Literary Reviews
Appearing
in The Majorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature, Vol. XIX, 2011.
Review
by M. B. McLatchey
Spiritual
Redemption in a World of Crime:
Carolina
Garcia-Aguilera and Barbara Parker
When an eternal judge joins forces
with a Miami-Dade County judge, good guys do in fact finish first. As differently
as they handle the topic of the eternal, crime novelists Carolina
Garcia-Aguilera and Barbara Parker share an optimism regarding its place in the
world of crime. In Garcia-Aguilera’s Lupe
Solano series and in Barbara Parker’s Suspicion
series, when the agents of justice cannot find the retribution that they are
seeking through the legal system, they turn almost reflexively to religious
systems. Like Parker, Garcia-Aguilera
consciously introduces into her crime novels a plot line that encourages her
protagonists to interpret the criminal world through a spiritual lens – in this
case, Catholicism. As Garcia-Aguilera
observed in a recent interview, “I wanted to bring in the Catholic perspective,
which hasn’t been done much in crime fiction” (Florida Crime Writers 51).
But what exactly does Garcia-Aguilera mean by “Catholic perspective” and
what does she think it adds to her work? Unlike Parker’s protagonists, who find
themselves cast onto a mythic stage rich with religious symbolism,
Garcia-Aguilera’s Lupe Solano seems
to import Catholicism in order to boldly demarcate political and cultural
allegiances.
Carolina Garcia-Aguilera:
Indeed,
in Garcia-Aguilera’s work, Catholicism and culture are one. However, because her most formative
experiences with Catholicism and with cultural identity and pride occurred in
Cuba during the repressive regime of Fidel Castro, Garcia-Aguilera’s
Catholicism is deeply anti-Castro. For
decades under the rule of Fidel Castro, Catholic schools and churches were
closed and Christian holidays such as Christmas were prohibited and declared
illegal. Because this was the Cuba that Garcia-Aguilera’s family knew before
immigrating to the United States – and because, under Castro’s reign, Cuba has
persisted with many of these repressions – the tenets of Catholicism in her
work are highly politicized. In her Lupe Solano series, her fictional sleuth
is a Cuban-American Private Investigator, who is smart, sexy, and
rabidly-religious. The primary tenets of Lupe Solano’s Catholicism might read
as follows: love and defend one’s family
at all costs; repay Castro for his sins at every chance.
One of the many examples of
Garcia-Aguilera’s desire to link religion and politics occurs in a climactic
scene in Havana Heat. When Lupe
Solano comes upon a cemetery in Cuba where her ancestors were buried, she
discovers an unexpected blend of the sacred and profane. The knee-jerk
condemnation of Castro that this scene triggers is stunning:
The
Cementerio de Colon haused the mausoleum the belonged
to my family.
My ancestors were buried there….We drove past …. I looked through its enormous
gates at the tombs, chapels, and stone crucifixes lining the rows of the
venerable burial place. I was saddened as, flashing by in a blur,
I saw a sign by the front entrance: tours
cost one dollar American. I couldn’t help but think that Castro was
profiting from my ancestors, stealing from them in their eternal repose. (254)
What
should be a hallowed place reserved for spiritual reflection has devolved into
a carnival-like setting for mercenaries.
The notion that Garcia-Aguilera presents here that Castro has not only
disrespected the faith traditions of Lupe’s ancestors, but that he is “stealing
from them in their eternal repose” points to a central theme in the Lupe Solano series: namely, that in
suppressing their religious freedoms and in rendering insignificant their
cultural artifacts, Castro’s regime has stolen
their history from Catholic Cubans.
Symbolically, he has rendered Cuba’s Catholics as the ugly step-child of
their own motherland. The motifs that
emerge in this cemetery scene – restoring rightful ownership; reviving
ancestral traditions; renovating a neglected landscape – are trumpeted
throughout Garcia-Aguilera’s novels, and they resound when she explores the
link between Cuba and Catholicism.
