Book Review - Blood of Paradise

Author: David Corbett
Publisher: Mortalis
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: March, 2007

EL SALVADOR: America’s great Cold War success story and the model for Iraq’s fledgling democracy—if one ignores the grinding poverty, the corruption, the spiraling crime and a murder rate ranked near the top in the hemisphere. This is where Jude McManus works as an executive protection specialist, currently assigned to an American engineer working for a U.S. consortium.

Ten years before, at age seventeen, he saw his father and two Chicago cop colleagues arrested for robbing street dealers. The family fell apart in the scandal’s wake, his disgraced dad died under suspicious circumstances, and Jude fled Chicago to join the army and forge a new life.

Now the past returns when one of his father’s old pals appears. The man is changed—he’s scarred, regretful, self-aware—and helps Jude revisit the past with a forgiving eye. Then he asks a favor—not for himself, but the third member of his dad’s old crew.

Even though it’s ill-considered, Jude agrees, thinking he can oblige the request and walk away, unlike his father. But he underestimates the players and stakes, and stumbles into a web of Third World corruption and personal betrayal, where everything he values—and everyone he loves—is threatened. And only the greatest of sacrifices will save them.

“I mistook disenchantment for the truth.”

Corbett is better then anyone else at using a simple premise or crime as a platform to spin epic stories of the human experience writ large against a vast canvass. From personal interaction with one another; to interactions with ourselves; to interactions with our own ghosts and demons; to interactions with faith, god and fate; to interactions with the socio/politico machines of our own creation. The beating heart at the center of Blood of Paradise may be a dark one but it’s a real one that we, at times, can recognize as our own.

“He went to sit down as she stood but it took a couple moves to accomplish the change of position. She laughed and kissed his ear and it felt like being forgiven for every stupid, clumsy thing he’d ever done.”

All of the characters are complicated and real and everything that Jude is, or thinks that he is, will be put to the test. The climax of this book is riddled with a series of shattering events that leave the characters forever changed. We, the reader, explicitly understand from early on that events are being put into motion that are buried so completely in layers of deceit that our only option is to bear witness to them. We are relegated to the sidelines in a passive capacity that can, at time be unsettling. Unsettling because we want to know what’s happening if only because we, on some base level, understand the gravity of the unfolding events, if not their specific outcome. Blood of Shadows unfolds with the impending weight of a Greek Tragedy. The climax will be a defining moment for Jude. Either he will define it or it will define him. The path that he finds himself on, seemingly by both fate and free-will, will be one that breaks him down to the very core of his being, leaving him with the ultimate decision of what to make of his life now. The end of the book will not make distinctions for you of right & wrong, good & evil. Instead you will be challenged to think, ponder & make those decisions on your own, if indeed they can be made.

“Why is it so hard for us to conceive that we might not be wanted.”

The politics of Blood of Paradise are worn openly and on its sleeve. But the political opinions and machinations, regardless of ones opinions, do not hinder the story. They instead serve to enhance the background and setting, bringing vividly to life the struggle of the people and the country. A place that is such a hotbed of activity, whether it is El Salvador, Darfur, Somalia, Rwanda, and Belfast, Afghanistan or as inferred in the book Iraq, can often be unrelatable to us in the states. For those of us who don’t know what its like to have armed militants invade our home in the middle of the night kidnapping family members, regardless of age, for doing something simple like speaking out the detailed information really hammers the point home in an effective manner. When such an act takes place we are appropriately shocked by the action, thanks mainly to the care with which Corbett crafts this foreign world. There is also a cynicism present that is born of life-long daily interactions with what can only be described as an openly corrupt system. It’s evident that Corbett put a lot or research into the background of this book and doesn’t blithely make statements. I found myself learning a lot from this book.

