Customer Reviews

Feast Day of Fools

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Feast Day Of Fools" is vintage James Lee Burke. At 460 pages, it is a jumbo of a book and takes time to get to its cruising altitude, but once it does.....WOW.

"Feast Day" is set in the drug, arms and people smuggling borderlands of Southwest Texas, a physical and metaphorical landscape ideally suited to Burke's eschatological battles between good and evil. Sheriff Hackberry Holland (in his second appearance after being recalled from a 40 year hiatus in Rain Gods, published in 2009) and his team of deputies investigate the brutal murder of a DEA informant and the related disappearance of an escaped hostage who carries with him vital military secrets. They are not the only ones in the chase: the Feds, shadowy vigilantes with unspecified links to the government, a Mexican gang and a Russian led criminal group also show up. "Preacher Jack" Collins, the demonic killer who escaped justice in "Rain Gods," also inserts himself though it is debatable as to which side he is on.

Burke's characters are colorful and complex. In addition to the various well-sketched thugs, there is La Magdalena, a Chinese missionary with a CIA past, the Reverend Cody Daniels, a cowboy preacher out to expunge his own sins, and Danny Boy Lorca, a loser who witnessed the murder and decides to make amends. The good guys all have their demons and the villains (mostly) have flashes of honour.

Hack himself is a peculiar hero. He is almost 80 years old but manages physical feats and intimidates his foes as if he were in his prime. He is haunted by (among many things) his memories of the Korean War. One forms the impression that Burke would have preferred to make it the War Between the States but concluded that it would stretch credulity even further if his hero was aged 160. He is a combination of wise old man and avenging angel. He incorporates all the values of Burke's other series heroes: Dave Robicheaux and Billy Bob Holland (whom I think I remember to be a relative).

Burke's writing is sui generis. It goes well beyond the crime genre and comparisons with Faulkner, McCarthy and O'Connor are justified. His prose is poetic and Biblical, full of allusions and images; his evocations of landscapes and the memories and ghosts that inhabit them are haunting and lyrical; his characters converse in a mixture of old world courtesies and scatological insults that is unique. No one speaks like this in the real world, but it is totally believable in the universe that Burke creates.

Fans of James Lee Burke will count this book among his finest works. New readers should persevere through its relatively dense build-up. You will be glad that you did so and the entire oeuvre of this astonishing author awaits you.

Flaws duly noted - it's indeed a surprisingly commercial turn of writing for JLB in many ways. However, this results in a high degree of sustained narrative drive. By contrast, the lack of same has sometime been, in the past, the weakest aspect of his otherwise amazing books. Strangely, the florid descriptive style made Texas live for me more than the renowned Dave Robicheaux novels ever did for Louisiana. So despite any of those flaws, it's simply the James Lee Burke book I've enjoyed most, and finished quickest, in ages. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed it, would happily return to Sheriff Hackberry's Texas mythi-verse any time Burke wishes to lead the way, and did not miss the loophole through which the delectably sordid villain escaped to live another plot ... Would ideally have awarded 4.5 stars. If Burke could combine ALL the best of his previous works with Hackberry's character family ... five stars easy.

Down by the border with Mexico there are people-runners, drug mules, guns-for-sale, psychos and the beginnings of lawlessness that lets the psychos have their way.

Back from a recent US trip, not far from this area, I was amazed by how JLB's characters come as much from his imagination as from reality. Whereas in the past I thought he'd hammed up his description of low-lifes just a touch (and of course he does)... I hadn't realised what rich pickings there are in the Deep South for his desperados with a bad streak. You see JLB types, slightly worryingly, all over the place.

Anyway, Feast Day of Fools (the title relates to a medieval tradition of letting the local imebeciles have a jamboree once a year to get it out of their systems) describes demi-life goings-on by the border, with Sheriff Hackberry Holland attempting to keep order. There are big issues such as immigration and political intervention where it is not required. There are also vivid scenes of stand-offs between bad guys (in particular mad-man Collins) and other players in the border zone.

The morality of JLB shines through. Why do we go to war in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq (Hackberry has recurring nightmares of serving in Korea) - why do vigilantes take pop shots at immigrants crossing over to USA? Why not just take a step back and see things a bit more clearly, concentrate on "the small pleasures that an orderly life" provides. Less gung-ho... but still some gun.

The descriptions of royal purple skies and hillsides with birdsong and dried out river beds are as enticing as ever. And inner-demons run free - as they always do in Burke's books. The book does take a while to get going, but when it picks up, you are there... and the characters are not -- quite -- as far-fetched and exaggerated as they may perhaps seem.

This is a typical Burke novel; vigorous, violent and filled with grotesque and memorable characters. It provides the usual quotq of liberal social commentary, thistime about illegal immigration from Mexico. The exchanges between the sheriff and his female assistants spice up yet another slightly formulaic but eminently readable novel.

Burke is worth visiting again. He keeps a close focus at the values and decisions you must take if you want to be a decent person. Thanks!

James Lee Burke is a master of lanuage. His books are full of violence and of poetic description of nature. His persons are complex whether they are the "bad" guys or the "good" guys. And in this book as in his others, you can smell and see the South, and the people in the book invades you. He has his political opinions, but do not push it on you. Also he gives his opinions of race, religion and how we deal with life through his caracters. He is what I would call a moral writer. But he is never what i would call a "I know best man". To put him in the catagory of Crime Writers is a big mistake. He is just a great writer.

This is a touching and insightful story. I love deep writing and do not hesitate to show my appreciation when I come across one.This is a well written work here with tons of good characters. The prose is excellent, the dialogue flows, the narrative is effective, the plot is gripping and the style is unique and simple.There is no point going on and on. The month has been off to a good start; reading The Oaf and Feast Day of fools. This is a story that will strike a chord with its target readership and even beyond. However, I am glad I stumbled onto it.

I love James Lee Burke, the plotting, the lyrical sense of place, the characterisations and the sporadic violence, so involving you could be there. But 'Feast Day of fools' is violence upon violence and little lyricism. A hero sherriff drawn from a much earlier book set in East texas, Hack Holland, and set oddly in the unidentified recent past, the book is one long scream of either retributional or semi-recreational violence As though man is the manifestation of nature red in tooth and claw, the sherriff included. There is some unlikely spirituality, some somewhat raw-boned East Texas sex, old Hack Holland up against Russian gangsters, white slavers, mexican drug dealers and all manner of pond life, out of the primeval swamp and into each others faces. You get into it and read it fast but it's the sort of book an author finds nearly completed in a drawer and then abandoned which can be fleshed out and finished to meet the delivery demands of an importunate publisher.

I'm inclined to agree with the two previous reviewers that the book has its faults, the rather overt moralising in particular (Hackberry Holland is rather a sanctimonious old codger), and the dialogue, though interesting, just doesn't seem like what real people would say. It's not so much that the words by each participant in a conversation are false, more that he two sets of remarks in the conversation don't seem naturally to fit together.

That said, the plot rattles along well - it's very hard to put the book down - and the set pieces are absolutely superb. I liked the descriptive writing, too, always a strength of JLB's. So most definitely a good read and well up to the standard of his earlier books.

James Lee Burke never disappoints and this is another fine example of his work.
The storyline never slows and the descriptive prose is a highlight of all his books.
Hard to put down such a gripping yarn.