Since
the setting for the Lupe Solano
series is not Cuba, but the United
States; not Havana, but Miami’s
Little Havana, Catholicism in her novels is the faith of the exile. As such, Catholicism
is summoned in Garcia-Aguilera’s work not for its spiritual benefits, but for
its nostalgic and revolutionary components. In Havana Heat, as she steers her boat toward the shores of Cuba, Lupe
reflects on the meaning of a mother
country. What we hear is a refusal of the Cuban-American to accept the identity
of the step-child:
Cubans
can never escape the influence of the island on their lives, and I was no
different. As I began to make out a faint outline of land – little more than a
smudge in the distance – I felt that patria
that was embedded in my DNA. I could picture the power of Cuba over me as
though I lived inside a bubble, sustained and nourished by the amniotic fluid
that was the essence of the island. (247)
In
the same scene, upon boarding the boat that will take her to her assignment in
Cuba – indeed, when embarking on any
of her assignments – we are told that Lupe Solano “touched the [holy] medals
pinned to [her] brassiere, and made the sign of the cross” (
245). It is an apparently unconscious, reflexive gesture that Lupe does
throughout the Lupe Solano
series. For people of faith, this might
look like an expedient way of invoking divine help. However, for Lupe, who
still hides (and in turn, sustains)
her Catholic faith by pinning it to her underwear, her medals and benedictions
remind us of what Castro’s regime cannot
crush. Since she is a P.I. in Miami, an equally important part of Lupe’s
wardrobe is her Beretta. In scenes that
portend danger, Lupe’s hands brush over her holy medals and her Beretta in such
a choreographed manner that it is as if she assigns equal importance to them:
I
reached into my purse for the white linen handkerchief Aida insisted I carry
because a lady should have one at all times. I carefully placed it on the
rusted doorknob….To my surprise it moved easily. I almost wished it hadn’t… To hell with the handkerchief. I put it back in my purse and took out the
Beretta instead. I double-checked to make sure it was loaded, then pushed the door open a few more inches. I’d begun to
sweat from fear, and I had to blink to clear the perspiration from my eyes….I
touched the three medals of the Virgin pinned to my brassiere, which my sister
Lourdes had given to me to wear at all times for protection, said a brief
prayer to Her, then pushed open the door all the way. (139)
In Havana Heat, the
odyssey-like adventure of smuggling an invaluable tapestry and other original
art out of Cuba that Lupe Solano undertakes has nothing to do with solving a
criminal case and everything to do with resuscitating her ancestral and
Catholic heritage. But what makes it an
irresistible case is the built-in opportunity to square accounts with Castro’s
regime:
The two
situations that had been dropped in my lap – both involving reunifying original
art with their rightful owners – were a departure from the usual criminal and
civil cases in which I specialized. And, because I relishes and reveled in my
Cuban heritage, I felt proud to be associated with any endeavor that
contributed to it…. But now I had to wonder … .How in the hell was I going to
get it out of Havana, right from under the nose of the Cuban police state? If
the Cuban government got wind of the fact that a tapestry was hidden in a
secret basement in the Vedado district, they wouldn’t hesitate to confiscate it
and, probably, sell it to the highest bidder to generate cash. The government
had been dismantling private art collections and selling them abroad for
years….I had to admit, I was tempted to be the one who returned it to the
Mirandas, who at least had a long-standing claim to possessing it – a better
claim, at least, than Fidel’s government. As far as Angel’s plan was concerned,
nothing would make me happier than to know I played a part in outfoxing the
Cuban government. (54)
Smuggling
invaluable art out of Cuba almost certainly falls outside of Lupe’s job
description of Miami P.I. Of the two
motives that ultimately compel her to accept the assignment, the first is raw
resentment. “I had to admit,” Lupe
confesses, as she mulls over the assignment, “the prospect of screwing Fidel
Castro had a certain appeal” (49).
Secondly, there is the more profound and moral motivation of returning
treasure to the rightful owners. For
Lupe to accomplish this goal, she will need to successfully complete several
complex steps, one of which will involve replacing several Cuban masterpieces
with convincing fakes. Significantly,
from the moment Lupe is offered this assignment, thoughts of her deceased
mother haunt her. What Garcia-Aguilera seems to suggest is that even more
compelling than “the prospect of screwing Fidel Castro” is the prospect of going
home again – the motherland inflected through remembrances of Lupe’s deceased mother:
My mind
felt pulled in different directions, but it returned to thoughts of my mother.
Mami loved the sea fiercely, and she often took my sisters and me to the beach.
I very much felt her presence with me there on the deck. Ever since Lucia
Miranda told me about the tapestry [that Miranda left in Cuba when she
emigrated to the U.S., and that she now wants Lupe to smuggle out of Cuba], I
had felt Mami occupying my feelings even more than usual. (53)
However,
as long as Castro continues his choke hold on Cuban Catholics and others
labeled as threats to the state, then a large population of Cuban-Americans can
never go home again. In Havana Heat,
it would seem that if Cuban-Americans cannot go home to their motherland Cuba,
then they will bring the motherland to America – piece by piece. Embedded in Lupe’s difficult assignment of
smuggling out of Cuba a family treasure for a dying grandmother is the harder
challenge of helping her family come to terms with the world of troubling
dualities that the Cuban-American inhabits: Cuban/American; Havana/Little
Havana; original art/fake art; Catholicism/ secularism; God/state.
Garcia-Aguilera tells us that the
tapestry that Lupe smuggles out of Cuba is the completing piece in a 16th-century
series known as “The Hunt of the Unicorn”.
In actuality, the series is currently on display in The Cloisters in New
York City and is believed to have originated in the Southern Netherlands.
According to pagan mythology, the series portrays a lover’s tale where the
unicorn can be subdued only by a virgin maiden, hardly a theme that
Garcia-Aguilera seems to intend given Lupe Solano’s obvious non-virginal status
– a point that we will return to later.
