A Mercy
by Toni Morrison
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Book Summary Information
Author: Toni MorrisonEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2008-11-11
ISBN: 0307264238
Number of pages: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of A Mercy
Book Review: A Harrowing Reminder of a Concurrent Past
Summary: 5 Stars
Reading Toni Morrison's books are an experience that mimics an epic voyage through the Strait of Messina where one would encounter the Greek monsters Scylla and Charybdis. There is always the inevitable and inescapable threat of coming up against the author's inviolable stance against both racism and sexism through her exploration of these themes with her black, female protagonists. There is no doubt that these characters are employed as beacons of truth and suffering in her fabricated worlds that highlight the injustice of a society structured against color and sex. And albeit the redundancies of such subjects in a day and age where these divisive edifices are slowly crumbling, Morrison nonetheless finds a knack for making these ideas at once relevant, and on another note, epiphanic.
In Morrison's latest novel, A Mercy, the author distills more than two decades of slave life that was so poignantly painted in her Pulitzer-winning Beloved into a more compact, yet elegantly written prose that I would wager digs under the nature of suffering with more precision and candor. This time, the Sethe and Beloved figures do not quite tread on such harrowingly passionate narratives, instead venturing through a literary style that reads like an abstract collage of ancient sepia portraits. Personal characteristics and distinctions, of which abound in her writing, are curiously blurred at the onset. This is a book that begs to be read twice: first for carefully identifying the myriad voices through which each character's face can be drawn, second for the reflection on the mind-plumbing themes that leave the reader with much to ponder about.
Set in the Americas of the late 1600s, Morrison shapes her narrative through a maze of voices--an Anglo-Dutch farmer/trader, a slave girl bought from a plantation, a Native American servant woman, a free African blacksmith, a strange girl whose earlier life was spent at sea, a mail-order bride, and the mother of the plantation girl. Bereft of their roots and struggling in an environment ridden with death, danger, and disease, these men and women must strive and survive in a world in constant flux. Call it a vicissitude of fortunes.
The farmer Jacob Vaark strikes gold in the rum trade and builds an ostentatious home that he consciously dubs as an earthly paradise, an American Eden. A striking feature in his house is the gate ornamented with copper serpents, whose heads join together to form a blossom. Vaark hopes to build an idyllic niche in a world rampant with the evils of the slave trade. He wishes to take no part in the human market that is the rage all over America. However, circumstances force him to take in Florens, the daughter of a slave woman working in a plantation. We also realize that his rum money is won through the sweat and blood of invisible slaves toiling away in the Caribbean. Eden indeed. His house costs the lives of fifty trees, his daughter dies during a construction accident, and he never lives to see it finished.
Lina, his Native American servant woman, feels as if she is "entering the world of the damned" forged by these Europes, men whose white skin makes them appear ill or dead. Through her forced inculcation into the Europes' Judeo-Christian traditions, she ascribes Christianity to a "dull, imaginative god" whose religion reeks more of a brimstone damnation rather than salvation. Sorrow, a "mongrelized" girl who one day washed up on shore, is a damaged character whose luck or rather her lack of it snakes its unwelcome tendrils into Jacob's farm. Lina drowns her baby one day hoping that ending its life will end the string of unfortunate events that has befallen the farmstead. And then there is Florens, the girl Jacob Vaark unwillingly buys from the plantation. Her feelings of abandonment and destitution drive her to search for a sense of self that eventually allows her to turn her life around later in the novel. If you have read a Morrison book, you may have guessed that Florens does end up owning herself, and like many of the author's protagonists, that her emancipation is ultimately a bittersweet blessing.
The premise of Morrison's novel does not ultimately aim to castigate the evils of human exploitation. We are already aware of these things. Rather, one could argue that its tragic narrative aims at excavating the roots of our moral subconscious. Her broken characters speak to us with such sincerity that we end up getting lost in this deluge of voices--voices that we sympathize with for their losses and their inviting weaknesses. The author's delicate filigrees of detail and color shaded on a plethora of literary elements ranging from the color of one's eyes to the coarseness of a garment's fabric and the texture of one's scars are gentle nudges that little by little complete a grandiose if somewhat jagged panorama of a very personal understanding of suffering that has become a prominent motif in her oeuvre. But it does still nonetheless address some of these grave errors. Close to the end of the novel, Florens' mother writes to her daughter, "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."
A Mercy, in the end, is a book that finally serves as a reminder that some of these base emotions, feelings, and ideas are no outdated atavism; that however dated her fabricated yet historically informed world is, humans still operate on the impetus that forced many of her characters to enslave and become enslaved. It reminds us that these voices should never be silenced, and that like many of the characters in her novel, that we are all living and surviving in a world in constant flux. In the beginning, Florens asks two questions: "One question is who is responsible? Another is can you read?"--the first to challenge us to dig deep into the sins we have inherited, the second to dare us to tread into the threadbare territory of her literature. Perhaps Morrison suggests that our worlds are after all really not that different.
Summary of A Mercy
A powerful tragedy distilled into a jewel of a masterpiece by the Nobel Prize?winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier.In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class divisions, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were planted and took root.
Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in ?flesh,? he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, ?with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady.? Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master?s house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.
There are other voices: Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, herself a victim of religious intolerance back in England; Sorrow, a strange girl who?s spent her early years at sea; and finally the devastating voice of Florens? mother. These are all men and women inventing themselves in the wilderness.
A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and of a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.
Acts of mercy may have unforeseen consequences.
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