Book Review: Harbor Lights by James Lee Burke

 ...terms like “dark odyssey” are the romantic stuff of poets and are hardly adequate to describe the fiction we write every day of our lives...

A boy and his father witnessed an oil tanker capsized by a German submarine in the Gulf of Mexico during 1942. They get embroiled in a situation where tough decisions have to be made, even when their family is being ruined by federal agents. We encounter the boy, Aaron, again in two other stories in this violent and draining collection of short stories titled Harbor Lights by the famous American writer James Lee Burke. I received an advance review copy of the book by the publisher, Grove Atlantic, through Netgalley in exchange for my honest feedback.

There are eight stories in this collection, and each of them deeply explores the dark past and how that horror still reverberates around us. The opening story, Harbor Lights, featuring Aaron Broussard, is a tale about how the corrupt system uses the frailties of an unsuccumbing person against him in order to exert pressure. In another story titled Deportees, we find Aaron and his mother temporarily living with his grandfather. They are forced to shelter illegal immigrants from Mexico while being threatened with the repercussions they have to face. In a third story, titled Strange Cargo, which is in fact a short novella, we encounter Aaron a third time. An old man now grieving his daughter's death, which he feels could have been avoided, has to encounter an entity from the long past that makes him aware of how things remain the same even after the passage of decades.

In the story Going Across Jordan, we find two migrant friends, one a Communist organiser and the other a runaway convict, hired to tend the farm of a Hollywood cowboy actor (Clint Wakefield!!!), only to realise that the heroic face is just a facade and behind the mask dwells evil personified. Big Midnight Special is the story of a prisoner being set up to fight another. He realises this and decides to follow the only path to avoid the confrontation. The Assualt is a painful story about a professor whose daughter suffers brain damage from an assault on her and his attempts to make it right.

The Wild Side of Life is about an oil rig worker who witnessed the decimation of a Latin American village. When he later falls in love with the wife of the person responsible for the atrocity, he decides to confront his past. A Distant War is a story that stands apart from the others in this collection. The story offers a strong dose of surrealism and elements of the supernatural. In this story, a man, along with his son, gets trapped in a village inhabited by the dead, and to escape, he has to confront the evil in his past.

Harbor Lights is the title of the book as well as its opening story. After reading the entire collection, I felt that the title binds together all the stories in it as a common thread. The protagonists in each of these stories are tormented souls with dark pasts who are forced to confront evil in the present. They cannot hide and have to fight simultaneously the past and their present. They are struggling against the turbulent waves in a dark sea because of their evil pasts, and far from them are lined the elusive harbour lights, their redemptive future.

The stories are placed in different times and spaces, the earliest one during World War 2. All the stories are intimately linked to the dark history of slavery and racism that was prevalent in the US. The stories explore the strenuous relationship between races, prejudices, and the guilt that is transferred through generations. In this background, the stories feature themes of guilt, loyalty, grief, conscience, love, and friendship.

Harbor Lights is a collection of stories that offer pretty dark and gloomy scenarios. The author refuses to serve us the anticipated tales of poetic justice. The protagonists of these stories, even when destined to suffer the injustice of the system, realise their own shortcomings and even empathise with the agents who try to defeat them. But each story, while set in a deeply dark and depressing environment, never denies its readers a glimpse of the harbor lights that are illuminated on a distant horizon.

....when good people stray into dark water, their lack of experience with human frailty can become like a millstone around their necks.