Instead, the Christian interpretation of the series would seem to apply:
in this case, the unicorn symbolizes Christ and the series portrays the Passion
of Christ. As a parallel to the
dangerous boat trip to Cuba that Lupe undertakes, the Passion story woven into
the tapestry serves to remind us of the heroic nature of such journeys.
In
his study of the mythic hero, Hero With a
Thousand Faces, scholar Joseph Campbell identified what he calls the three
seminal points of any heroic adventure: first, the departure into the unknown;
secondly, the literal or figurative death of the hero; and finally, the return
of the newly enlightened hero, a new life after death. Lupe’s boat trip to Cuba and back features all
three of the components of the heroic cycle.
In order to commit herself to her assignment, she must sever her
relationship with her Cuban-American lover, who strongly objects to her trip.
In terms of the archetypal heroic cycle, she leaves behind the familiar and
enters the zone of the unfamiliar:
At
times, Alvaro thought I was a typical knee-jerk, right-wing Cuban exile; in
turn, I thought he excused many of the Cuban government’s actions in the name
of expediency and survival.… Ay, Cuban men. Maybe I should have stuck to
Americans. Everything would have been easier and less complicated. As it was,
nothing between Cubans was every simple. It was a fact that I should have
remembered before I opening my mouth to Alvaro. (Havana Heat 60)
Secondly, she must re-ally herself with an old
friend and warrior-like figure, who will navigate Lupe’s route to Cuba and back
– what Campbell would refer to as the seminal step: embracing a cause larger
than herself, and advancing toward the threshold of her adventure. Significantly, Lupe’s friend Barbara embodies
the qualities of the Santeria tradition’s goddess, Yemaya – a fertility and creation goddess, and
a fierce protector of women. What we see
in Lupe’s reunion with her friend Barbara is a dying of the old Lupe and an
awakening of the warrior within. Suddenly forgotten is the Cuban-American Lupe
who settles for a café con leche and mojito as badges of her Cuban heritage;
newly emerged is the Cuban-Warrior Lupe who smokes cigars, drinks Anejo, and
plans an art heist whose main objective is to return to Cuban-Americans what is
rightfully theirs – to retrieve for them their piece of their motherland – and,
in the process, to “screw Castro”:
Normally I shied away from
physical contact with woman, but with Barbara I broke all the rules. Barbara
Perez was a unique woman, and I loved and respected her in a way that defied
easy explanation. She was fierce, brave, loyal, and she had an unmatched
knowledge of the sea. She was the one person who could help me…Barbara
remembered our last trip to Cuba very well. She remembered the bodies in the
countryside and the blood in the waters of the Florida Straits. Neither of us
could ever possibly forget. “To success,” I said holding out my glass. “To
success,” she repeated, clinking hers to mine. (Havana Heat 120)
The
new Lupe that emerges in the final scenes of Havana Heat will become the Cuban warrior at the center of
Garcia-Aguilera’s subsequent Lupe Solano
novels. No longer self-consciously Cuban-American, no longer the step-child of
American culture nostalgic for her homeland, the new Lupe is at once
assimilated into American culture and boldly Cuban; at once, Catholic-schooled
and fiercely non-doctrinal in her Catholicism.
In
a recent interview, Garcia-Aguilera explained that she named her protagonist,
Lupe, after the Virgin de Guadelupe – but the problem with this given name is
that there is nothing even remotely virginal about Lupe Solano. “Lupe is the
nickname for Guadelupe, as in the Virgin de Guadelupe,” the author explained,
“and because that is a part of her Catholic and Hispanic culture I wanted to
bring it out” (Florida Crime Writers 53). The key to understanding the nature of Lupe
Solano’s Catholicism is to note the ease with which Garcia-Aguilera seems to
secularize religion in the statement above. For Garcia-Aguilera, as for her
protagonist Lupe, “Catholic and Hispanic culture” are simply two sides of the
same national identity: Cuban. To identify Garcia-Aguilera’s Lupe as Catholic in the doctrinal or spiritual
sense would be a stretch indeed. In Bloody Twist, Lupe’s assignment as P.I.
is to confirm that the highest paid escort in Miami Beach is a virgin – a
bizarre enough case, but not half as bizarre as Lupe’s interpretation of
Catholicism. In reviewing the clues that
tipped her off regarding the escort’s duplicitous nature, Lupe mulls over the
escort’s use of the Virgin Mother’s name, Mary:
She told me Madeline’s street
name was Mary, which could have been a play on her middle name, Marie. But a
true practicing Catholic would never mock the Virgin’s name that way. At least,
no Catholic that I know would ever do that. That was another red flag that she
[the escort] was not telling the truth.” (253).
