James Lee Burke: White Doves at Morning

Reviewed by MICHAEL LARSEN

James Lee Burke is best known for his detective novels. However, while researching information on America's deep South, he realised two of his ancestors had played important roles in the American Civil War and that's how White Doves At Morning was born. Burke combines his hard-hitting style with a clear-eyed view of a violent chapter in American history (taken largely from the Confederate side), and produces a historical novel that informs, intrigues, shocks and satisfies in equal measure.

Willie Burke is a playful Irishman whose pragmatism has a romantic core, and the novel revolves around his part in the conflict. The supporting cast includes his long-time friend Robert Perry (the other Burke ancestor), from wealthy slave-owning stock, who yet questions the basis for battle. There's Miss Abigail, a Northern idealist who ferries slaves to freedom in the dark of night and Ira Jamison, the plantation owner who rises above his filthy trade to appear, to himself anyway, an altruistic do-gooder. Flower Jamison is Ira's half-caste child, who takes the phrase "to rise above her station" to the nth degree.

Burke's concerns are the casualties of conscience that all conflicts inflict upon those involved and those on its edges.

The really ugly characters - Captain Rufus Atkins, redneck Todd McCain and the various thieves, rapists and "jayhawkers" that pepper the text - add life to a novel already rich with it and play their own part in challenging the ethics of all involved.

"Willie wondered why those who wrote about war concentrated on battles and seldom studied the detritus it created: livestock with their throats slit, the swollen carcasses of horses gutshot by grape or canister, a burning houseboat spinning around a bend at night, with no one aboard, a naked lunatic drifting by on a raft, a cowbell hanging from his throat, a Bible open in his hand, yelling a sermon at the soldiers on the shore."

This novel embraces some big themes - slavery, the ludicrous nature of war, religion's place in such a conflict, loyalty, conscience - but Burke neither gets bogged down in unnecessary detail nor does he pass over the important.

And while the book has a wonderful historical flavour, the questions it raises are just as relevant to Iraq, Palestine or Northern Ireland today, as to the Union versus the Rebs 150 years ago.

Orion, $35

* Michael Larsen is an Auckland freelance writer.