A Mercy is about many things: slavery, emotional bondage, fear, hubris, faith, enlightenment, love. It's about how lawless and harrowing life in the early colonies was and how the foundation for nearly every aspect of Colonial American life was enslavement. And it's about mercy - giving and withholding.
Morrison is not an easy writer, and A Mercy is not an easy read. The opening chapter is complicated beyond reason; it takes another hundred pages before the reader comprehends the meaning of those first pages.
Never one for linear narrative, in A Mercy, Morrison takes more license with narrative structure than usual, at times dispensing with it altogether. The reader must work at discerning at what point any given scene rests within the totality of the story and who is telling what part of the Rashomon tale, as Morrison employs several vantage points.
As always, the prose is exquisitely wrought, poetically economical. Each image is vivid, keen and palpable. Morrison transports us more than 300 years into America's sordid, bloody, rapacious past and brings it to brutal life. A Mercy is an extraordinary book. At 77, Morrison's edge remains sharp as a knife blade, her storytelling spellbindingly good.
Victoria A. Brownworth is the author and editor of more than 20 books, including the award-winning "The Golden Age of Lesbian Erotica: 1920-1940." She teaches writing and film at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and is at work on a collection of essays about the 2008 election.
excerpt
"Brawls, knifings and kidnaps were so common in the city of her birth that the warnings of slaughter in a new, unseen world were like threats of bad weather. The very year she stepped off the ship a mighty settlers- versus-natives war two hundred miles away was over before she heard of it. The intermittent skirmishes of men against men, arrows against powder, fire against hatchet that she heard of could not match the gore of what she had seen since childhood. The pile of frisky, still-living entrails held before the felon's eyes then thrown into a bucket and tossed into the Thames; fingers trembling for a lost torso; the hair of a woman guilty of mayhem bright with flame. Compared to that, death by shipwreck or tomahawk paled."