What
Lupe misses here is that “a true practicing Catholic” would not make
prostitution her profession either. What
renders Lupe positively nonplussed is the question of how the escort demands such a high hourly rate while still
maintaining her virginity. In a swift analogy between virginal escort and the
Virgin Mary that would make the Catholic Church cringe, she chalks it all up to
“another improbable claim of virginity” (Bloody
Twist 4). Either Garcia-Aguilera has
consciously decided to mock one of the most profound tenets of the Catholic
Church – in this case, one of the four dogmas in Roman Catholic Mariology – or
else she is simply imparting here a light-hearted and non-doctrinal skepticism
that defines her cultural attachments more than it identifies a spiritual
foundation. Given the Lupe who animates
the latest novel in Garcia-Aguilera’s Lupe
Solano series, one would have to choose the latter of these
interpretations. What Garcia-Aguilera delivers in the new Lupe is a
decidedly-unmarried, archly-Cuban, and persistent P.I. with a variety of sex partners and a
weakness for rich foods and wine that would make the Sisters of our Lady of
Lourdes blush – and that keeps her readers sympathetically engaged. In
Garcia-Aguilera’s mysteries, the spiritual dimension – Catholicism – at once,
marks out her protagonists as the exiles that they are and buoys them with the
hope of national reunification.
Barbara Parker:
By contrast, in Barbara Parker’s
crime thrillers, the spiritual dimension provides an alternative path for her
protagonists to make sense of their lives and to ultimately discover justice
outside of the constraints of secular judicial systems. For Parker’s
protagonists such as Gail Connor or Dan Galindo, as long as they entertain the
company of spiritual mentors and feel their influence, redemption and personal
renewal look possible.
In Barbara Parker's legal thrillers,
good guys finish first, in part thanks to the good detective work of her
protagonists, but primarily thanks to a kind of cosmic and redemptive justice
operating in the natural world. If the police and the courts fail to deliver
justice – which is often – then a kind of Old Testament judge embedded in her
plot lines will deliver it. When bright and intuitive criminal lawyers
somehow misread a trail of clues that should lead them to their man, then
circumstances outside of their
control lead them to him instead. The
laws of nature in Parker’s universe appear wired to deliver justice. And, like the God-force of the Old Testament,
this moral conscience that emerges in her novels is short on mercy and
ultimately delivers what theologians would call a retributive justice. In other words, people get what they deserve.
In an interview shortly before she died of cancer in 2009,
when asked about the possibility of a unifying philosophy in her crime novels,
Parker seemed to surprise even herself with a response that emphasized the
spiritual world rather than the criminal world:
If you
really want to know about my philosophy, you can probably look at the final
scene of Chapter Two of Suspicion of
Innocence, or the very last chapter of
Blood Relations…. I am not particularly religious, but both of these scenes
involve older men, who are spiritual guides. One is a priest, the other a Torah
scribe. Come to think of it, the protagonist of Criminal Justice, Dan Galindo, undergoes three (a significant
number in the Christian church) instances of immersion and revelation. And in
the chapter of Suspicion of Vengeance,
in which Gail’s client is executed, take a look at the symbols of renewal and
rebirth, especially in the last few paragraphs. Interesting.
I’ll have to think about this. (Florida Crime Writers 159)
Even
beyond Parker’s specific references, the contest between spiritual guide and
secular guide seems to be the very contest that drives her narratives. Inevitably, Parker’s protagonists find
themselves having to face the hard challenge of choosing between systems of
moral justice and systems of legal justice – and, in turn, examining the
difference between the two. In Parker’s legal
thrillers, trials are aborted because of the “Double Jeopardy” rule, material
evidence is ignored because of police sloppiness and mishandled Miranda rights,
and rapists and embezzlers escape sentencing and carry on unsanctioned, while
the would-be guardians of the law – criminal prosecutors, defense attorneys,
and P.I.’s – suffer professional hardships and personal losses that rival those
of Job from the Old Testament. Parker’s
protagonists – characters such as the career-minded attorney, Gail Connor in
the Suspicion series; former federal
prosecutor, Dan Galindo in Criminal
Justice; and world-worn, criminal prosecutor, Sam Hagan in Blood Relations – all struggle with the
same thorny concept: namely, they work in
a justice system that, because of its inherent nature, cannot deliver justice. Reflecting
on the corruption inherent in man-made systems such as the U.S. judicial
system, Hagan’s wife sourly advises him, “You’re stuck in a justice system that
has no connection to justice, only to expediency, or to whoever has the most
money or power” (Blood Relations 49).
Inevitably, to one degree or another, Parker’s protagonists arrive at the same
question: what can a religious system do
for us that our legal system cannot?
