The White Country (Creed of Violence)
“The White Country feels longer than it is, because of the slow luxury of its questioning pace and its manhunt story haunted by conflicts of loyalty. Set aside time for it.”
A Western. A noir thriller. A work of political despair. The White Country is all of these, but most significantly, it’s a novel of outrage and grief in deeply personal narrative.
John Lourdes has chosen his own name to disguise his past but also to ally himself with the most famous site of miracles. In 1911, he’s become the first “mixed race” agent of the Texas Bureau of Investigation, an organization that’s not quite the Texas Rangers even in fictional form but carries moral authority as well as legal.
And it seems only fair that in launching John Lourdes to pursue the notorious Whiteman, a racist killer, Lourdes’s mentor Wadsworth Burr sends him first to a Hispanic priest. “I enjoy the company of non-religious men,” Father Pinto tells him. “I have come, over time, to put a great deal of faith in them.” A man who believes his life to be limited to earth, not heaven, will work more cleverly to stay alive. “I’m going to ask you, son, to put your earthly life at risk.”
John Lourdes—never referred to in the novel as John, or as Lourdes—has already sacrificed his family of origin, in the struggle for what’s right along the Texas-Mexico border. Adopting Burr as his parent figure echoes his own sense of mission: Burr, a long-time morphine addict with a devoted Chinese lover, made political enemies in Texas by fighting the laws restricting the Chinese there. Now Burr is fighting for the lives and freedom of Mexican Americans, and John Lourdes is his fierce and often violent tool.
Frankly, it’s a fierce and violent time. A masked man called The Whiteman is leading the “open season” on Mexican Americans, imposing brutal and shocking death sentences. John Lourdes is willing to seek out this human devil. But first he’ll penetrate the layers of menace and assault provided by those who find exultation in following this terrible leader.
The depth and evocative language of The White Country speaks to long preparation behind this novel. Page after page, it also speaks to the violent rejection of immigrants at this moment in American politics. There are no answers in this book for how to resolve the conflict of a “nation of immigrants” electing a leader declares powerful war on those who’ve entered the country recently. But the pain and losses in the mission of John Lourdes declare the importance of facing this.
John Lourdes does find other allies—one man, Cager, on the team that Burr has aimed at The Whiteman, plus a Hispanic newspaper printer and his daughter Marisita, as well as other Mexican Americans along the way—but his inner loneliness is never assuaged. In this sense, as in so much musing and a noir atmosphere, John Lourdes resolves into the internally injured priests of Graham Greene and other authors of that period. When Marisita asks him whether the grief of the time will destroy them, he is silent: “With all the hurts in the world, how could he answer? And so, he just held her with only that mobile of small crosses the breeze blew upon like a convene of voices.”
The White Country feels longer than it is, because of the slow luxury of its questioning pace and its manhunt story haunted by conflicts of loyalty. Set aside time for it. Marisita’s self-searching offers a piercing counterpart to that of John Lourdes, and the moments when love can flicker into flame endow the griefs of this story with increasing power.
The author name of Boston Teran is a nom-de-plume, with a long list of previous novels. The White Country presses past the Los Angeles-and-global noir of his 2023 Big Island L.A., by narrowing its focus to the Texas border, with sleight of hand to set the story in 1911. Readers won’t be fooled: This book is addressed to all of us, now.