A Mercy

"If they worried that the little survivors would infect them, they chose to ignore it, being true soldiers, unwilling to slaughter small children."

- A Mercy, pg. 47

"The Europes neither fled nor died out. In fact, said the old woman in charge of the children, [the sachem] had apologized for his error in prophecy and admitted that however many collapsed from ignorance or disease more would always come. They would come with languages that sounded like dog bark; with a childish hunger for animal fur. They would forever fence land, ship whole trees to faraway countries, take any woman for quick pleasure, ruin soil, befoul sacred places and worship a dull, unimaginative god."

- A Mercy, pg. 54

In the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Jean Luc Picard encounters a spatial anomaly in the Romulan Neutral Zone. Finding that the anomaly is larger in the past and non-existent in the future, he surmises that the anomaly is traveling backwards through time.

There is something in that anomaly in A Mercy; in all of Toni Morrison's novels. The reader learns something, something small and horrifying, that detonates out the front of the novel, leveling the reader's previous perspective. If this is done poorly, it is known as a twist.

The beginning of this novel is deadly, terribly dull. The first narrative is scattered and unintelligable; the next feels like historical fiction. Which it is. All of Morrison's work is, to some degree, historical fiction. But it always feels so wonderfully pregnant and breathless, defying the genre.

An Example of the Miasmatic properties of Historical Fiction:

"Mr. Blithe stared out into the field, smelling the cool Virginia air. He knew he had to bring the lambs in before Sarah started jawing at him about the wolf she had seen at the far end of the pasture, waiting. A clean, Protestant woman, she was far gone with his child, he hoped a boy, one that would survive the long winter."

Of all the things I've written this year, that was the easiest. Do you want to know why? It sucks. It pretends that a man is the sum of his demographics, the way hats were worn in his time, and his lineage; it assumes that if you've read enough obituaries on microfilm, you can encapsulate a human life.

All is not lost. There is a section, 50 pages in, where Morrison hits her stride and gets the old juice back. The rest of the thing feels like a Master's Dissertation in a creative writing program. Not even a program at a major university, one of those schools with a dash and the name of a city at the end. This is the best student in the program, but she's up against some soft competition.

I enjoyed parts of A Mercy, but it reminded me of what Doris Lessing said after she won the Nobel for Literature last year, about the way that Stockholm strangles the writer you used to be, and replaces it with celebrity. After Love and A Mercy, I believe her.

A Mercy was, mercifully, short. I will shelve it, and dream of another Beloved.