For Parker, this will become a
question inflected through the professional or personal struggles of her most
upstanding citizens. In Blood Relations, and to a varying degree
in all of her novels, the broken and imperfect characters marched before us for
our scrutiny are not the corrupt and the criminal element
of society, but the guardians of the law. In Blood
Relations, our subject is not the real estate mogul, who rapes and
sodomizes a teenager in a Miami club;
not the male fashion model who parlays his celebrity status into a license to
sexually exploit aspiring young male models; nor is it the fashion photographer,
who – lacking a moral core – can produce nothing more in her photos than one
American cliché after another. Instead, our
subject is the forsaken and broken character presented in the law-abiding
protagonist and – as if marked out for their very association with him – the
members of his immediate family: a desperately lonely teenage daughter and a
wife immobilized by grief after the tragic death of their son. All of this is
because, in Parker’s universe, the criminal world is simply the foreground to a
more mythic world where questions of loyalty, love, and personal responsibility
will be examined in the protagonist’s quest for legal justice. As Parker
explains it:
There
are generally two basic plot lines unfolding simultaneously in a mystery. First, the crime. Who did it and why, and how does the bad
guy get his (or her) just deserts in the end? Second, the
hero’s journey. (I’m stealing that phrase from Joseph Campbell.) The
hero is on a quest to (a) help a friend; (b) save himself; or (c) save or
understand the society in which the action takes place; or (d) any combination
of the above. The two major plot lines are the wheels that carry the story.
They move forward at the same speed. They both propel the plot (quickly, we
hope). They are metaphorically similar. They must work together so that neither
the solving of the crime nor the resolution of the hero’s journey can happen
without the other. (Florida Crime Writers
155)
In
Blood Relations, a twist of events in
the criminal world leads us back to the mythic world – and, in turn, returns us
to the philosophical debate regarding forms of justice that permeates Parker’s
fiction. When Sam Hagan, head of major crimes for Dade County, discovers that
the murder victim whose case he has been assigned to is a gay model that had lured
Hagan’s son into a secret life of homosexuality and drugs, he offers up at once
the despair of a grieving father and the righteousness of a criminal
prosecutor. Reflecting on the forms of justice that might be delivered to the
man who murdered the gay model (the model, who in Hagan’s mind metaphorically
“murdered” his own son) Hagan ruminates, “Do I send him [the murderer] to the
chair or give him a medal?” Confused about what justice looks like now that he
is so intimately involved, now that the criminal world and the mythic world
have collapsed upon one another, Hagan confesses to a colleague, “I don’t know
[what justice is]… And I’m losing the ability to pretend I do” (240).
Throughout the novel, like the chorus
in a Greek tragedy, Hagan’s wife appeals to her husband to reflect not just on
the laws that he had to learn to pass the Florida Bar, but to consider more
universal laws and to reflect on alternative and morally-based systems of
justice. In an effort to justify the apparently accidental death of her
once-vibrant son – a young man in his early-twenties and a rising star in the
world of male fashion models – Dina Hagan engages her husband in a line of
inquiry regarding justice and absolution that will resonate throughout the rest
of the novel:
“Sam, do you suppose we’re being
punished for something?”
“By what?”
“God. Eternity.”
“No.” Sam rested his forehead on
his fists. “I don’t believe in that.”
“Strange thing for a lawyer to
say….The universe has laws, doesn’t it? And laws imply judgment. You know that
well enough. If someone suffers, there
has to be a reason. A system of laws must be rational. If one is punished, the
next question is what is the punishment for?”
(49)
Dina Hagan’s questions fail to interest her
husband for the same reason that absolute truths fail to interest a court of
law. They are simply outside his purview as a man of the law. What she needs is a man of the cloth. And,
Parker will appoint one in due time. In lieu of her prescribed Prozac or her
weekly appointments with her psychiatrist that her husband recommends to help
her cope with the loss of her son, Dina Hagan opts for spiritual healing: a
sacristy in a Greek Orthodox Church.
Answers through prayer rather than through a criminal case log. Wisdom through revelation rather than through a witness’s
testimony. Inspired
knowledge rather than rational deductions. Religious ritual rather
than police protocol. Dina
Hagan’s methods of discovery depart from those of her husband because her
questions are so radically different from his: Why do bad things happen to good
people? Why, if there is a universal order, does evil seem to vanquish goodness
so often? If there is a God that judges us, then when does that judgment come? What
Sam Hagan’s wife challenges her husband to consider is precisely what the Torah
scribe implies at the conclusion of the novel: that redemption cannot be realized through a court room in Miami,
Florida. This is an ideal that only religious
systems and mythologies can hold out to us; and to the extent that redemption
is an ideal, it becomes the Holy Grail of the lives of Parker’s chief
characters.
As
if to offer us a glimpse of the Holy Grail, Parker concludes her protagonist’s
mythic cycle by leaving him in the care of a Torah Scribe. What we glean from
this spiritual guide in the final chapter of Blood Relations is a variation of a message that we have heard
before in Parker’s crime novels: namely, that in releasing ourselves from the
straitjacket of secular laws, we can intuit the existence of universal laws. And,
for Parker, universal laws will always be discovered through spiritual
exercises. In the same way that the Torah scribe releases himself from the
daily modicum of existence when he meditates over the laws of his Torah, we can
release ourselves from our relentless regimen of hopes and unsanctioned
betrayals – and, in turn, regain a sense of optimism, and even redemption, regarding
the human condition. In drawing Sam
Hagan, the non-believer, into the monastic-like exercise of inscribing the
first letter of his deceased son’s name into a parchment, Rabbi Perlstein helps
Hagan to literally create a new memorial to his son – and in effect, to
reconcile their once- troubled relationship:
Finally,
Perlstein straightened up and leaned back in the chair. “Okay, you see how it
goes? [he said, addressing Sam Hagan] I’ve stopped so
the next letter is mem. Like an M. For Matthew, your
son. Now, put your hand on mine. Not so heavy. Lighter. Yes, like that.
