The decline and fall of Dixie

White Doves at Morning
by James Lee Burlke
Orion, £12.99, pp280

Spirit of place plays such an important part in James Lee Burke's fiction that Louisiana's bloody Civil War experiences have already cast a melancholy shadow over his work. White Doves at Morning, a moving work of historical fiction, is set between 1837 and 1868 and addresses some of these experiences directly.

Not that this is is a war novel like Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage, which dealt specifically with Civil War men in combat. It's more like Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, operating on the edges of big events, using the turmoil and its aftermath as backdrop for a story that reflects on courage and morality in the face of suffering.

The novel tells the story of Confederate soldiers Willie Burke and his friend, Robert Perry, and two brave women sorely affected by the war. Slave Flower Johnson is the illegitimate daughter of the ruthless Colonel Ira Jamison. She suffers terrible abuse, especially at the hands of Jamison's overseer, Rufus Atkins, but remains determined to better herself through the power of the written word. Her white friend, Abigail Downing, is a Quaker abolitionist and Union sympathiser, roughly courted by Jamison.

There is crude violence, horrible injustice and much suffering in this book. Burke sets against such horrors what he regards as 'the finest and most ennobling virtue in human beings', that is 'a degree of spiritual love and selfless commitment that not even death can undo'.

Such a heartfelt declaration might seem mawkish, but all Burke's work consistently explores how we should behave and what kind of morality we should live by.

He has said this is the book he has wanted to write all his life. Visible memories of the Civil War were all around as he grew up in Louisiana. He still has the bullets (called minié balls) he and his father dug up in the Forties from the chicken coop of an antebellum mansion Union troops had pillaged 80 years before. Jean Lafitte, the slave runner and pirate, used to anchor his ships at the back of Burke's aunt's property on Bayou Teche.

And he still has the war diaries of his ancestors who fought in the conflict. This book is based on his own family experiences: Robert Perry was his great-grandfather and Willie Burke was his great-great uncle. Many of the other characters are based on real historical figures. Some are composites and some names he changed because he didn't think he had the right to use them.

In White Doves At Morning, Burke demonstrates again his bravura skill at memorable characterisation, acute dialogue and wonderfully evocative descriptions. But basing the novel on real events and real people might be both a strength and a weakness. A strength because it gives the prose the rich tang of authenticity. A weakness because being true to the actual course of his ancestors' lives weakens the novel's narrative power.

In real life, many issues never get resolved. But Burke usually writes within a genre where there needs to be resolution of some sort to the issues raised. Here, he sets up some conflicts that simply peter out. Loose ends are true to life but not necessarily truly satisfying for popular fiction.

Maybe he wasn't in the mood for keeping to the rules. Perhaps that's why the first sentence of the novel is a gush of prose 75 words long: 'The black woman's name was Sarie, and when she crashed out the door of the cabin at the end of the slave quarters into the fading winter light, her lower belly bursting with the child that had already broken her water, the aftermath of the ice storm and the sheer desolate sweep of leaf-bare timber and frozen cottage acreage and frost-limned cane stalks seemed to combine and strike her face like a braided whip.'

If you like that, you'll love this book.

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