Book Review : Sam Wiebe - Sunset and Jericho (2023)
It's the proper of young people to want to overthrow the government and make the world a better place. When you don't have a place in the world, it's normal to want to tear it all down and start over. But you're eventually offered two choices : either change the world or settle down. Not everyone is equipped to handle this hard truth. Some people think that not getting what they want is immoral. Canadian author Sam Wiebe explores the dark side of this unchecked idealism in his new novel Sunset and Jericho.
In Sunset and Jericho, private investigator Dave Wakeland is tasked with finding the mayor's brother, which our favourite curmudgeon refuses. He subsequently accepts the much less glamorous task of finding a gun stolen from a transit cop (who are patrolling mostly in the subway) by two unlikely-looking criminals and quickly realizes that both cases are connected. A shadowy faction is going after the elite of Vancouver under the guise of popular rebellion, which does not exactly inspire a popular rebellion. On the contrary.
The fine line between class warfare and terrorism
Sam Wiebe was never an ideological writer. The earlier Dave Wakeland novels were realistic and understated and while they tackled real world issues, they emphasized the multifaceted nature of the said issues enough to imply that no lone ranger could possibly come up and save the day by himself. Dave Wakeland solved problems, but he could never sort of the underlying dynamics. Somehow, that made Sam Wiebe the perfect person to write a deeply ideological detective novel like Sunset and Jericho.
The antagonists Wakeland is after in Sunset and Jericho use violence, kidnapping and murder to attempt to override social inequities and "make the world a better place". This is a noble and somewhat unassailable cause on paper, Sam Wiebe's ultrarealistic microscope deconstructs quite ruthlessly this idea of kidnapping and killing the rich to fund community initiatives. By using violent and extreme tactics, the antagonists of Sunset and Jericho take the agency away from people who are otherwise free.
Whether you like the system or not (I'll admit it is very flawed and getting worse every year), we still live in a free society. People are free to make choices for themselves and elect whoever they want to govern them every four years. By arbitrarily taking the sense of security people feel in this system, you unwittingly cast the establishment you hate as the upholders of this security you’ve just taken away. In other words, you can't make ideological choices for other people. They'll think you're an asshole.
This idea is brilliantly broken down in Sunset and Jericho, a novel that could've only been written by a surgically precise and nonjudgmental writer like Sam Wiebe. I thought it was a breath of fresh air in a crime fiction landscape that is increasingly more concerned with being morally satisfying than being ethically challenging and interesting. It's very possible that half of the people who read Sunset and Jericho will fucking hate it, but it will only mean Wiebe has struck a nerve.
The Agony and Ecstasy of Being Dave Wakeland
I've talked before about how uncomfortable it is to read a Dave Wakeland novel. He's not an unpleasant character or anything close, but he's austere and stubborn. He socially progressive, but psychologically conservative and cares more about solving problems and upholding social order than he does genuinely care about himself. That makes him equally frustrating and riveting and Sunset and Jericho is the novel where Sam Wiebe takes his deepest dive yet into his iconic character's psyche.
Shrewdly enough, Wiebe mostly does it through his interaction with other characters. There's a new love interest in Sunset and Jericho and she's anything, but easygoing and she exposes the limits of the lone wolf mentality of Wakeland like itss never been in the earlier novels. He appears more broken and vulnerable than ever, which again is a nice change of pace for a character of this ilk. By challenging the very worldview of his character, Wiebe makes everyone else in his novel come alive too.
Without spoiling anything, let's just say that I’m glad the character is evolving. Because it is clear with every Wakeland novels that Sam Wiebe is also getting better and his craft and the way he handles Dave Wakeland, I wouldn't be necessarily against him walking into the sunset so that Wiebe could go on to do bigger and better things. It was never 100% clear to me before, but it is with Sunset and Jericho, Sam Wiebe has the talent to explore outside the narrow confines of crime fiction. He's good enough.
*
In case it wasn't obvious, Sunset and Jericho was my favorite Wakeland novel so far. It treats a hot button issue with such a cerebral and analytical manner, it brought me completely elsewhere and made it difficult to stop reading. It's the most confident and incisive Wakeland novel to date and anyone could get a kick out of it, whether or not they're familiar with the character. Sunset and Jericho is a 201 kind of novel. You won't find any of your typical thrills in there, but thank you Baphomet, novels like this are still being written.
