Haley's comment

QUEEN By Alex Haley and David Stevens (Macmillan, $255) ALEX Haley did not write his latest - and last - book, Queen. Instead, according to co-author David Stevens, he told it in story form during two years of kitchen table discussions, in the oral tradition of some of his forebears whose sad history it is.

And when Haley died of a heart attack in February 1992, aged 70, Stevens replayed the tapes, pulled out the history books and an outline they had prepared, and put together this history of Haley's father's family, told mainly through his memories of his grandmother, Queen, a ''child of the plantation''.

The result is a quickly-written, slightly repetitive but fast-moving and occasionally lyrical saga which will no doubt reach the best-seller lists. It will also no doubt attract attention from zealous historians such as those who discredited Haley's Pulitzer prize-winning book Roots for factual inaccuracies.

As Mr Stevens suggests in his Afterword, critics would probably not have to spend long hours in the library to find historical inconsistencies in Queen, or detect occasions where truth took second place to drama. But I dare say that wouldn't matter too much: Queen is by no means a great book, but it is an important one if only because it has the power to remind us of the social injustices that are part of our past, and tragically also part of our present.

For Haley, this sequel appears to have been more a tracing of bloodlines than tracing of his roots. Through the slave-child, Queen, he looks back at the life of her white land-owning father, a family tie that she was denied by 19th-century white Americansociety in every way except in the genes that made her look ''white as cotton''.

The 650-page saga begins with the story of Haley's great-great grandfather, James Jackson, fighting for the nationalist cause in late 17th-century Ireland. As a boy, James wept at the reprisals against Irish peasants who refused to pay taxes to their English landowners - when soldiers slapped molten tar on their heads, and laughed at their screams of agony, and their inability to remove the flaming mess.

But later, banished from his homeland, and living in contented exile in Alabama, James often heard of the vicious flogging and shackling of black slaves - sometimes his own, more often other people's - and he forgot to weep.