Review by New York Times Review
The Greeks might have invented the pastoral, the genre in which the rustic life is idealized by writers who don't have to live it, but it's found its truest home in America. To Europeans of the so-called Age of Discovery, the whole North American continent seemed a sort of Edenic rod and gun club, and their descendants here still haven't gotten over their obsession with the pure primal landscapes they despoil with their own presence. A straight line - if only spiritually - runs from Fenimore Cooper's wild Adirondacks and Hawthorne's sinister Massachusetts forests to Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River" to Cheevers domesticated locus amoenus of Shady Hill to the theme park in George Saunders's pointedly titled "Pastoralia" - where slaughtered goats are delivered to employees in Neolithic costume through a slot in the wall of their cave, much as Big Macs appear at a drive-through window. The line even leads to "Naked Lunch," which pronounces America "old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians" - simply a calculated blasphemy. Apply enough ironic backspin, and almost any American novel this side of "Bright Lights, Big City" could be called "American Pastoral." Or for that matter, "Paradise Lost." Toni Morrison has already used the title "Paradise" for the 1998 novel that I think is her weakest. But it would have been a good fit for her new book, "A Mercy," which reveals her, once more, as a conscious inheritor of America's pastoral tradition, even as she implicitly criticizes it. Her two greatest novels, "Song of Solomon" and "Beloved" render the rural countryside so evocatively that you can smell the earth; even in the urban novel "Jazz," the most memorable images are of the South its characters have left behind. But Morrison, of course, is African-American, and hers is a distinctly postcolonial pastoral: a career-long refutation of Robert Frost's embarrassing line "The land was ours before we were the land's." The plantation called Sweet Home, in "Beloved," is neither sweet to its slaves nor home to anyone, except the native Miamis, of whom nothing is left but their burial mounds. In "A Mercy," a 17th-century American farmer - who lives near a town wink-and-nudgingly called Milton - enriches himself by dabbling in the rum trade and builds an ostentatious, oversize new house, for which he orders up a fancy wrought-iron gate, ornamented with twin copper serpents: when the gate is closed, their heads meet to form a blossom. The farmer, Jacob Vaark, thinks he's creating an earthly paradise, but Lina, his Native American slave, whose forced exposure to Presbyterianism has conveniently provided her with a Judeo-Christian metaphor, feels as if she's "entering the world of the damned." In this American Eden, you get two original sins for the price of one - the near extermination of the native population and the importation of slaves from Africa - and it's not hard to spot the real serpents: those creatures Lina calls "Europes," men whose "whitened" skins make them appear on first sight to be "ill or dead," and whose great gifts to the heathens seem to be smallpox and a harsh version of Christianity with "a dull, unimaginative god." Jacob is as close as we get to a benevolent European. Although three bondswomen (one Native American, one African and one "a bit mongrelized") help run his farm, he refuses to traffic in slaves; the mother of the African girl, in fact, has forced her daughter on him because the girl is in danger of falling into worse hands and he seems "human." Yet Jacob's money is no less tainted than if he'd wielded a whip himself: it simply comes from slaves he doesn't have to see in person, working sugar plantations in the Caribbean. And the preposterous house he builds with this money comes to no good. It costs the lives of 50 trees (cut down, as Lina notes, "without asking their permission"), his own daughter dies in an accident during the construction, and he never lives to finish it. True, some of the white settlers are escapees from hell: Jacob's wife, Rebekka, whom he imported sight unseen from London, retains too-vivid memories of public hangings and drawings-and-quarterings. "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." America, she figures, can hardly be worse. But even the relatively kindly Rebekka (kindly, that is, until she nearly dies of smallpox herself and gets religion) and the relatively human Jacob have that European brimstone clinging to them, and it's stinking up the place. One native sachem diagnoses their unique pathology: "Cut loose from the earth's soul, they insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans they were insatiable. It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit out a horribleness that would destroy all primary peoples." This sounds like P.C. cant, and even Lina doubts that all Europes are Eurotrash. But the sachem's got a point. Does anybody own the earth we all inhabit as brothers and sisters? From that perspective, property really is theft, and if you don't think Europeans did the thieving, I've got $24 worth of beads I'd like to sell you. OR if Europeans aren't the only serpents in the garden - after all, "A Mercy" also implicates Africans in the slave trade - this theory, advanced by an African woman