The America depicted in James Lee Burke's powerful new collection of stories is a chaotic nation defined by Hurricane Katrina, traumatised Vietnam veterans and the catastrophe in Iraq. It is a place where bullies abound, violence is omnipresent and storm clouds are always on the horizon. And yet, his memorable characters somehow remain able to harvest a grain of salvation from the blasted earth around them.

Set (like many of the book's 11 stories) in the seedier precincts of the Gulf Coast, Mist depicts young Lisa Guillory's descent into drug addiction and prostitution after her lover is killed in the Iraq war. As if that wasn't motive enough for her decline, she is also haunted by the memory of her baby's death in the chaotic aftermath of Katrina. “My sister was trying to hand up my l'il boy t'rew the hole in the roof and they fell back in the water. I could hear them knocking in there, but I couldn't get them out. My baby never got baptised.” Despite being tormented by these ghosts, she is still able to find solace from the thought that her baby has been granted a measure of grace: “Beneath the water's surface Lisa can see tiny lights that remind her of broken Communion wafers inside a pewter chalice or perhaps the souls of infants that have found one another and have been cupped and given safe harbour by an enormous hand.”

In Texas City, 1947, a young boy loses his father in the conflagration that consumed an entire coastal city and is delivered into the custody of a woman so cruel that she forces him to commit a terrible crime to escape. His salvation comes from a nun who understands that sometimes justice can only be found outside the boundaries of civilisation.

Burke is best known as the author of a series of acclaimed detective novels, though in Jesus Out to Sea he amply illustrates that he can more than hold his own when he moves beyond the genre. His working-class dialogue feels spot on, while his evocations of sultry Gulf summers and the stinging Montana winters are perfectly pitched. But it is his characters, men and women who are forced to find their humanity amid extreme suffering and duress, who make this book memorable.

Although Jesus Out to Sea features no shortage of venal behaviour, one outrage stands above them all. It is described in the title story, when the narrator, drifting toward his doom in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, hears a rumour that “the president of the United States flew over and looked down from his plane at us. Then he went on to Washington. I don't think the story is true, though. If the president was really in that plane, he would have landed and tried to find out what kind of shape we were in. He would have gone to the Superdome[] and Convention Center[] and talked to the people there and told them the country was behind them”. The narrator's self-delusion is forgivable, because even for the singularly brave souls who populate this fine book, some cruelties remain too much to bear.

Jesus Out to Sea by James Lee Burke
Orion £14.99 pp241

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