Fiction: A young German soldier returns from the horrors of the Great War. His survival owes as much to his silence as it does to his immense physical strength.
Fidelis, by character as by name, is also motivated by loyalty and a grim sense of honour. He marries the pregnant fiancée of Johannes, his dead friend who had saved him, and whose own death at the front Fidelis had witnessed. He then sets off to the New World with hope and a suitcase packed with "his father's miraculous smoked sausage".
For her eighth novel, Louise Erdrich draws on a common theme, that of the European who looks to the US for a new life. As have so many, in history and in fiction, Fidelis rises from poverty to relative prosperity. Yet he never changes. Erdrich ensures that her hero, for hero he is, remains something of an enigma. Even after he learns English, Fidelis never wastes words and continues to work with an energy bordering on the manic.
Into this life of work come his wife, Eva, and her son, the child of the dead Johannes, who arrive in the small town of Argus, North Dakota, a place well-rooted in Erdrich's fiction. Soon, Fidelis has made a place for himself with his butchering skills as well as his fine singing voice. The narrative sustains a texture of the Old World living within the New. Eva then gives birth to three further sons. The Waldvogel family is established.
This is a big novel, teeming with life, vivid characters, violent incident and Erdrich's trademark, quasi-religious flashes of the surreal. Everything is described. Erdrich has always possessed a physical sense of the world. People and things acquire a three- dimensional presence. On the publication of her second novel, Love Medicine, in 1985, she became about as famous as it is possible for an emerging literary writer to be in the age of airport fiction.
She writes very well, with exuberant urgency, warmth, generosity and a fluid, sensuous lyricism. In her previous work, Erdrich has also brought a fresh voice to her natural storytelling gifts - that of the native American. An entire world, a culture, history and folklore is superimposed on small-town US life. With The Beet Queen (1987), she continued observing some of the characters from Love Medicine. A fictional world was born.
Tracks followed in 1988: it is an ambitious, sophisticated work in which the monumental message, that of the dispossession of the native American, overpowers the narrative. "We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall," she writes.
Although intended as part of a cycle, its bizarre elegiac beauty makes Tracks stand alone from Erdrich's work and, as such, it is almost problematic. Its very austerity sets it at a remove from all her other books. For all her frequent wild humour, she is essentially a storyteller with serious intent, but Tracks is a polemic which carries this seriousness to a different, almost uneasy level.
There have been several other books, including The Bingo Palace (1994), The Antelope Wife (1998) and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2002). For all the appeal of her open- ended fiction, there has always been the sensation of having wandered into a Chagall exhibition on tour in the US mid-west.
If the late Angela Carter has a magic realist literary heir, it is most probably Erdrich. Yet the beguiling magic and ghostly images had begun to be not always quite enough, a lack of direction had begun to infiltrate, with The Beet Queen remaining her finest, most cohesively crafted novel. Her art appears to have lost some of its freshness, and the narrative excesses have come to rely too heavily upon her obvious storytelling flair - but Erdrich's readers will delight in this sprawling domestic saga of sorts.
While her German-American roots have always been apparent, Erdrich's native American heritage has tended to dominate. In her new book, though, her German legacy is centre stage, through the experiences of Fidelis and Eva, who - from a not very interesting first glimpse as the pregnant girlfriend of a dead soldier buddy - becomes quite a character, a portrait of a traditional housewife.
There are also elements of another fine US writer, Alice Hoffman, at work in Erdrich's wider vision of life and love, particularly the strange coincidences and mistakes that make up an individual's story.
Running parallel with the account of the passive Fidelis, the stoic master butcher who waits - and also sings with his singing club - are the fast-moving antics of Delphine Watzka, a young woman with little to her name except energy, a fast practical mind, a drunk for a father and tremendous willingness to help. At no time does she become a sickly do-gooder, as Erdrich has supplied her heroine with a sharp tongue. She also has a glamorous lover, Cyprian, who turns out to be a better best friend than husband.
Dangerously early in the novel, Erdrich - who has never been shy of fantastically obvious plot shifts - describes the sexual tension that occurs the first time Fidelis sets eyes on Delphine, who almost immediately became Eva's intimate. It would be a shame if any reader decides at this point to abandon the novel. As someone who has ridden the ups and downs of Erdrich's career, I would say this is a hugely readable yarn that far surpasses similar tales by Isabel Allende.
Much of its success lies in the variety of the characters, most of whom are odd without being caricatures. Delphine's father, Roy, is an eloquent drunk, while Cyprian, a homosexual acrobat, is the sole native American character in the book. He is a study in displacement caused by sexuality, war and mixed race. Delphine - in her dreams, her frustrations and her losses - is fully believable.
Also memorable is the persistent Sheriff Hock, who is determined to woo Delphine's pal, Clarisse. Hock stalks the girl throughout and puts his love on the line to her: "Take a look at yourself. You're pretty as an angel, but you're an undertaker. Men are scared off by your line of work. Not me." There is no way out, so she kills him.
Then there is Fidelis himself, an unsung hero whose desperation in the face of Eva's dying elicits some of the finest and most understated writing in the book.
The humour is black, often grotesque. But for all the comedy, this is sad novel, stalked by war, its legacy, ghosts, notions of escape, and an awareness of death: "The snow fell as a bitter powder all December, light dustings that did not soften the Earth's iron."
No one has it easy - Erdrich ensures that her characters suffer and her readers wince. Her relentless imagination is at full strength throughout. Wonderful set pieces, some sharp dialogue and sufficient rich images collude to allow a narrative that is determinedly earthbound to soar and glide like a leaf on the wind.
The Master Butchers Singing Club By Louise Erdrich Flamingo, 389pp, £10.99
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
