Mystic River - Dennis Lehane

Mystic River, the brilliant and award-winning contemporary crime fiction novel by Dennis Lehane, is the tale of three Boston buddies whose lives took divergent courses after one fateful day when they were kids. Now, twenty-five years later, another deeply tragic event, have not just brought them together, but has also set them off on a collision course from which no one can hope to escape unscathed.

“If you really want to know when innocence dies, just look these people in the eye” - New York Times Book Review

Oftentimes the power of a book gets determined by the role played not just by its protagonists, but also by the place it is based on. Going by that dictum, Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, which has at its forefront three devastatingly real characters as its principal protagonists, and where Boston, the author’s hometown and the city where the story is set, has become the proverbial fifth character, is a rousing success. That it is also an extremely engaging murder mystery tale, apart from being a top rate character study, only adds to its status as one of the most rewarding pieces of contemporary American fiction.

Published in 2001, the book, which won the prestigious Dilys Award in 2002, starts off with a flashback of sorts on one not-so-fine day in the year 1975 in the working class East Buckingham region of Boston. The blue collar nature of its residents forms a vital aspect of what the effects of the day ends up having on three kids growing up in that community. Sean Devine lives in the comparatively ‘upper class’ section of the Boston locality known as Point, while Jimmy Marcus and Dave Boyle reside in the seedier part of the neighbourhood known as the Flats. The three are playmates and hang out together. Yet, from the very outset, the class distinction at their residences defines their strangely impersonal friendships. Sean is smart and has a college-educated future ahead of him; Jimmy is brash, fearless and has trouble written all over him; Dave, who is raised by his single mother, is a boy of low-confidence who just tags along with his two companions trying to win them over with a charm that he does not have.

And then, all of a sudden, an ominous car smelling of apples stops in front of them with a Big Wolf and a Greasy Wolf in it posing as police officers. The former judges Dave as the easiest picking of the three, and intimidates him into hopping into the car. Dave gets into the car, and their lives change irrevocably forever. Though Dave manages to escape from the wolves four days later to the surprise and happiness of the community, their friendship of convenience gets broken right down the middle because somewhere deep down they all get to realise that this is not just one memory that they will have to carry for the rest of their lives, but that this episode will in more ways than one literally as well as figuratively shape their futures as to who they will be and what they will make out of their lives.

Flash-forward to present-day Boston, twenty-five years after that fateful day, and another not-so-fine day beckons the lives of the three, now grown-ups but still essentially boys in their own ways. Sean, not unexpectedly, has made the best out of life. He is a homicide detective employed with the Massachusetts State Police department, and is known for his ability to close cases with tremendous speed and regularity. But his professional success is counterbalanced with his broken personal life. His wife, the only woman he has and is capable of being in love, has left him, and consequently he took to alcohol and an increasingly destructive lifestyle, which he is on the path of recovering from, albeit with futility written all over his endeavour. Jimmy, true to his love for trouble and dare as a kid, never completed school, became a crook by his early teens and a notorious gang-leader by his late teens. He ended up serving time in a penitentiary, which contrary to what usually happens, reformed him, and he is now a family man with a loving wife and three doting kids – two from his present wife, and one, Katie, from his first wife who died when he was in prison. He thus leads a good life, running an honest shop, but with the potential for crime and violence very much running through his veins, searching for a reason to explode at the first given opportunity. Dave, as was pronounced ‘damaged goods’ by a person of the neighbourhood amid celebrations the day he returned home twenty-five years earlier, is a seemingly normal guy but with deep scars and unhealed wounds in him. He has a homely wife and a fine kid; however he is a severely lonely, irreversibly destroyed man, and harbours secrets and masked dualities that have the ability to shatter him and his family. And when the three were living their own respective definitions of life, trying to bury their personal sins and memories in their own personal ways, a ravaging tragedy occurs in the form of the young and beautiful Katie’s gruesome murder. And that sets the three off, as a violent repercussion of the event, on a collision course from which none will return unscathed, i.e. if they at all manage to return alive from the chain of events set in motion in the first place.

Thus, quite evidently, Mystic River is not a light read by any stretch of imagination. It is a modern-day variation of a Shakespearean tragedy – a tale of lost innocence, broken friendships, ill-fated loves, bleak memories, trampled dreams, dark secrets, misplaced loyalties, self-destructive deeds and brutal retributions. Plot has taken a secondary roll as pages after pages have been devoted to bring out the three exceedingly complex, deeply flawed, intensely fallible and yet profoundly believable men in all their nuances, shades and layers. The characters, to reiterate a point made earlier in this review, have been delineated as such frighteningly real people that they will remain with the readers for a long time. And, in keeping with the characters, Boston has been painted in rich strokes as a city of ‘Sad Eyed Sinatras’ – a city that is as alive, as unique and as three-dimensional as Raymond Chandler’s cold and lovelorn 30’s Los Angeles, and Samaresh Majumdar’s turbulent yet poignant 70’s Calcutta, in The Big Sleep and Kaalbela (The Odd Hours), respectively – two unforgettable books, masterpieces rather, that I have happened to have briefly spoken about at this site.

Yet, despite the gut-wrenching tale, it also happens to be a terrific page-turner and a compelling read. This immensely moody, haunting and emotionally draining book is evidence enough that Lehane has a natural and an uncanny ability to grip his readers through the creation of dense imagery, fine suspense build-up and stupendous character development. The novel has a fractured narrative that swings frequently from the present to the past – a crucial element that Lehance has made use of in defining the numerous alter-egos of his characters as well as in his successful attempt to go far beyond the generic confines of the police procedural and murder mystery plot. Nevertheless, the author has ensured that the non-linear unfolding of the events through heavy usage of flashbacks or the detailed expositions of what transpires in the nooks and corners of his characters’ minds, never act as sources of deterrence in the pacing and accessibility for the not-so-literary-minded readers. Thus what we have here is a breezy-fast, powerhouse book that does not just knock the readers down with its complex character study and crushing denouement, but in its own way, also manage to lift them up by providing the kind of satisfaction one gets after reading books that keep playing in one’s mind for a long after the final page has been read.

As an aside, Dennis Lehane’s books seem to be tailor-made for good cinematic adaptations, though if this book were to be taken as an indication, it should not have been logically so. Mystic River was made into the much acclaimed and Oscar winning movie of the same name by Clint Eastwood. His Gone Baby Gone, at the hands of actor-turned-filmmaker Ben Addleck turned out to be a surprisingly engaging movie. And his Shutter Island, adapted by the legendary Martin Scorsese very recently, has opened to a lot of appreciation from the critics and viewers alike.

“Mystic River is a deeply felt, beautifully composed novel by a gifted young writer… who is helping to set the standards by which 21st-century crime fiction will ultimately be judged.” - Barnes & Noble Review