We’ll put him here, on this line. (438)
Significantly,
Parker ends her novel, Blood Relations,
by drawing her protagonist into a synagogue – a place, she tells us, that felt
like “another country” where Hagan’s eyes needed “adjusting” (436). It is the same kind of “adjusting” to a new
light that Plato’s Cave Dweller experiences when he exits his cave of material
evidence and false reality:
He
[Hagan] put on the yarmulke that Perlstein handed him, patting it down onto his
hair. “You’ll have to excuse me for not remembering much. I haven’t been in a
synagogue since I was a kid. “I know. You told me. You’re not religious. That’s
all right.” Perlestein led him through a side door. “Come on. I’ll show you
around”. (436)
Hagan’s
unease is the discomfort of the Cave Dweller who suspects that he has been
living a lie by settling for less: shadows on the cave wall as material
evidence of the truth. Simply put, Hagan
sees the light. The sordid details of his deceased son’s life and the scenes of
father-son collisions that have haunted Hagan throughout the novel now fade out
in this new light. In ceremoniously putting on the yarmulke, Hagan puts on the
mind of the Rabbi’s apprentice – and, in turn, discerns the kind of redemption and
reconciliation that can only be found outside
a court of law.
In
Suspicion of Innocence, a Catholic
priest engages attorney Gail Connor in a similar spiritual exercise. In his effort to prepare his eulogy for
Connor’s deceased sister, the priest asks Connor to describe her sister – a simple
question that almost instantly engages Connor in the Catholic rite of Final
Reconciliation. In an effort to come up
with a response, Connor stumbles. Although her childhood memories of her
friendship with her sister are positive, Connor is rendered speechless by a
kind of guilt that the sisters drifted apart during their adult years:
Gail’s
throat felt tight. “I thought sometimes we should start over, you know. For our mother’s sake. But…we never did.” Turning the pages,
he [the priest] found the right place in his book, then
closed it on his thumb. “I think,” he finally said,
“that in our last hour, we are all forgiven.” He looked up smiling at her. “Go
take your place. I shall say Renee Michelle, beloved daughter and sister. It’s
enough.” (52)
By
advising her to “go take your place” the priest effectively initiates Connor as
a participant in the Catholic ritual of Reconciliation. In granting her sister her Final Rite of
Reconciliation – a last confession of one’s sins and omissions, in the Catholic
tradition – the priest indirectly grants Connor the same absolution. Because this appears to be only the second
time in her life that she has participated in a religious ceremony – the
previous time, for her father’s funeral – Connor’s engagement with the
spiritual here is stiff and highly ritualized. Connor joins the other
celebrants in attendance at her sister’s funeral the way any new initiate
might: by finding herself feeling swept up in its ritual aspect. The refrain,
“Hear us, Lord, and have mercy,” resounds and the Ave Maria pours into the room “like light” (53). In contrast to this highly-formalized
engagement in her sister’s funeral ceremony, Gail Connor remembers her deceased
sister, Renee, at her father’s funeral:
When
her father had died, it must have been June because the Poinciana in the park
across the street were in full bloom. Blood-red
blossoms made an arching canopy. Renee had run across the street, legs pumping,
hair streaming out behind her. Irene screamed for her
to stop. But Renee was already in the park, grabbing handfuls of blossoms from
the lowest branch. Ben carried her back, kissed her, then
lifted her up to let the red flowers fall into her father’s casket. At
thirteen, Gail had looked sullenly on, wishing she had been the one to think of
it. (54)
Renee’s
engagement with religious ceremony trumps Gail’s because of its emphasis on the
heart, rather than the head – precisely the disposition for inspired insight. While Gail is the observer, her sister is the
participant. This is a difference that at once makes Gail a better lawyer than
her sister could ever be, and affords her a healthy skepticism regarding
religious ideas. On the other hand, it is a difference that clearly inhibits Gail’s
capacity to engage on a more profound level with religious ideas.
In
Parker’s fiction, religious skepticism can look like a flaw to the extent that
it short-circuits a character’s capacity to fully realize his or her humanity.
