A Mercy by Toni Morrison

I finished reading Toni Morrison's short novel A Mercy.  It's well worth reading; challenging in some ways (not least working out whose voice we're hearing at times), lyrical in parts and affecting throughout.  If it's not as fully realised as is her Pulitzer Prize winning novel Beloved, one can hardly fault the author.  Beloved is a once in a lifetime event.  No author could produce two novels at that level of accomplishment.

There is, however, a direct line between A Mercy and Beloved.  The unnamed mother of Florens. like Sethe's Africa-born mother, remembers the pens of her initial captivity and subsequent sale to slave-traders who transport her to Barbados where she is sold to Senhor, the two-dimensional malignant force with whom Jacob reluctantly trades. But A Mercy is not a prequel.  There are no common characters or shared storyline.  The more recent novel deals with an earlier period, the late-17th Century when indentured servants hailing originally from Europe lived little-better lives than African slaves; where religious intolerance amongst Christian sects replayed old European (particularly English) rivalries and where the loss of the New World paradise to the be-spoiling touch of the fallen European re-enacts the original sin and banishment of Genesis.  It's probably no co-incidence that the house built by Jacob, with its serpent-headed wrought iron gates, is on the edge of a hamlet called Milton.

I think it's a good read.  The New York Times called it one of the best books of 2008 and gave a glowing review here.  Others were less persuaded.  In an uncomfortable, rather sneering review, here in The New Yorker, John Updike damned the novel with faint praise.  His thoughts on the text should not prejudice anyone.  It's a decent work of fiction with something valuable to tell us.
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Why so loud?

Good question. Second Beloved class.

Beloved

Finished it. Truly wonderful writing. It has to be one of the finest novels I've read and genuinely an important one too (and it's not often that that can be said with justification).

What can one say? Read it.

Here's what the much-maligned Wikipedia has to say on the novel.

These are some surprisingly perceptive Sparks Notes on the book.

And this is a link to Toni Morrison discussing her novel on the BBC Radio World Service Book Club.

I love this story from the New York Times:

SULLIVAN’S ISLAND, S.C. — Toni Morrison has said that her acclaimed novel “Beloved,” which features the ghost of a baby killed by her enslaved black mother, came out of the need for a literature to commemorate slaves and their history. “There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath or wall, or park or skyscraper lobby,” Ms. Morrison said in a 1989 magazine interview. “There’s no 300-foot tower, there’s no small bench by the road.”

This weekend, on Sullivan’s Island, off the South Carolina coast, Ms. Morrison, the Nobel laureate, and some 300 people held a memorial ceremony to dedicate her long-awaited “bench by the road.” (read the rest)

(Photograph by Anne McQuary for The New York Times)
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Beloved

I've spent most of the day sitting in the sun with cups of tea, a bag of crsips, cheese & tomato sandwiches and one of Spike's sponge cakes reading (aloud mostly) Part 1 of Toni Morrison's novel. Fiction ... writing of any sort ... just doesn't come any better than this. I am in the presence of greatness; transported out of time, place and body. The past is, indeed, another country but a text this good can take you there.