Robert B. Parker's "Double Play": An Audio Book Tour de Force

Double Play, a novel published in 2004
Robert B. Parker
A five CD audio book produced by Phoenix Records and read by Robert Forster (audio book link has sample of Forster's reading)

The combination of the late Robert Parker’s tight prose and Robert Forster’s laconically graceful interpretation has the poetry of a well turned double play. Parker invents one character, WWII veteran Joseph Burke and spins a yarn about a very real Jackie Robinson who breaks the color barrier in major league baseball in 1947.

Ex-Marine Burke, shot up at Guadalcanal, comes back to the states on a hospital ship with a body that can be repaired but an emotional life drained of hope and aspiration by his experience of war. After a short-lived boxing career, he’s taken on as a bodyguard for the 25 year-old spoiled daughter of a New York crime boss. He survives using his wits, strength, and lack of fear of dying.

Burke is let go after too zealously protecting Lauren and is recommended to Branch Rickey, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Rickey hires him to be bodyguard for Jackie Robinson, whose presence on the baseball team will certainly provoke antagonism, and perhaps worse, amongst racist fans.

The conversations between Robinson and Burke, who keep each other at arm’s length as they travel and room together, deepen as the season progresses. The surprise of the book is Parker’s ability to have his finger on the pulse of race relations in the late 1940s and bring it to the surface in the dialogue between Robinson and Burke, two tough men who at first don’t seem to share much else than a desire to succeed at the job they’re paid for. 

Burke is the center of a matrix involving a historic moment in American history and a world filled with gang bosses who fight over turf and nurse dangerous beefs with each other. The scrapes with cops, criminals, gang bosses, a headstrong woman – all are imaginatively overlaid with the day-to-day drama of Robinson’s first year in the big leagues.

Robert B. Parker was 15 years old in 1947. You can visualize him hunched over a radio to hear history unfold. If you remember the way you cherish memories from your childhood, the kind that transport you with emotional clarity when you recall them, you have an idea of the well from which he drew to write this story. He seamlessly inserts play by plays of hits, errors, pitchers, and batters through Burke's eyes as he sits near the dugout, peanuts in one hand and his .45 tucked in his belt. Forster’s reading is elegant. He channels Burke as perfectly as Parker has drawn him.

Parker usually paints the inner life of his characters with a broad brush but here, perhaps thinking about the story from his teenage obsession with Jackie Robinson and what he endured in 1947, Parker takes the time to penetrate Burke’s incapacity to access his feelings and to illuminate his upbringing (perhaps reminiscent of Parker's) that instilled his egalitarian values.

The beautifully imagined intersection of the lives of Burke, Robinson, and Lauren Roach paints a picture of three characters with universal appeal and an era now remembered in sepia tones. The enormous power of Parker’s prose and Forster’s reading drives this story right out of the park.

Comments

[Gerard McMahon]

Very nice, it is a touching book...

[Susan McCulloch]

Thanks for the review of the Parker book. It sounds like a perfect book for Alan.

[Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. aka pt at large]

The first link in the story has an audio of Forster reading. Give it a click to get a sense of it. Listening to the book, with Forster's voice and pacing, is an entirely different experience from reading on your own. How about letting me know if Alan tries it.
Thanks for the response!

[Susan Sullivan]

Just finishing a Parker...one I read before but he is my go to man for light, easy story telling...