"Night fell. The red waters of the swamp grew sinister and sullen. the tall pines lost their slimness and stood in wide blurred blotches all across the way, and a great shadowy bird arose, wheeled and melted, murmuring, into the black-green sky."

So begins this epic novel, first published in 1911 but possibly existing, at least in embryonic form, some years before.

On a personal, and entirely subjective, note, I read that paragraph, immediately fell in love with the book and have not had cause to revise my opinion.

In general, I am not particularly keen on political/politically-motivated novels (whether or not I agree with the writers` viewpoint), though I am prepared to make the odd exception (I thoroughly enjoyed Margery Allingham`s `Tiger in the Smoke`, though the author`s views seem to me to be those of a mad woman !).

This book seems to me to be primarily a work of literature and certainly not a simple work of propoganda (though I`d concede that the author`s viewpoint becomes more and more noticeable towards the end).

The silver fleece of the title is cotton, the setting is the deep south and the underlying themes are race relations, capitalism/labour relations and good old fashioned romance.

The plot is complicated, though not unnecessarily convoluted, and I will not try to summarise it here. The characters are well-depicted. One does catch glimpses of Du Bois himself here and there in his characters, especially the brusque but idealistic teacher Miss Smith, but no one character is a self-portrait. In fact the array of characters encountered during the course of the tale is one of it`s greatest strengths. It is pleasing that even the villains of the piece, Southern gentleman Colonel Cresswell and his dissolute son Harry, are not presented as mere ciphers, and the Colonel in particular is presented as having his own standards of ethics, in which he believes deeply, even though these are clearly not shared by the author or intended to be seen as admirable by the reader.

Arnold Rampersad in his introduction, claims that the novel suffers because characters are given unconvincingly `poetic` dialogue here and there. I was not conscious of this. I did feel that some dialogue was a little stilted and maybe a little artificial but then again, I do not know how people spoke in the Southern states of the US over 100 years ago.

My sole major reservation woul be that I have been reading books from the late 19th/early 20th century for literally years and am very accustomed to the writing of the time. A reader more accustomed to modern writing may struggle.

Having said that, this makes it into my personal top ten books easily ! ( )