Dark knights

Two honorable men find themselves fighting the law, with Boston as backdrop, in spectacle-laden The Given Day

The Given Day
By Dennis Lehane
Morrow, 704 pp., $27.95

Seven years ago Boston's Dennis Lehane broke out from a chain of hard-boiled thrillers about a pair of police detectives to write "Mystic River." Still a thriller, still hard-boiled - though with a darkling and part-melted center - it goes on to portray a blue-collar neighborhood undone by the abduction and killing of one of its children.

Now Lehane has broken out much farther. "The Given Day" is a vast historical novel, set at the end of World War I. It conjures up the glory days, and early portents of decline, of the Boston Irish hegemony that grew up to resist the city's Brahmin rule and came to displace it.

Other novels, notably Edwin O'Connor's "The Last Hurrah," have done this mainly through politics. Lehane uses the Boston police of the early 1900s. He writes of a political and cultural establishment, ruled by feudal loyalties and threatened by the signs of change that were beginning to stir elsewhere in American life. (The police department is still Irish-dominated but no longer much of an establishment.)

"The Given Day" threads through four disasters, all of which took place in and around 1919. They are the lethal influenza pandemic; a molasses plant explosion that released tons of the stuff, with 21 dead and the downtown stuck fast for months; a May Day leftist protest put down by a brutal police rampage; and the Boston police strike, giving rise to massive looting and eight or nine deaths.

Lehane writes them as set-pieces, but except for the brilliantly haunting influenza scenes, they are marked more by length than impact. Like the special effects in action movies, they are overloaded with spectacular details that bring things paradoxically to a stop by their high-velocity bashes and crashes.

What they also bring to a stop - though only for a while - are the novel's finely thought-out personal, familial, and political confrontations. These convey an era's upheaval much more strongly than the surging crowds, explosions, shootings, smashed-up streets, and outsize villains.

The seemingly quieter but more dramatic story is woven from many strands. The central one belongs to an Irish-American prince, the policeman son of one of the department's most powerfully connected captains, and destined to rise high in its close-guarded hierarchy. After a Job's portion of batterings, many hesitations, and a few fearful retreats, he renounces his coronet and opens himself to the chaos of a wider, changing world.

Danny Coughlin's bumpy journey takes him from unquestioning loyalty to the police, to disillusion, to a break with his comrades and his family. (Thomas, his father, hard but with ineradicable tenderness for a son he regards as a traitor, provides one of the novel's wisest, tightest portraits.) The first twinge comes with his assignment to spy on the incipient police union, and to infiltrate leftist groups. The Red Scare is on, and, for the big cops, the union efforts, the radicals, and the era's anarchist terrorism are all one.

Danny finds himself sympathizing with his fellow policemen's grievances (a 70- to 80-hour week, miserable pay, broken promises of improvement). He becomes a leader and, after more broken promises - the negotiations with the city are written with gripping astuteness - a strike leader.

After a day or two of street chaos, the National Guard is called out, replacement police are hired, and the strikers, who make up 80 percent of the force, are fired. Danny, almost killed in an anarchist shooting, heads to New York: maimed, jobless, but somehow hopeful (though why?). Babe Ruth, whose story weaves lightly through to no apparent purpose or advantage, is on the same train. Perhaps Lehane intends a swipe at Boston's failure to retain its heroes.

Danny is accompanied by Nora, an emotionally battered Irish woman who is an old love and a fellow escapee from the harshly narrow Coughlin world. Her perils and prevailings, too involved to tell here, have their dramatic moments, but they recline on a softish bed of melodrama.

There is a second main story in "The Given Day," one that starts far removed from Danny's and, by the end, converges with it. For the most part, the long journey of Luther Laurence, a black man who flees a mob involvement in Oklahoma to take refuge in Boston, makes the richer of the novel's two extended narratives. Among its many stunningly managed scenes are a lethal confrontation with Luther's Oklahoma crime boss, and another with Lieutenant Eddie McKenna. He is the murderous, supremely evil head of Boston's police intelligence unit, bent upon using a cache of weapons to frame the NAACP chapter where Luther works.

Lehane largely succeeds in making Luther a genuinely moving exemplar of hope and prowess, armed as he is with nobility and sometimes a gun. There are facile moments, but, for a reader, to want to believe can be most of the way to believing.

"The Given Day," along with its virtues, suffers badly from overwriting and, above all, overplotting. (Outside every thin man is a fat man struggling - and managing, in this case - to get in.) Like a pianist, writers need to play the rests. They must know not to write.

At one moment Lehane is both powerful and subtle; at the next he gives way to "pow!" compulsions, and a weakness for wind-up jolts of good and evil. Ketchup splashes into a dish of whose quality - or possibly salability, or conceivably movie interest - the author may harbor a doubt or two.

Richard Eder reviews books for several publications.