Look, for example, at the final scene of Suspicion
of Innocence. As in many of Parker’s
novels, it is not a court of law’s justice that ultimately prevails here, but a
Christian God’s retributive justice. Through a series of dramatic events that
transpired outside of the courtroom,
the criminals and child-molesters have all been summoned and, through one
method or another, killed – hence, delivered their retributive justice. In the
final scene of Suspicion of Innocence,
Gail Connor stands accompanied by her daughter, by a Native American, and by her
new lover, attorney Anthony Quintana at her sister’s graveside in the Memorial
Park Cemetery. What has apparently propelled the narrative up until this moment
has been the effort to vindicate Gail Connor, who has been falsely accused of
killing her sister. But, that accounts
only for what Parker refers to as “the basic plot line – the crime.” On the
mythical level, and in terms of the heroic cycle, Gail Connor has vindicated
herself on another level: by becoming a participant in spiritual ritual, she has
properly buried her sister. This motif of the need to grant one’s loved one a proper
burial has appeared in world mythology for centuries in some of the most
powerful of love stories – the myth of Isis and Osiris, for example, where Isis
travels the earth to find her husband’s body and his murderer, and to
ultimately celebrate their love for one another through a proper burial. In
attendance at these mythical burials are the parties who honor the deceased,
but also in attendance is the concept of justice. Evil has been ousted through
one means or another, and the righteous are properly memorialized. Likewise,
Gail Connor has come full circle in what Parker recognizes as the heroic cycle:
from the novel’s opening scene where her sister’s dead body is discovered
floating in the marshes of the Everglades, to Gail Connor’s fledgling attempt
to participate in religious ritual, to her failed effort to celebrate her love
for her sister, to her capacity to truly memorialize her sister. The glue between Connor and Quintana in this
novel has been Quintana’s trust in Connor’s innocence, while logic and hard
evidence points to her guilt. What Connor discovers in her growing love for
Quintana is exactly what many of Parker’s protagonists come to discover: the
importance of the unseen, as well as the power of faith, trust, and loyalty –
all concepts that make us more fully human, but that do not hold up well in a
court of law.
Whether
the setting is a synagogue, a funeral home, or a suburb of Miami, location
matters to Parker. In the genre of Miami-based crime novels, she excels in
mapping out for us the seedy side of Miami Beach – crime-ridden, urban, paved,
and unnatural. In Blood Relations, as if to underscore the novel’s preoccupation with
the themes of spiritual absence and justice, the Miami nightclub where the
book’s central crime occurs – the rape and sodomizing of a teenage girl – is
appropriately called The Apocalypse. A
gathering place for celebrities and rising stars in Miami’s world of fashion, The Apocalypse is a dance club that used
to be a synagogue, but now recalls the decadence of a Roman bacchanal:
In the
middle of the next block she spotted The Apocalypse, looking pretty tame in
broad daylight. Just another white concrete front with an awning over the door,
except this building used to be a synagogue …. It had curves like Mosaic
tablets at the roof – two curves and a dome with silver paint. She supposed the
congregation had died off, or moved a few miles north, or off the Beach
entirely. (66)
When
synagogues undergo refacing, the spiritual world has clearly been displaced.
Indeed, the dramatic setting for Parker’s crime fiction is often as it is here:
where the “congregation” has “died off” – or at minimum, has been sent into
exile. As a landscape, it parallels the
spiritually-bankrupt character of Parker’s protagonists. In Blood
Relations, Sam Hagan confesses that he “used to be Jewish,” to which a
Rabbi responds, “Used to be. How does a person used to be Jewish? …. What are
you now?” And, when Hagan answers, “I’m not religious,” the Rabbi assures him,
“That can be fixed” ( 275).
Like
the spiritual world, the natural world in Parker’s fiction is a place for the
nostalgic. A subtropical, marshy region that
Miami Beach impinges upon, the natural world beckons Parker’s protagonists like
a kind of Paradise Lost. But nature, in Blood
Relations – like most of the population of Miami in her novels – is fallen.
In Biblical terms, the natural world in Parker’s novels is post-expulsion from
the Garden of Eden. Dina Hagan’s preoccupation with the unwieldiness of her garden,
and the intensity and regularity with which she prunes its flowers and trims
its bottlebrush suggests a kind of yearning for an Edenic
existence:
Fingertips
moving quickly over the damp earth, Dina Hagan scraped together the leaves and
twigs, then tossed them into a brown paper grocery sack. She nudged the piece
of cardboard she’d been kneeling on farther along the walkway. Herringbone
bricks bordered the screened terrace, leading across the thick Bermuda grass to
the redwood gazebo where she had hung her orchids and staghorn fern. She had
planted a low hedge of ixora as a border – a mistake, for the plants were far
too uncontrolled. It would take some effort to trim them back….Of course one
did not have a garden behind a house in the flat, monotonous suburbs southwest
of Miami; one had a backyard. But this was a garden, designed with an eye to
color and shape and to the dry and rainy seasons as well, so that the yellow
tabebuia would flower in one corner while the red bottlebrush stood dormant in
another. (36)
Nature
– like human kind – needs constant pruning and correcting. Like humankind, left
to its natural impulses, Hagan’s garden becomes “uncontrolled”.
