Another Given Hit From Lehane

The Given Day By Dennis Lehane

DENNIS Lehane's best selling novels Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone are about to eclipsed by his strongest offering to date, the 700 page The Given Day (Harper Collins), a bracingly sad but ultimately uplifting novel set in 1918 Boston.

It's Lehane's first historical novel - he spent four years writing it - and it's a surefire winner certain to eclipse his previous offerings. The author writes like a man in love with his city and its often painful history, but in particular it's Lehane's tragic and vividly drawn characters that linger in the memory.

The struggle of the workingman for better pay and conditions is most often called idealism by the employer who pays his wages. So it is in The Given Day, which centers around the notorious 1919 Boston police strike, which signaled a major shift in the traditional labor relations of the era, forcing the Boston police commissioner to review their pay and conditions.

The proposed creation of a police union proved a bridge too far for the city fathers, and when the police commissioner refused to allow it, all 1,117 Boston police officers went on strike. What followed next was predictable enough - public strife, riots and widespread looting, with Governor Calvin Coolidge intervening at the last minute to stem the chaos.

Coolidge argued that the police did not have the right to strike against the public safety, and so he brought in the state national guard to restore order to Boston. The strike was broken, permanently, when Coolidge hired replacement police officers, many of which were returning servicemen from World War I, and the former striking officers were refused re-entry into the department.

In Lehane's new novel we see this David versus Goliath tale unfold though the eyes of Danny Coughlin, one of Boston's finest, a man of conscience and principle, which in Lehane's bleak world view means he usually has the farthest to fall.

And fall he does, spectacularly. Working long hours for low pay in harsh conditions, he knows and comes to believe wholeheartedly in the basic justice his fellow policemen are asking for.

But Danny Coughlin is the son of the legendary Captain Thomas Coughlin, and is a nephew of Edward McKenna, one of the most corrupt officers in the Boston Police Department. Before you can say divided loyalties Danny has infiltrated the union radicals to relay their movements to the political powerful forces arranged against them.

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Nster.com