THE PLAGUE OF DOVES.
Louise Erdrich. Harper. 320 pages. $25.95.
To read Louise Erdrich's thunderous new novel is to leap headlong into the fiery imagination of a master storyteller. By turns chilling, funny, astonishing, wild, wrenching and mournful, The Plague of Doves is a rich, colorful mosaic of tales that twist and turn for decades around tiny Pluto, N.D., their secrets whispered through generations of French, German, Indian and mixed-blood families. Did snake handler Marn Wolde murder her preacher husband? Who stole Shamengwa's enchanted violin, the gift from his ancestors that floated gently to him as he stood on the lake's shore? Will the Catholic priest ever convert that old reprobate Seraph Milk?
(Here's one answer: Father Cassidy will never succeed in his campaign, but he will mistakenly deliver a blistering eulogy for the naughty old man as Seraph sits, grinning, in a pew. 'No, it is really not for me to say that Seraph Milk belongs in hell, as I am but a servant of God the Father, the Son and Holy Ghost. . . . I ask this blessing in spite of Seraph Milk's expressed wish that `I keep my trap shut about the pagans.' '')
The Plague of Doves is surely Erdrich's best work since the rollicking The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, packed with intriguing characters and fueled by one terrible act of violence that links everyone in the town, which lies slowly fading on the fringes of an Ojibwe reservation. The mystery unravels with intricate deliberation. In 1911 five family members -- parents, a teenage girl, two young boys -- are found shot to death on their farm, with a squalling baby their only survivor.
''In the heat of things,'' Erdrich writes, 'a group of men ran down a party of Indians and what occurred was a shameful piece of what was called at the time `rough justice.' ''
The only man to escape the lynching was Seraph Milk, known as Mooshum to his granddaughter Evelina, one of the book's thoughtful narrators and in love with bad boy Corwin Peace. ''It wasn't like he was talking to us, though, or even using his usual storytelling voice. . . . This was different. Now it was like he was stuck in some way, on some track, like he couldn't stop the story from forcing its way out.'' Mooshum's recounting haunts Evelina in a surprising and unsettling way, fate being, above all, a trickster.
How and why Mooshum was spared, the baby's fate, the identity of the killer -- the resolutions of all mysteries will be revealed, but Erdrich takes her time, her gorgeous, restrained prose offering feints and hints but also distracting us with other, equally absorbing stories. The Plague of Doves is her 13th novel and, like the others, rooted deeply in the families and histories of the Ojibwe. This land is Erdrich's land, and she mines it with exquisite skill and compassion, making clear that such fertile territory is hers for as long as she wants to inhabit it.
The book opens with Evelina's retelling of Mooshum's tale about the doves that once blanketed the land. ''[O]ne could wring the necks of hundreds or thousands and effect no visible diminishment of their number.'' The narrative flows onward to absorb skinny, teenage Billy Peace who tried to exact revenge on the married white banker in love with his sister, then to his adult conversion into a wild-eyed prophet: ``The stars are the eyes of God and they have been watching us from the beginning of the earth. Do you think there isn't an eye for each of us? Go on and count.''
In Pluto, where descendants of the posse and their victims find their lives irrevocably entangled, everyone has a story. Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, in love with Evelina's aunt, recalls a youthful affair with a white doctor and remembers how the Peace brothers saved his grandfather when they worked on a surveying crew.
''As I look at the town now, dwindling without grace, I think how strange that lives were lost in its formation,'' he muses. He also offers a hard look at the changes in contemporary reservation life: ``Drugs now travel the old fur trade routes, and where once Corwin would have sat high on a bale of buffalo robes or beaver skins and sung traveling songs to the screeching wheels of an oxcart, now he drove a banged-up Chevy Nova with hubcaps missing and back end dragging.''
What becomes of the stories, then, once the town's faint light flickers out? ''The dead of Pluto now outnumber the living,'' an elderly doctor tells us. ''The wind will blow. The devils rise. All who celebrate shall be ghosts.'' Still, the stories linger, like stubborn sparks rising from a fire too bright to burn out.
Connie Ogle is The Miami Herald's book editor.
