Don Winslow is not an author one reads for simple entertainment. This is not a fun, light hearted beach read or some picks up and puts down over the course of a week. When a person opens one of Winslow’s books a silent, but binding contract is agreed upon. Don, as master of the universe held within the covers, takes up his role as tour guide, while the reader, whether knowingly or not, has agreed to be transported into the world so eloquently created on the page.
The sites, the sensations, the smells are all spelled out in splendid detail and envelop the reader to the point where they need only to close their eyes to envision themselves as part of the story. They are there with the old man digging for clams along the shore line. They can feel the rough texture of goosebumps along a lover’s arm, raised in anticipation for the delight to come. They can smell the iron hanging heavy in the air, wafting off the blood pooling under their friend’s lifeless body. It is the simple act of opening the cover that makes the compact ironclad and in which Winslow has agreed to be our Homer, our Virgil, guiding us through the magnificent world of his creation.
In order to best summarize City on Fire I must paraphrase Bernard Knox; “Three thousand years have not changed the human condition in this respect. We are still lovers and victims of the will to violence…”
It is this most basic of human conditions that Winslow explores. With a nod to those most famous of epic poems, readers are transported, not to the ancient fields of Troy, rather to the foggy shores of Rhode Island in the mid 1980s. While a lasting and beneficial peace had been forged between the Italian and Irish mobs in Providence, it takes only a spark to start a fire that will burn down everything those involved have known. It just happens that this spark is a ravishing young woman who has no idea of the destruction she will bring.
There will always be great respect and veneration for those who live by moral codes. Traditionally in literature this is most often represented by a medieval knight on an Arthurian quest to save a damsel or right an injustice. It is with this built in understanding of an adherence to a ‘code’ that helps us, maybe not related to, but at least understand members of organized crime. By understanding the motivations of this cast of perfectly imperfect characters, we can sympathize with every impossible decision and the agonizingly disastrous ramifications that come from having to choose between a terrible or an even more terrible option.
City on Fire is a spectacular opening salvo to what is sure to be a sweeping saga that only an author of Winslow’s extraordinary ability can produce. Tension and angst are palpable on every page as we follow an array of shady characters, each fully aware that death could, quite literally, be around the next corner.
Waiting on the next installment of this series, City of Dreams, is going to be absolute torture.
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