captured by rival tribesmen and shipped to Barbados, gets to the heart of the problem: "I think men thrive on insults over cattle, women, water, crops. Everything heats up and finally the men of their families burn we houses and collect those they cannot kill or find for trade." Men! You can't live with 'em and (since women "did not fell 60-foot trees, build pens, repair saddles, slaughter or butcher beef, shoe a horse or hunt") you can't live without 'em. Not to mention that old-as-Eden matter of sexual attraction. Florens, the black girl whose mother entrusted her to Jacob, and whose feeling of abandonment rules the rest of her life, falls uncontrollably in lust with a free black man, the smith who builds Jacob's gate. "The shine of water runs down your spine and I have shock at myself for wanting to lick there. I run away into the cowshed to stop this thing from happening inside me. Nothing stops it." In their last scene together, the blacksmith rejects her for being a slave - not to Jacob, but to her own desire. "You alone own me," she tells him. "Own yourself, woman," he answers. "You are nothing but wilderness. No constraint. No mind." If you've ever read a Toni Morrison novel, you can already predict that Florens does end up owning herself and that it's a bitter blessing. Her only compensation for the loss of her mother and her lover is that she comes to write her own story, carving the letters with a nail into the walls of her dead master's unfinished and abandoned house. "A Mercy" has neither the terrible passion of "Beloved" - how many times can we ask a writer to go to such a place? - nor the spirited ingenuity of "Love," the most satisfying of Morrison's subsequent novels. But it's her deepest excavation into America's history, to a time when the South had just passed laws that "separated and protected all whites from all others forever," and the North had begun persecuting people accused of witchcraft. (The book's most anxious moment comes when a little white girl goes hysterical at the sight of Florens and hides behind her witch-hunting elders.) Postcolonialists and feminists, perhaps even Greens and Marxists, may latch onto "A Mercy," but they should latch with care, lest Morrison prove too many-minded for them. This novel isn't a polemic - does anybody really need to be persuaded that exploitation is evil? - but a tragedy in which "to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing." EXCEPT for a slimy Portuguese slave trader, no character in the novel is wholly evil, and even he's more weak and contemptible than mustache-twirlingly villainous. Nor are the characters we root for particularly saintly. While Lina laments the nonconsensual deaths of trees, she deftly drowns a newborn baby, not, as in "Beloved," to save it from a life of slavery, but simply because she thinks the child's mother (the "mongrelized" girl who goes by the Morrisonian name of Sorrow) has already brought enough bum luck to Jacob's farmstead. Everyone in "A Mercy" is damaged; a few, once in a while, find strength to act out of love, or at least out of mercy - that is, when those who have the power to do harm decide not to exercise it. A negative virtue, but perhaps more lasting than love. This oddly assorted household slaves, indentured servants and a wife shipped to her husband in exchange for payment to her family - exhibits varying degrees of freedom and dominion, and it holds together, for a while, thanks to a range of conflicting motivations. "They once thought they were a kind of family because together they had carved companionship out of isolation. But the family they imagined they had become was false. Whatever each one loved, sought or escaped, their futures were separate and anyone's guess. One thing was certain, courage alone would not be enough." The landscape of "A Mercy" is full of both beauties and terrors: snow "sugars" eyelashes, yet icicles hang like "knives"; a stag is a benign and auspicious apparition, yet at night "the glittering eyes of an elk could easily be a demon." But whatever the glories and the rigors of nature may signify to the civilized, for these characters, living in the midst of it, nature doesn't signify. It's simply to be embraced or dreaded - like the people with whom they have to live. In Morrison's latest version of pastoral, it's only mercy or the lack of it that makes the American landscape heaven or hell, and the gates of Eden open both ways at once. A farmer thinks he's creating an earthly paradise, but his slave feels as if she's 'entering the world of the damned.' David Gates's most recent book is "The Wonders of the Invisible World," a collection of stories.