A Civil War-era underworld and its evil genius

August 28, 2005

Canaan's Tongue
By John Wray
Knopf, 352 pp., $25

John Wray is a talented young writer, a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, and his first novel, ''The Right Hand of Sleep," set in Austria after the Second World War, received much acclaim. Then he explored the world of his mother's European forebears; now he turns to the heritage of his American father, whose ancestors fought in the Civil War.

However, Wray is not interested in the usual cast of characters of that great conflict, but rather in the cruel and wily John Murel, an infamous trader in slaves and an accomplished preacher who could sway large audiences and was called ''the Redeemer." Wray got the idea from a passage in Mark Twain's ''Life on the Mississippi," which he uses as an epigraph for Part 1:

''He appears to have been a most dextrous and consummate villain. [His gang] would tell a negro that if he would run away from his master, and allow them to sell him, he should receive a portion of the money paid for him, and that upon his return to them a second time they would send him to a free State, where he would be safe.

''The poor wretches complied with this request, hoping to obtain money and freedom; they would be sold to another master; and run away again, to their employers; sometimes they would be sold in this manner three or four times, until they had realized three or four thousand dollars by them; but as, after this, there was fear of detection, the usual custom was to get rid of the only witness that could be produced against them, which was the negro himself, by murdering him, and throwing his body into the Mississippi."

In his memoir Twain explains the workings of Murel's gang, revealing that ''more than a thousand" confederates were sworn to help support the gang, and tells about a man named Stewart who penetrated its workings and then got a confession from Murel, which was, strangely, ignored. In an interview Wray confirms that ''the operation had grown so profitable, and so pervasive, that when it was finally exposed and the list of its shareholders published, it contained so many respected names (from both the South and the North) that the report was dismissed out of hand."

It is easy to understand why Wray was fascinated by this material and its parallels to what is happening between corporations and government today. And he has created some interesting characters: Thaddeus Morelle, based on John Murel; Virgil Ball, his most pliable protege; Clementine Gilchrist, a whore who initiates the na&#xEF;ve Ball and even bears his child; and others, both white and mulatto, who make up the elite inner circle of this gang.

The book begins in 1863 at Geburah Plantation, La., where the gang is hiding out, and the writing on the first page is superb and filled with urgency:

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