“Jude nodded mechanically. He hated politics–sanctimonious paranoids on one side, bleeding-heart incompetents on the other, that’s how he saw it anyway. Sadism-Makes-The-Heart-Grow-Stronger versus All-You-Need-Is-Love: one side pimping freedom, when what they really meant was money, the other side screaming for justice, which translated into screwing the rich. Because what everybody really wanted was the upper hand–smack the crap out of your enemies, humiliate them, make them shut the fuck up. Forget consensus, bag compromise, to hell with logic or even getting much done except waxing indignant and milking they system. Which, as far as he was concerned, meant they were all nuts or crooked or both.”

Extending one of the books themes, that of the microcosm and the macrocosm and their interaction and relation, one of the books most compelling, telling & horrifying passages is one that methodically if not clinically tells of a simple act. Jude is in the states for an extended period of time. During that time away he leaves his truck parked at the airport parking lot. Upon his return he inspects literally every inch of the truck to see if it has been tampered with. He even finishes the inspection by comparing the engine area with a picture that he took before he left to see if everything is in place. He says of the extended procedure “”It’s a funny country, you can make funny enemies.” It’s a tense scene that acts as a metaphor for the larger story.

“The world was an unforgiving place. Maybe happiness was virtue like the nuns had said, but survival required a little venom in the blood. Too much, you turned malicious. Too little, you were a sucker. It was why the cutthroats so often got the upper hand, he thought, because they could disguise themselves as practical, whereas their do-good naysayer’s came across as maudlin and shrill.”

While Blood of Paradise may take its inspiration from the drama Philoctetes written by Sophocles it takes its title from the Wallace Stevens poem Sunday Morning. The central idea of the poem is of a woman who doesn’t attend church one Sunday. She instead chooses the transcendent ordinary pleasures of drinking coffee and eating oranges in her Pajamas. She then spends her time struggling with her loss of belief in the Christian God in a philosophical debate with the authorial voice of the poem. This causes an internal struggle as she examines the two existing ideas of Christianity and paganism. Corbett intends for us to see El Salvador and its struggles with wanting its own measure of independence but also relying so heavily on the United States as the woman in the poem.

The fourth stanza of the poem, from where the title of the book comes, deals specifically with the reconciliation of heaven and earth, or in other words the macrocosm and the microcosm, by the intermingling of blood. But the authorial voice is prescient enough to also ask “Shall our blood fail?” which injects a certain level of doubt into the equation. Nothing is guaranteed and our place in heaven is not assured. In this case El Salvador and the US represent respectively the microcosm and the macrocosm and by inference of the poem we are left to wonder if such a union is a success or a failure.

I honestly don’t want to turn this into a critical examination of the relationship between Sunday Morning and Blood of Paradise so I’ll stop here but there is more to say on the matter; the Jove/Jude relationship for example. Instead by at least nominally addressing it I hope to point out that Corbett does get a bit of mileage out of the comparison. It hopefully also serves to illustrate that Corbett is caHREFully crafting his multi-layered novels and is very aware of how those different layers interact with one another. The depth of the relationship between the two is also just one facet of this story; others are there to be uncovered.

“All of which meant Jude had spent ten years indulging a righteous, bitchy monologue of grievance that now seemed largely beside the point. And now that the Laugh Masters seemed brought down to size, his resentments seemed small as well.”

Regardless of the location Corbett shows an impressive level of immersion in his subjects. His dialogue is so realistic in its use of slang that one immediately thinks of the works of George Pelecanos and David Simon. I say this with a nudge and a wink so hopefully it’s taken in the spirit that its intended but middle aged white guys aren’t normally able to spout off lines like.

“Behind her, the skels were mobbing tall, draped in bling and pimped out in skullies or hats kicked right, Gangster Disciples, some of them throwing signs, stacking the Cobra Stones in contempt, the whole hand business, others crowing out, “All in one,” or just bellowing names–Raymont, Stocker, Girl Dog, D.T. –like everybody was missing the show.”

But it always comes naturally and never feels forced. You’ve heard of the term embedded journalist well Corbett is an embedded novelist.

Book Review – Blood of Paradise

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