There is no action without
consequence, no cause without effect. In bad fiction, those effects fall upon
each other like poorly laid dominoes, resulting in tedious plotting. Better
writers can make predictable results seem fresh through cleverness and
sincerity, but great writers tell stories that refuse the easy answers of
inevitability. The choices made by the characters in Toni Morrison's A
Mercy,
are often hardly choices at all, and the consequences are impossible to see to
their ends, but by its final pages, Morrison's novel is as unexpected as it is
richly rewarding.
Set in America in the late
17th century, Mercy follows the lives and miseries of a farmer named Jacob Vaark,
his wife Rebekka, their servant Lina, a half-crazed young woman named Sorrow,
and a girl named Florens, a slave's daughter with an affection for fancy shoes.
Jacob takes Florens from her original master as payment for a debt; apart from
Lina, he owns no slaves and has no interest in them, but the Florens' mother
offers up her child for reasons beyond Jacob or Florens' understanding, and he
can't help but accept. The decision changes her life, as Jacob soon becomes
ill, and Rebekka is quickly infected. Only a local emancipated blacksmith
offers any hope of salvation, and Florens, deeply infatuated with the man, is
sent to find him.
Mercy alternates between
Florens' first-person narrative and third-person chapters detailing the other
characters' present and past. It's a short novel, almost a novella, but even in
its brevity, Morrison creates a passionate, well-textured world. Tragedy looms
behind every moment; given the time period and the predominately wilderness
setting, it would be unrealistic otherwise. But there's also a tenuous thread
of survival connecting each narrative, a feeling of progression that builds as
the story moves to its conclusion. A Mercy is as haunted by the living as it is by
the dead; it's full of people struggling to anchor themselves against the
vagaries of circumstance. In the end, whether they succeed is open to
interpretation.