Listening to the Dead by George Seaton

[Ulysses]

Listening to the Dead
By George Seaton
Lethe Press, 2017
Four stars

Can a book centered on a grisly double murder be called gentle? George Seaton’s low-key novel is not really a mystery, because the perpetrator is known to the reader fairly early on. The narrative is elegiac in its presentation of the wilderness of Colorado’s mountain ranges as a holy place – a place tainted in this story by evil and violence.

It is a complicated story, more confusing to Seaton’s characters than to the reader, who is helped along by at least partial omniscience. The various plot lines begin to come together by the middle of the book – and then it goes quiet again. That’s when I realized that the point of the book is not the murder, but the three pairs of gay men, all couples, around whom the entire plot is woven. Two of the couples are pawns in a deadly game, and the third is the two old Denver policemen who set about trying to figure out what happened.

This final couple, Jack Dolan and Michael Day, are, strangely enough, the most broken of the three couples. One in his fifties, the other his sixties, they were lovers in younger years, and then broke off their relationship out of fear of discovery and reprisal in a hostile America. The murder itself is a catalyst that brings them back together and gives them a second chance at the happiness they’ve denied themselves.

There is a deeply poignant ”Brokeback Mountain” sort of vibe here, but without the overarching tragedy. It was disconcerting but entirely believable to read of men of my generation so fearful – despite their professional success and self-assurance as police officers – that they couldn’t allow themselves even to dream of personal happiness. As Jack and Mike search for clues to the identities of both the victims and their killers, they listen to the dead (Jack literally and Mike figuratively), and in what they hear they begin to find answers to their own questions.

I was unsettled at the ending, because it didn’t do what I wanted it to do – in terms of the murder. On the other hand, the author does settle some things that satisfied me very much, as an older man who looks for happy endings. Seaton gives Jack and Mike the agency to change their circumstances, and sometimes that’s enough.

[Lloyd]

II love Seaton's work. What you describe as gentle I think is also the worn stoicism that comes from living a long time in a setting where nature is so clearly more powerful than humans. His love of horses, and the Colorado mountains just sings to me, as do the taciturn speech patterns of his protagonists. No big effort to ramp up the reader's emotion with gore and drama, just the quiet, unflinching delivery of facts. So I guess you can tell I'm a fan... Glad you enjoyed this one!