A Mercy - Toni Morrison

As I mentioned last week, I had the honour of hearing Toni Morrison reading from this book at the UEA LitFest and I am so glad that I did. She mentioned that she writes for the ears as well as the eyes and I found myself reading sections aloud to myself to fully appreciate the lyricism of this beautifully crafted book. Try it yourself - it really helps!

A Mercy is a slim book that I find really hard to explain so I will steal the blurb from the back:

"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."

Each chapter in turn focuses on each of the four women living on the farm and, as time moves back and forward, we see how they ended up at this place in this time. The themes of religion race, gender, poverty and (or course) slavery in the context of the early years of America are dealt with intelligently and movingly. This is a beautiful, and deceptively simple, book that is absolutely going to merit a re-read so that I can appreciate the layers of the story.

Reviews from the Guardian, the Independent, the Sunday Times and the Telegraph.

UEA Literary Festival - Toni Morrison

Last night I had the absolute privilege of watching Toni Morrison read from her latest book, A Mercy, and the answer questions from the audience as well as those posed by Prof. Chris Bigsby.Perhaps most famous for Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, Morrison is also the holder of a Nobel Prize for literature and this was her third visit to the UEA.

The introduction centred on the theme of slavery and oppression and this seemed very appropriate as the excerpt that she read out was set in 1690, two years before the Salem witch trials, and featured a young black slave Forens, who (as far as I know) is one of the book's central characters. A book from this era struck me as a particularly apt choice given this event was part of the Arthur Miller centre's lecture series and his The Crucible is such an incredibly powerful piece of work. I digress...

In the conversation that followed the reading, she was very softly spoken, was possessed with enormous dignity but also seemed a little weary - she'd appeared at the Cheltenham Festival earlier in the week. One thing that really struck me was how important the choice of precise language seemed to be to her and she described "writing for the ears as well as the eyes" which really encapsulates what I am trying to explain when I say that.

I also could not resist buying a copy of the book for her to sign and I am delighted that I did as somehow I feel like it's a permanent momento of this evening. At some stage I really must post about why a signed book is more important to me than a not-signed one but I am not sure I can crystalise those thoughts just yet. In the meantime, here's an interview with Toni Morrison, talking about A Mercy, with a slightly unfortunate YouTube freeze-frame. Enjoy.