The Dying of the Light

WHEN THE WAR IS OVER by Stephen Becker. 240 pages. Random House. $5.95.

Like Diogenes, Stephen Becker has spent most of his career as a novelist searching for an honest man--or at least a protagonist who can face a tough moral decision with honesty. In A Covenant with Death, a youthful judge must decide the fate of a man who kills his executioner after being convicted of a murder that he did not commit. Juice concerns a wealthy businessman fighting the machinery mobilized to exonerate him of the drunken-driving death of a pedestrian. Now, in his sixth novel, Becker, 42, turns back to the Civil War. In an excellent period morality tale, a Union Army officer attempts to save the life of a teen-age Confederate boy who shot him during a skirmish.

Becker's story is based on a real incident. On May 11, 1865, 32 days after Lee surrendered and 18 days before President Andrew Johnson declared an amnesty for all rebel soldiers, a Union firing squad executed Thomas Martin outside Cincinnati for being a Confederate guerrilla--even though the case against him was never proved.

The central figure is 1st Lieut. Marius Catto. The 24-year-old lieutenant is an orphan who feels that the Union Army is his first real home, a bumbling but compassionate leader, an idealistic virgin consumed by lust. Catto manages to get himself shot in the shoulder by Martin mainly out of sheer carelessness. He feels no animosity toward the boy, and while recuperating from his wound, Catto fights the court-martial and the subsequent execution with an increasingly anguished awareness of the complexities of life. "What had been a duel, lost honorably and without resentment, became a charade, himself an inept harlequin, a clown in blue."

In the process, Catto loses his physical virginity to a whore, his philosophical virginity to his surgeon. He becomes an outraged man who takes it upon himself to lead the firing squad in order to save another officer from having to live with the crime.

The impact of the book is a shocking and melancholy reminder that men, in war or peace, always must go on living with an accumulation of such crimes. Becker quotes the real Judge William Martin Dickson of Cincinnati, writing after the boy's death: "But why revive these harrowing incidents of the war? As well ask, why tell the story of the war at all? If it is to be told, let us have the whole. Let the young not be misled." Like Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Stephen Becker's book explores the whole of war with realism and irony. Becker's hero, astounded at man's inhumanity, rages superbly against the dying of the light.

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