters solving village murders, it's on an entirely higher level. The reason I wanted to post on it was because it's set in New Orleans during and after the Katrina disaster, and is an eye popping read for its up-close depiction of just what living in New Orleans was like through that episode. The main character is a police detective trying to cope with the work overload, catch a gang, deal with a maniac, and stop organized vigilantes from shooting every black person they see. In short, the plot trappings are pretty much the same as most other police procedural thrillers, but the backdrop, the use of language and environment, and the sheer oppressive weight of the tragedy propel "Tin Roof Blowdown" far above the limits of its genre.

This is powerful reading for the stunning descriptions of the destruction of New Orleans. Seeing it through the lead's eyes as he wades to work in chest-deep water, surrounded by gruesome sights (a dead baby hangs in a tree for five days, a hugely fat man drifts past on a raft made of floats, surrounded by beer coolers and drinking as he sails the flooded streets, corpses piled like firewood and left to bloat and rot in the Louisiana heat)... It's a tough read, but an incredibly gripping one. The author pulls no punches concerning the incompetence of the disaster response (The scene at the hospital geriatric ward, where the lead character is warned not to even open the elevator doors on that floor, is truly horrific) It's a tough read, and will definitely upset more sensitive types, but it's one hell of a book.


Some comments from the multitude of five star Amazon reviews:

An Elegy for New Orleans - Burke's lush descriptions of the beauty of New Orleans and Louisiana bayou country are gone, replaced by "bodies wrapped tight like mummies in the gray and brown detritus left by the receding waters."

One of the things I like best about Burke's books is that he makes the locale a major player in his stories. He has a love/hate relationship with New Orleans and calls her the Whore of Babylon. When driving through the ruined streets, he muses "New Orleans had been a song, not a city. Like San Francisco, it didn't belong to a state; it belonged to a people." He describes southern Louisiana with lush brushstrokes, from the bayous to the wildlife to the marshes. But where he outdoes himself in The Tin Roof Blowdown is in his descriptions of post-Katrina New Orleans. No pictures that you may have seen will accurately tell the story of what happened to this historic city as well as Burke does in narrative form. It is that vivid and that horrible.

The ending of this book will stay with you for a long time - Robicheaux says, "When I go back to sleep, I once again tell myself I will never again have to witness the wide-scale suffering of innocent civilians, nor the betrayal and abandonment of our countrymen when they need us most.
"But that was before Katrina. That was before a storm with greater impact than the bomb blast that struck Hiroshima peeled the face off southern Louisiana. That was before one of the most beautiful cities in the Western Hemisphere was killed three times, and not just by the forces of nature."
Katrina is the most ominous character in this book because it was real. Burke shows us scenes of the storm's aftermath: bodies of old people left to rot in the streets by the city's convention center and survivors smashing their china to bits upon learning that their insurance companies will not cover water damage. And of course, there is the grim ghost of the Ninth Ward of Orleans Parish, still in ruins two years later.

And finally, an excerpt from a UK review in The Independent:

‘It’s been a long time since a crime novel made me cry. It’s been a long time since a crime novel made every hair on my body stand on end. The Tin Roof Blowdown did both…In my opinion The Tin Roof Blowdown is more than a crime novel; more than a literary novel, even. It is a work of profound historical value and importance that should, no, must be read by anyone interested in what happens when a holocaust breaks loose and civilisation breaks down… There were moments when I wanted to put the book down, it was so painful to continue. But I couldn’t. Nor, I dare say, will anyone else.’