Wayfaring Stranger

Burke breaks new ground in his latest book, covering the Second World War, the Holocaust and the oil boom in Texas and Louisiana in the immediate postwar years with a couple of visits to Hollywood thrown in. But he remains true to his explorations of the greed, violence and conscienceless evil that lie at the heart of American privilege. And the good man driven to violence to protect his family from these threats.

The narrator is a new member of the Holland family familiar to Burke's readers. This time it's Weldon Holland, a decorated veteran of the Second World War who found his wife to be, Rosita Lowenstein, alive at the bottom of a pile of corpses in a Nazi extermination camp. His father mysteriously disappeared when he was young and he was raised by his mother and his ex-Texas Ranger grandfather, a formidable old man who put John Wesley Hardin behind bars. Weldon himself put a bullet through the window of Bonnie and Clyde's car, an incident which becomes almost mythologized in later chapters and which is the seminal event of his young life.

Weldon returns from the war with his beautiful wife and almost immediately becomes a success in partnership with his old soldier buddy Herschel Pine (who married Linda Gail, his childhood sweetheart, a beautiful young woman who would nearly destroy him) who has developed a revolutionary new pipeline welding technique based on Nazi technology. The ghosts of the Nazis haunt every chapter and their resemblance to the privileged wealthy elite of the Texas old patch who feel they can destroy and violate whatever they wish without fear or consequence is obvious. Their efforts to destroy and ruin Weldon and his wife know no bounds and lead Weldon to ever more desperate attempts to avoid their viciousness. Roy Wiseheart, the son of the worst of these men and a flawed war hero himself is a constant presence as he seeks to distance himself from his father and find ultimate redemption.

Burke is the poet of the banality of evil. This time it's not the evil of the overt psychopath or ruthless criminal but the heartless, soulless and apparently guiltless evil of Big Oil and Big Money. One of Burke's best.