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Antigonish Review
# 127
| Margo
Wheaton |
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Mercy Among the Children
by David Adams Richards
Doubleday Canada, 2000, 371 pages
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Mercy Among the Children, as most readers
will know by now, is the searing, award-winning new novel by David Adams
Richards that is currently being greeted with the enthusiastic, widespread
readership his work has always deserved.
By tracing the story of the Hendersons, a family
whose members beautifully embody the virtuous qualities his best characters
have always possessed-emotional depth and purity, spiritual courage and
generosity, passion and goodness-and by allowing, for the first time,
a single character-the beleaguered Lyle Henderson-to tell the entire story
in his own words, Richards is able in this novel to deal more directly
than ever before with a passionate concern that has long informed his
work: the complex moral and spiritual dimensions of power and violence
and of his characters' personal responses to instances of inhumanity.
The result is a novel that is both intensely philosophical and gracefully
poetic, dramatically compelling and quietly, lyrically evocative and is
a work that is being hailed as Richards' most definitive to date.
Mercy Among the Children takes the form
of an extraordinary testimonial and is eldest son Lyle Henderson's telling,
in a single sitting, to Terrieux, a retired police-officer, of the senseless
persecution of his family, its devastating consequences and of his own
struggle to make sense both of the cruelty inflicted upon them and of
his parents' and siblings' individual responses to it. The narrative is
haunted, in particular, by Lyle's dramatically conflicted response to
his father Sydney's selfless, steadfast upholding of an impulsive pact
made in childhood when, after pushing a youngster who has stolen his sandwich
off a church roof, he vows, should the boy live, to "never raise
his hand or his voice to another soul." In the face of the socially-sanctioned
rejection and humiliation visited upon his family by several members of
the community who are alternately fearful and scornful of Sydney's passion
for books and ideas and suspicious of his stoic individualism, Lyle has
neither a personal pact with God to uphold nor the hard-won wisdom his
father has achieved through years of profound suffering and deep reading
and reflection. Grappling with his own baffled, battered young heart and
his keen sense of injustice, Lyle's desperate, instinctive response is
to fight back in a passionate attempt to shield the people he loves from
the wrong-doing that assaults them as relentlessly as the raw winter wind
assails their small, tarpapered house. Lyle's eventual, heart-broken allegiance
with violence, against others as well as himself, is, of course, in direct
opposition with Sydney's adamant belief that "they who lift a hand
against you do so against themselves" and counter to his father's
staunch refusal to "beg the truth" in the face of falsehood
and persecution. This fundamental conflict between father and son creates,
on one level of the text, an on-going dialogue, a conceptual prism through
which all of the events, actions and personal responses of the characters
who people Lyle's world and imagination are coloured.
Powerful as Sydney's example of spiritual integrity-and
Richards' portrayal of this remarkable character-is, however, to focus,
as recent reviews have tended towards, upon the saintliness of his character
and the age-old debate of pacifism vs. vengeance is to wrongly view Mercy
Among the Children as primarily a novel of ideas or, worse, as some
critics have already claimed, as a work that is basically prescriptive,
its characters functioning essentially as vehicles, as idealized abstractions
through whom Richards can deliver the tenets of his own personal moral
and spiritual beliefs. Central and affecting as his example is to the
novel, intense emphasis upon Sydney and the philosophical dimensions of
his stance inadvertently suppresses the immense complexity and searching
nature of Richards' consideration of evil and goodness and ignores the
author's acute awareness of the inevitable ironies and contradictions
surrounding even the most virtuous, impassioned upholding of one's most
deeply-held truths. Such emphasis glosses over, for example, Sydney's
own feelings of self-doubt and failure and the very real ways in which
his uncompromising adherence to his own vision adversely affects those
closest to him, his family, at one harrowing point in the novel, in need
of their aged neighbour Jay Beard's vigilant patrolling of their home
with his .38 revolver. This is not to suggest that Richards in any way
downplays Sydney's inspiring, virtuous example but rather that it is his
continual insistence upon the ambiguity and complexity of human striving
and morality that renders the novel so provocative and affecting.
Though deeply moral, Mercy Among the Children
is not primarily a moral examination, explication or debate-it is, first
and foremost, the extraordinary story of Lyle Henderson, of his own bloody,
embattled, and finally triumphant, search for beauty and truth, the gripping
tale of the coming-of-age of his heart and soul. If Sydney's courageous,
enlightened commitment to compassion functions, on a certain level, as
the novel's intellectual and moral sensibility, then Lyle's churning indecision
and tumultuous inner battle is surely its guts and constitutes the novel's
emotional centre.