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In its first pages, Morrison's latest novel seems to be a retread of the author's old themes, settings, and narrative voice; however, it quickly achieves its own brilliant identity. The time is the late 1600s, when what will become the U.S. remains a chain of colonies along the Atlantic coast. Not only does slavery still exist, it is a thriving industry that translates into plenty of business for lots of people. These factors coalesce to provide the atmosphere and plot points for Morrison's riveting, even poetic, new novel. She has shown a partiality for the chorus method of storytelling, wherein a group of indivuals who are involved in a single event or incident tell their versions of what happened, the individual voices maintaining their distinctiveness while their personal tales overlap each other with a layering effect that gives Morrison's prose its resonance and deep sheen of enameling. Here the voices belong to the women associated with Virginia planter Jacob Vaark, who has quickly risen from ratty orphan to a man of means; these women include the long-suffering Rebekka, his wife; Lina and Sorrow, slave women with unique perspectives on the events taking place on Vaark's plantation; and Florens, a slave girl whom Vaark accepts as partial payment on a debt and whose separation from her mother is the pivotal event around which Morrison weaves her short but deeply involving story. A fitting companion to her highly regarded Beloved.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Some authors make mediocre readers, but Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison is certainly not among them. Her husky voice, lyrical rhythms and precise timing--especially of pauses within sentences or even phrases--give clarity and poignancy to her vivid metaphors and elegant prose. Set in the 1680s, this story tells of multiple forms of love and of slavery. Florens is a slave girl whose mother urges her sale to Jacob, a decent man, to save her from a rapist master. Florens feels abandoned and is finally betrayed by the lover she worships. Morrison holds the listener completely in thrall through her narrative, her characters, her language and her own fine reading. An enlightening interview with the author appears at the end. A Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 15). (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In 1690, Anglo-Dutch trader Jacob Vaark sets off from New Amsterdam to collect a debt from a landowner in Maryland. Arriving at the plantation, Vaark discovers that the debtor cannot pay, and Vaark reluctantly decides to accept a young slave girl, Florens, as partial compensation. Taken from her baby brother and her mother, who thinks that giving up her daughter to a kinder slave owner is an act of mercy, Florens finds herself in the midst of a community of women striving to understand their burdens of sorrow and grief and to discover the mercies of love. Much as she did in Paradise, Morrison hauntingly weaves the stories of these women into a colorful tale of loss, despair, hope, and love. Knitted together with Florens's own tale of her search to be reunited with her mother are the wrenching stories of Sorrow, a young woman who spent most of her time at sea before coming to Vaark's home; Lina, a Native American healer and storyteller who looks after Florens as a mother would a daughter; and Rebekka, Vaark's wife and Florens's mistress, who endures her own persecution, loss, and sorrow. Magical, mystical, and memorable, Morrison's poignant parable of mercies hidden and revealed belongs in every library. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/08.]--Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Evanston, IL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Abandonment, betrayal and loss are the somber themes of this latest exploration of America's morally compromised history from Morrison (Love, 2003, etc.). All the characters she sets down in the colonial landscape circa 1690 are bereft, none more evidently so than Florens, 16-year-old slave of Jacob Vaark and his wife Rebekka. Eight years earlier, Anglo-Dutch farmer and trader Jacob reluctantly took Florens in settlement of a debt from a Maryland landowner. Her own mother offered herso as not to be traded with Florens' infant brother, the girl thinks. (The searing final monologue reveals it was not so simple.) Florens joined a household of misfits somewhere in the North. Jacob was a poor orphan who came to America to make a new start; Rebekka's parents essentially sold her to him to spare themselves her upkeep. The couple has shared love, but also sadness; all four of their offspring died in childhood. They take in others similarly devastated. Lina, raped by a "Europe," has been cast out by her Native American tribe. Mixed-race Sorrow survived a shipwreck only to be made pregnant by her rescuer, who handed her over to Jacob. Willard and Scully are indentured servants, farmed out to labor for Jacob by their contract holders, who keep fraudulently extending their time. Only the free African blacksmith who helps Jacob construct his fancy new houseand who catches Florens' love-starved eyeseems whole and self-sufficient, though he eventually falls prey to Florens' raging fear of abandonment. Morrison's point, made in a variety of often-melodramatic plot developments, is that America was founded on the involuntary servitude of blacks and whites, that the colonies are rife with people who belong nowhere else and anxiously strive to find something to hold onto in the New World. Gorgeous language and powerful understanding of the darkest regions in the human heart compensate for the slightly schematic nature of the characters and the plot. Better seen as a lengthy prose poem than a novel, this allusive, elusive little gem adds its own shadowy luster to the Nobel laureate's shimmering body of work. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
