From the sumptuous and protean After the fall (Since We Fell) published in French in 2017, Dennis Lehane has not published anything. We know that he mainly worked as an author and screenwriter for television series (Mr Mercedes, The Outsider, black bird), in addition to giving a few creative writing workshops. But no novel until Silence which arrives Monday in the bins of bookstores after creating a shock in the United States and France.
On the surface, this tragic story is that of Mary Pat Fennessy, a woman from the working-class Southie (South Boston) neighborhood who desperately searches for her missing daughter. We are in 1974 and the general context has been one of confrontation since a federal judge decreed the desegregation of schools in the Boston area.
Jules, her seventeen-year-old daughter, therefore disappears while a monster demonstration is being prepared to counter the ” busing “, this measure which forces the transport of pupils from white neighborhoods to schools located in black neighborhoods. And the opposite. Historically, the clashes were very violent, and Dennis Lehane himself recounts having experienced a traumatic episode which marked him deeply when he was barely nine years old. But The silence goes much further than highlighting this other tumultuous episode in the recent history of our neighbors to the south. Rather, Lehane’s novel is about setting up and running a hate factory.
It’s that life is difficult in the district of Southie, where the future is not bright for anyone. Yet the community survives, knit together by a kind of sense of belonging that brings together the vast majority of descendants of Irish immigrants who live in the area. Even if the blocked horizon does not give hope for anything different in the foreseeable future. Small jobs, small wages, small lives. When we were born for a little bread…
But Mary Pat wants to find her daughter. While everyone around him is telling him that now is not the time and that we must rather oppose the ” busing » so that no one comes to stick their nose in the neighborhood to see how things are really going. And that’s where she finds out who’s profiting from the hate factory… and then directs all of her energy against the cartel of petty scoundrels that keeps the system going.
Mary Pat Fennessy is a fabulous character, with a determination reminiscent of the great Greek tragedies. Once she understands who is manipulating whom and what, she won’t stop. Dennis Lehane’s writing, brilliantly rendered by the translation, is of a breathtaking rhythm that knows how to make us vibrate on different levels. That of the intimate in front of the intensity of the drama which lives Mary Pat, just like that of the collective tragedy which is played out under our eyes. A great book. Which will undoubtedly be brought to the screen, as Mystic River and several other books by Lehane.