In
Criminal Justice, Dan Galindo’s three
immersions in the waterways of south Florida exemplify Parker’s willingness to use
the Miami landscape as a canvas for exploring spiritual questions. The degree to which each of these underwater
experiences calls up concepts associated with the Catholic sacrament of baptism
is stunning. In the first instance,
Galindo nearly drowns while diving in an area south of Key Biscayne in a place curiously-enough
called Triumph Reef. If something triumphant occurs here, it would
appear to be the fact that Galindo manages to get to the water’s surface quickly
enough to avoid drowning. However, on
closer examination, Galindo’s near-death underwater drama seems to point to a
much more profound triumph: namely, the spiritual renewal that occurs through
the sacrament of baptism. The Roman
Catechism defines baptism as the sacrament of regeneration by water. Through
baptism, we are symbolically “resuscitated” or brought back from the dead. Upon his initial descent into the ocean,
Galindo entertains ideas of dying, and to the extent that his life passes
before his eyes he does die:
The
thought of not going back up drifted morbidly through his mind. In two weeks he
would turn thirty-five. The number was somehow portentous. The
halfway point. The zenith. And
then what? Between hangovers and periods of generalized funk, when he
dared to reflect on the tattered state of his psyche, Dan slammed up against
the horrifying vision that he would never get beyond that ratty office where he
worked now, with its cheap, cigarette-burned carpet and wheezing air
conditioner. That one day he would be washed up, living on memories of better
days… If he drowned, what difference would it really make? (26)
While
he is submerged, images of his father and son pass before him, and he is filled
with precisely the same kind of joy that one associates with that aspect of
baptism that unites one with Christ’s mystical body. Lastly, if baptism is a sacrament intended to
confer upon us the beginnings of a spiritual life and to initiate a kind of
spiritual metamorphosis – where we shift in our postures from denying God’s
existence to embracing God and the larger human condition – then we can make
good sense of Galindo’s euphoria and renewed optimism after he emerges from the
water and discovers that he has been given back his life:
There
was a splash as he broke through. He dragged in a breath. The rush of oxygen
made him drunk, almost euphoric. He rolled over, wheezing, barely keeping his
face above the surface. The sun blasted his eyes….[Once
onboard the boat] he stood up behind the wheel and let the wind rush into his
lungs. The sky was incredibly, intensely blue, the water a sheet of silver. The
boat danced over it. A gull dipped, then swung away.
Dan laughed out loud. (29)
Galindo’s
subsequent immersion – and once again, his near-drowning – in the Florida
waters occurs as part of a foiled attempt to carry out
a kind of “sting” operation. Again, his
life passes before his eyes, but this time he is buoyed by thoughts of his son
and of newly-restored friendships with old colleagues:
Curling up, losing his strength,
he felt the water break past his mouth. He thought of Josh. And of Elaine,
waiting terrified on the opposite shore, unable to help him. He would rather
have died in the ocean, where the water was clean and free. Not in this ugly,
dark water with a bottom of unyielding rock covered by ooze (410).
The
fact that it is not simply thoughts of loved ones that sustains
Galindo, but also his peculiarly strong preference to die “in the ocean, where
the water was clean and free” seems worth noting as well. In administering baptism, the Catholic Church
requires that the water used be consecrated and not putrid. Galindo’s keen
awareness regarding these conditions suggests that he is not afraid of dying;
he is simply afraid of living without spiritual ceremony. In choosing the conditions for his death,
Galindo identifies the new principles of his life. Thus, we see a renewed and
stronger Galindo than we saw in the first immersion.
In
projecting her protagonists onto these mythical landscapes, Parker allows them
to probe questions about the human condition beyond the purview of the court of
law and far outside the scope of the typical protagonist in the canon of legal
thrillers. Similarly, as long as Garcia-Aguilera’s Lupe Solano keeps her holy
medals pinned to her brassiere and her Berretta within reach, a brand of
justice – a redemption that the legal system cannot deliver – seems within
reach. Ultimately, it is this inflection
of the spiritual through the secular – what Parker calls “these two basic plot
lines unfolding simultaneously” – that distinguishes Parker and Garcia-Aguilera
as both literary artists and mistresses of whodunits.
Works
Cited:
Campbell,
Joseph. The Hero with a
Thousand Faces. New York: Princeton University, 1973.
Garcia-Aguilera,
Carolina.
A Miracle in Paradise.
New York: Morrow, 1999.
_____________________. Bloody Twist. Florida: Miramar, 2010.
_____________________. Havana Heat. New York:
Morrow, 2000.
Parker,
Barbara. “Barbara Parker, Mistress of
Crime Writing” by Claudia Slate. In Florida Crime Writers: 24 Interviews. Ed. Steve Glassman. North Carolina: McFarland, 2008.
_____________________.
Blood Relations.
New York: Dutton, 1996.
_____________________.
Criminal Justice.
New York: Dutton, 1998.
_____________________.
Suspicion of Innocence.
New York: Dutton, 1994.