Louise Erdich -- The Plague of Doves
American Indian Novel by Author of Master Butchers Singing Club
Award winning author, Louise Erdrich was inspired to write The Plague of Doves after reading about a lynching that happened in 1897. An adult and two young American Indians were among a group in a North Dakota jail, awaiting trial for the murder of a white family. 40 men broke into the jail and carried out their own rough justice.
The incident affected Louise Erdrich deeply and eventually found its way into the central theme of a work of fiction, The Plague of Doves. Here three American Indians are lynched for murder and one survives the hanging. The reader knows who did the lynching, but the book seems to search within itself for clues as to how and why one person survived the hanging. Finding out who actually did commit murder seems to be almost unimportant, although it is revealed at the end of the book.
This American Indian novel set in a small town in North Dakota, is richly woven with the stories of the lives of a community, spanning several generations. The characters are vibrant, eccentric and wholly believable, with Louise Erdrich’s keen observation of the human condition being reminiscent of the writing of Patrick Gale. Her style of writing, however, is different to Patrick Gale’s, as it veers towards the magical realism favoured by South American authors such as Isabel Allende.
The reader is caught up in a community coming to terms with the lack of justice served on their forebears. This coming to terms is not as one might hope, through a process of forgiveness, but more through the entwining of lives. The main members of the white lynch mob have children who marry into the town's Indian families until it is impossible to point fingers without looking at a relation in between.
Racial Identities
This mixing of families is something Louise Erdrich understands very well. She was raised in North Dakota of a French Ojibwe mother and a German American father. Not surprisingly, the characters of The Plague of Doves struggle with racial identities. This is combined with issues of sexual orientation and enormously complex family relationships, creating a dramatic and often explosive set of individual portraits.
Marn Wolde and Billy Peace
One of the portraits is of Marn Wolde and her husband Billy Peace, a self ordained evangelical preacher who gathers a devotional community around him to compensate for the family he did not have when he was a child. Marn finds her own brand of comfort in the company of poisonous snakes.
Evelina and Mooshum
Evelina and her grandfather, her Mooshum, are the common threads through the novel although their journeys are markedly uncommon. The Plague of Doves does not deal with the ordinary, but focuses on the extraordinary events that seem to be packed into each of the character’s lives. Evelina explores her sexuality in a psychiatric unit, whilst trying to unravel the mystery of the lynching which haunts her.
This is not an American Indian novel with a beginning, middle and happy ending. It is a deeply insightful tour de force of imaginative storytelling.
The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
HarperCollins Publishers 2008
ISBN 978-0-00-727076-7
£7.99 / US$11
The Plague of Doves
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