Lyle's brutally honest attempt to make sense
of, and ultimately bear, all that he has witnessed and experienced is
a spiritual struggle in its own right, one that is every bit as exacting,
strenuous and honourable as his father's. Despite the recent lamentation
in a current review of Mercy of a supposed absence of irony and
complexity surrounding Lyle's first-person narration, it is precisely
the relentless irony and complexity of Lyle's own personal stance-alternately
condemning and yet deeply affected by his father's courageous example,
swinging between furious blaming and guilty self-laceration, spurning
and at the same time aching for love and connection-that render him such
a believable narrator and character, perfectly suited to the telling of
this particular tale. Of all the Hendersons, Lyle is easily the most conflicted
and torn and consequently, the most fiercely searching. In his desperate
struggle for meaning and self-definition, Lyle is the most open of all
the characters to deep encounters with the radically differing perspectives,
agendas, and dilemmas of the extraordinary personalities swirling around
him. Driven by his deep need to learn the truth of things, he comes into
contact with them all and must imaginatively carry and make sense of a
multiplicity of examples, everything from the graceful, self-effacing
gentleness of his family, to the gritty determination of self-made local
millionaire Leo McVicer, to the artful manipulations of the self-romanticizing
Mathew and Cynthia Pit, to the desperate, self-absorbed interventions
of social worker Diedre Whyne. In his determination to distinguish truth
from falsehood, to perceive what is actual as opposed to what is merely
proclaimed and assumed, it is Lyle alone who must grapple with and carry
the story of them all in all of its intricate, tragic, contradictory beauty.
There is, at the novel's end, a marked sense of relief, of a Herculean
task finally being completed and, despite the lonely exile that Lyle Henderson
returns to after telling his story, there is a profound sense of triumph
and vindication that transcends completely mere avenging. For all of the
suffering that he has witnessed and endured and regardless of the personal
failings that he is so acutely aware of, Lyle has been, despite his own
despairing decision at one point to "forget everything I had ever
learned or known," absolutely faithful in his pursuit of the truth
regardless of how inconvenient, shattering, and even self-implicating
that truth may be and has elected, at great personal cost, to bear and
to tell it. In his stubborn, if often unintentional, devotion to this
essentially selfless act, Lyle achieves a rare form of redemption, the
fury that caused the self-inflicted knife wounds upon his chest and arms
mingled noticeably now with what Terrieux rightly perceives as extraordinary
valour, compassion and tenderness.
The absence of irony or contradiction in Lyle's
emphatic assertion, near the novel's end, that his has been "a life
of joy. Of joy unending." is reflective of a further discourse that
deeply informs this novel, one that has always been present in Richards'
work and that concerns things that transcend, finally, all dialectic.
While critics have frequently lamented Richards'
change in style and narrative technique-moving years ago from the naturalistic,
stream-of-consciousness interiority of his earliest novels to a more objective,
sparer, removed narrative-and have charged him with becoming, as a result,
overly didactic and polemical, all of his works from Nights Below Station
Street onwards have evinced an acute, heightened sense of the wondrous
and mysterious in human experience, a reverence for that which is utterly
wordless and elusive. While in Mercy, Richards' acuity regarding
the various dimensions of violence, inhumanity and moral behaviour has
perhaps never been keener or more comprehensively expressed, the novel
is infused, from beginning to end, with a deeply mystical sensibility,
a profound appreciation of the transformative gifts of grace-like mercy,
love and redemption, to borrow from the novel's titled subsections-that
are beyond definition, available only through surrender.
A sense of the transcendent and eternal is beautifully
evoked in Mercy, as it is so often in Richards' works, by his starkly
poetic depiction of the natural world, a presence so immediate and felt
it is rendered prescient, as timeless and apart from human design as the
final, abiding truth of things. It is also unselfconsciously evoked by
the rapt, reverberant rhythms of Richards' spare, beautifully-honed prose,
by its solemn, hypnotic blend of realistic dialogue and austere, lilting
cadence.
Several of the characters in Mercy experience
a timeless, transcendent realm through dreams, intuitions and sudden revelations
and it is exquisitely expressed by two of the characters in particular,
Elly, wife of Sydney, who is told things by the wind and sees miracles
"in trees, in flowers, in insects in the field, especially butterflies,
in cow's milk, in sugar, in clouds of rain, in dust, in snow, and in the
thousands of sweet midnight stars" and Percy, the youngest Henderson
son, who sees intuitively and immediately into the depths of peoples'
hearts. The fragile otherworldliness that surrounds both characters does
not, despite a recent charge to the contrary, reflect the construction
of idealized "icons" that are simply "lauded" by the
text, but rather is reflective of the rare, unselfconscious state of grace
that both characters exist in as flesh-and-blood manifestations of an
acute sensitivity and emotional purity that is revered by Richards as
the naturally-occurring miracle that it is and is gently, lovingly celebrated-Percy
with his tiny bowtie forever askew, staring at his peanut-butter sandwich
and Elly with her hands on her lap, beautiful head bowed in shame and
fear, waiting for the proverbial shoe to drop.
Although it is suffused with breathtakingly painful
instances of inhumanity, rife with vivid illustrations of how "evil
and darkness attach themselves to the good or great to destroy their will
to live," Mercy Among the Children is profoundly celebratory,
a spell-binding testament to the resilience and purity of the human spirit
and to the simple, uncomplicated miracle of kindness and love. If there
is villainy in Richards' imagined world, it is located not so much within
specific individuals as attached to the blinding and corrupting nature
of self-serving attitudes, behaviours and institutions that fail to honour
the intrinsic beauty and worth all are heir to. By refusing the immediate,
easy relief of ironic distance or sentimentality and by remaining consistently
true to the vastness and richness of human experience in all of its heartbreak,
grit and glory, Richards has created a novel of extraordinary depth, resonance
and universality. Only the purest artistic integrity and the deepest,
most abiding compassion could fashion a work of such haunting power and
beauty.
Margo Wheaton
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