Blown by the Same Wind (A Cold Storage Novel)
John Straley writes really good novels with a crime inside. This one, Blown by the Same Wind, is the fourth book in his Cold Storage series, and it’s a stunner. Straley weaves his wonderful, idiosyncratic characters into a twisty plot and a beautifully rendered setting: coastal Alaska in 1968. Moral and mystical complexities center around a finely rendered, deeply personal portrait of the great Catholic author and theologian Thomas Merton (1915-1968), who was also a Trappist monk and a social activist. Extraordinary as it may seem, the real Merton (also known as Brother Louis) did visit Alaska in 1968, under the surveillance of the FBI because of his peace and race activities. But beyond that, the novel is fiction, although the attentive reader will learn something about how to manage a floatplane and a boat in Alaska weather, among other solid pieces of information. Straley’s detailed picture of the summer of 1968 is utterly convincing.
Cold Storage is a tiny fictional village containing a cannery and a set of Alaskan eccentrics who’ve become mostly middle-aged characters since the series began—with the fabulous exception of a flower child called Venus Myrtle and Glen, a Vietnam veteran with PTSD. Straley does a masterly job of differentiating his characters, often moving from one point of view to another. These characters include an outstanding dog named Dot and two loony racists obsessed with John Wilkes Booth, whose mummy has supposedly ended up in Cold Storage (really), and who are both evil and funny. There are also a lot of bears. Alaska is itself a character, achingly beautiful and deadly. The atmosphere starts out serene and homey but soon darkens as the plot begins to spin. Before long, blood will spill… Bravo!
