The Broken Shore

The Broken Shore

Views and Values Sample SAC Response

* What values does the text endorse?

* What values does it challenge or criticise?

Peter Temple's prize-winning crime novel, The Broken Shore, has a more profound interest in questions of justice and mercy than is usual in this genre. For Joe Cashin, Temple's wounded protagonist, justice is more than a matter of discovering who did the deed. Cashin shows a degree of fellow feeling with the guilty not usual among fictional sleuths. His empathy makes it possible for him to ignore some serious criminals. He recognises that there is a class of wrongdoer toward whom justice should turn a blind eye. However, the novel's judicial restraint has its limits. While it endorses compassion, even toward some criminals, there is a group of malefactor toward which it denies all sympathy.

Cashin's compassion is central to an understanding of his character. It is almost the first of his traits that Temple establishes. Not once, but twice, he has his protagonist decide not to treat Dave Rebb with the suspicion his indigent state would seem to demand. The man is a vagrant. He has no visible means of support. He has no valid identification. When the reader first encounters him, he has just committed trespass. Any of the above would be sufficient to justify Cashin detaining him and at least fingerprinting him. However, Temple legitimises Cashin's apparent professional negligence by stressing Rebb's vulnerability.

Waiting to turn, Cashin watched Rebb go, swag horizontal across his back, sticking out. In the morning mist, he was a stubby-armed cross walking.

Rebb is presented as a Christ figure. Not Christ resurrected, but Christ crucified. The reader is not encouraged to see him as a god; rather to see him as a victim - an obviously impoverished man, harassed by a cranky old woman who would like to have him locked up, though he has done her no harm. His bare, defenceless state, 'a stubby-armed cross walking' is a strong appeal to sympathy. It is probably not accidental that Rebb is later revealed to be a carpenter. Thus the reader not only notes Cashin's compassion toward Rebb, he or she is likely to applaud it. Similarly Cashin is shown ignoring Bern Doogue's petty theft. 'I don't care a lot about wood crime.' Here Cashin displays a sense of family connection that is more important to him than harassing his cousin for a minor offence. Equally, he warns his niece about the danger of drugs rather than endangering her family by having her inform on one of the Piggots who is dealing. Cashin is revealed as a man who makes his own judgements; for whom the law is not an inflexible instrument designed to punish irrespective of circumstance.

Cashin's capacity to suspend judgement is most remarkably demonstrated in his treatment of Erica Bourgoyne. Erica has been revealed as implicated in a brutal and grotesque crime as part of which the victim was strung up and tortured above a stage, being gradually allowed to bleed to death while he presumably pleaded for his life. Though she took no direct part in the murder, she was an accessory to the fact, sitting in prime position in the theatre, the sole audience for whose benefit the slaughter was apparently orchestrated. Cashin alone recognises Erica's part in Arthur Pollard's death. He confronts her with her role and virtually extracts a confession, yet he fails to act on it. Cashin does not charge her because he recognises both her motivation and her pain. She was sexually abused by her stepfather who murdered her mother and then passed her on for more abuse at the hands of Arthur Pollard. Again Temple presents Erica Bourgoyne in a way that emphasises her vulnerability.

'Joe, no, please. I can't.'

Cashin looked at her bowed head, saw the pale skin of her scalp, her hands clenched at her throat... saying something inaudible... saying a mantra.

It is not that Cashin does not recognise the evil in which Erica was involved; it seems more that on balance he judges she has already been punished and further, that she was not solely responsible for her crime. The implication appears to be that the abuse she suffered in some way explains, if not excuses, her latter actions. Cashin offers her no obvious sympathy. His tone remains harsh. 'You're a sick person, Ms Bourgoyne... Sickness has bred sickness.' At base, however, his restraint, his refusal to force her before the law, grows out of his empathy. He identifies and sympathises with her pain.

Cashin knew about mantras. He had said a million mantras, against pain, against thought, against memory, against the night that would not surrender its dark.

However, there is a group of malefactors to whom the novel denies any sympathy. The prime instance of this group is Charles Bourgoyne, paedophile and murderer. Unlike his stepdaughter, Erica, there is no explanation offered for the dire crimes he commits, except wilful evil. There is a cold calculation in the manner in which Charles Bourgoyne's living arrangements are described. They appear to symbolise a man who existed without any human attachment; who lived in order to control his world. His bedroom 'a white chamber: bed, table, simple table lamp, small desk'; his bathroom 'walls and floor of slate, a wooden tub...a shower that was just two stainless-steel perforated plates'. There is an almost surgical precision about the way Charles Bourgoyne lived that seems an embodiment of the man's disregard of human life and the love that gives it value. The man is presented as a monster; a manufacturer of giant, perfectly symmetrical urns, meticulously dated, who incinerates the bodies of his boy victims in the flames of the kiln within which he fires them. Cashin is never in a position to bring Bourgoyne to justice; the man is injured and dying from the start of the novel; however, it is impossible to imagine that he would have done anything other than pass him on for prosecution. Bourgoyne is constructed as a man whose crimes forbid compassion. He kills the vulnerable without compunction and so there is no justification to offer him pity. Though the novel does not endorse his death, any more than it does Arthur Pollard's, it does not regret it.

There are Biblical echoes in much of Temple's language. Cashin concludes the novel by suggesting there is no end to suffering and murder 'on this earth'. This perspective is significant for it suggest that only in another life can