Freedomland by Richard Price
Like many, I got acquainted with Richard Price after watching the TV series'The Wire'. Like many, I got hooked to the authenticity and its realistic approach and scoured around for every writer that supported 'David Simon'in writing it. I knew many names that popped up; one of them was my favorite as well. Except this guy.
'Freedomland' starts with a white woman, entering the emergency room, all bloody and claims she was carjacked by a black man, and almost emits a crucial piece of information, until the case in charge detective Lorenzo Council coaxed it out of her. That her four-year-old son was in the rear seat and has now disappeared. What follows is the all-out search for the missing child and the cacophony of racial tensions erupting sky high as police go bullying though the minority group, which intensifies even more when a black man is arrested out of suspicion. It's usual time conditioned response to which no one bats an eye when the protocols are being followed even the protocol means to charge through the houses of black people disrupting their peace, but when strong suspicion lingers around in your mind about the complainant herself and the whole supposedly carjacking story things get a lot more dubious and edgy, specially for Officer Council.
This is my second Richard Price book that I read now, ‘ The Whites’ was the first. I knew the guy had mastered the street dialogues and the black Amercian lingo and you can see that he has relayed all his mastery in this book to near perfection.
But dialogues won’t fill 700 pages; it’s the description of the grim environment, the desolate state of minds and inescapable world of rage and despair that gets into you. It’s fascinating how the author has got literary equivalent words to describe every expressions and action the characters exhibit. I guess you can see why he is an Oscar-nominated screenplay writer; every sentence creates a vivid description of the mind and the mood.
It’s a fiction book written with great concern and care to be close to its real world situation with a scant hope of betterment some day.
Only a few writers could excel the way Richard Price did, considering the high strung nature of the chosen plot. Writing this book is not everyone’s cup of tea, likewise reading as well.
