World War I weighs on the mountains in evocative tale
by Rob Neufeld
Lambs of Men by Charles Dodd White (Casperian Books, Nov. 1, 2010)
Early reviewers have said that thirty-four-year-old Asheville author Charles Dodd White writes like Charles Frazier, but that comparison pertains only to the beginning of White’s debut novel, “Lambs of Men.”
White’s hero, World War I battlefield leader Hiram Tobin returns home to the North Carolina mountains to recruit more soldiers. Like Inman in “Cold Mountain,” he is haunted by horror and observant of scenes that evoke “The Odyssey.” Also, like Frazier, White forges his words to sound like an Anglo-Saxon in a mead hall.
Describing Hiram’s squad’s actions in the French woods of Belleau, where soldiers scrabbled to outlast German shelling, White notes, “They fell in love with the earth.” As Hiram rides the train home from Parris Island, he observes, “The winter crust lay like silence made visible.”
Then, as both Hiram and his father, Sloane, are drawn into a manhunt for a crazed father, the style changes. Dialogue and storytelling fill the pages.
Sloane tells his favorite family story about the Civil War; and Hiram relates his mother’s story, about her father’s conversion in a cornfield and costly defiance of a bushwhacker. War, and the loss of men, consume White’s novel, which makes its next transitions to a trial and the meditations of a saddened mother.
At 150 pages, “Lambs of Men” provides an elegant structure for a grim psalm.
BOX
Charles Dodd White launches his novel, “Lambs of Men” (Casperian Books, Nov. 1, 2010) at City Lights Bookstore, 3 E. Jackson St., Sylva, 7 p.m., Fri., Nov. 5. Call 586-9499.
