A Mercy by Toni Morrison Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of A Mercy
Book Review: "Dark Matter...Aching to Be Made into a World"
Summary: 3 Stars
I first read Toni Morrison while taking an early American literature class about 12 years ago. I remember that we were studying slave narratives and my professor decided that we should read Morrison's "Beloved," a hauntingly beautiful, gut-wrenching novel about a mother who murders her own child rather than have her sold off into slavery. After reading "Beloved" I felt I could better understand the horror and anguish of slavery, as well as the power of art to give voice to the voiceless. Morrison's early novels are impressive because they manage to carry the weight of a political message without sacrificing art. Her early writing is enlightening, lyrically stunning and highly compelling.
This is still true of her newest novel, "A Mercy," but not to the same degree. The story takes place in the 1680's, when the slave trade is just beginning in the Americas, and thus the novel can be read as a kind of prelude to "Beloved;" however, it dosen't make for nearly as satisfying and thought-provoking a reading experience as "Beloved" does.
"A Mercy" begins with a Dutch trader and farmer, Jacob Vaark, and the mercy he shows a young slave girl, Florens, when he agrees to take her as payment for a debt he is owed by a plantation owner. Jacob, it turns out, despises slavery and on his farm he assembles a ragtag bunch of new world orphans. There is Jacob's beloved wife, Rebekka, who came over from England to marry Jacob without ever setting eyes on him. Then, there is Lina, a Native American whose tribe was wiped out by smallpox, as well as an eccentric young woman named Sorrow, the only survivor of a shipwreck, among others.
Love is at the center of this story, but, as with most of Morrison's work, love is both redemptive and destructive. Thus, the story is also about the oppossite of love: betrayal. As the characters struggle to survive in the American wilderness, in a world where Jacob could "ride for hours with no company but geese flying over inland waterways," they come to realize that even the best intentions can go awry. There aren't bad people, but they are living in a beautiful, brutal brave new world, a world where religious warfare, racial hatred, class struggle and sudden death threaten everything of value they struggle to build.
Morrison once said, "I am really happy when I read something, particularly about black people, when it is not so simple minded... when it is not set up in some sociological equation where all the villains do this and all the whites are heroes, because it just makes black people boring; and they are not. I have never yet met a boring black person." Her early work champions the black community not merely because she writes about it so well, or even because she opens up its private agonies and triumphs, but because she refused to type cast. She created real characters that are involved in everyday situations, characters that possess fallible and unique personalities. As she put it, she sought to portray her characters' "relationship to the earth, to society, to work, and to each other, to find complexity and subtlety."
I think, too, that Morrison's focus, especially in "Beloved," tends to be on the history that blacks have suffered as American slaves, and as the so-called "inferior" race, because she hopes that in reliving the pain through fiction a mass healing, as well as a mass recognition of what actually took place, can be achieved.
This is noble work, but, at least in her earlier fiction, it was also entertaining work. Unfortunately, I cannot really say this is true of "A Mercy." With the exception of Rebekka, whose haunting, bitter memories of lost joy I can easily sympathize with, most of her characters fall flat. I just could not identify with their inner struggles and desires. Most of them come off as types, or as child-like fairytale characters lost in an immense, mythical wilderness. While Morrison's prose is as poetic and beautifully crafted as ever, her storytelling, at least for me, loses much of its power and suspense in her latest work.
Still, there are deeply moving passages in "A Mercy," and one of them occurs toward the end of the story when Scully, an indentured servant, analyzes the group of outcasts Jacob managed to assemble: "They once thought they were a kind of family because 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. Minus bloodlines, he saw nothing yet on the horizon to unite them. Nevertheless, remembering how the curate described what existed before creation, Scully saw dark matter out there, thick, unknowable, aching to be made into a world." In this lyrical passage Scully could be describing the infant country, as well, as it struggled to become what it is today. I sometimes think it still is unclear that there is anything "on the horizon to unite[us]."
There are plenty of brilliant moments like this in "A Mercy" that recall the depth of Morrison's earlier work and make "A Mercy" worth reading in spite of its considerable flaws.
Book Review: "I don't think God knows who we are. I think He would like us, if He knew us, but I don't think He knows about us."
Summary: 5 Stars
(4.5 stars) Continuing themes that she has been developing since the start of her career, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison creates an intense and involving philosophical, Biblical, and feminist novel set in the Atlantic colonies between 1682 and 1690. Her impressionistic story traces slavery from its early roots, using unique voices--African, Native American, and white--while moving back and forth in time. The primary speaker is Florens, a 16-year-old African slave, who tells the reader at the outset that this is a confession, "full of curiosities," and that she has committed a bloody, once-in-a-lifetime crime. In a flashback to 1682, we learn that when Florens was only eight years old, her mother suggested to the Maryland planter who owned the family, that Florens be given to New York farmer Jacob Vaark to settle a debt. Florens never understands why she was abandoned by her mother.
Florens lives and works for the next eight years on Vaark's rural New York farm. Lina, a Native American, who works with her, tells in a parallel narrative how she became one of a handful of survivors of a plague that killed her tribe. Vaark's wife Rebekkah describes leaving England for New York to be married to a man she has never seen. The deaths of their subsequent children are devastating, and Vaark is hoping that eight-year-old Florens will help alleviate Rebekkah's loneliness. Vaark, himself an orphan and poorhouse survivor, describes his journeys from New York to Maryland and Virginia, commenting on the role of religion in the culture of the different colonies, along with their attitudes toward slavery.
All these characters are bereft of their roots, struggling to survive in an alien environment filled with danger and disease. When smallpox threatens Rebekkah's life in 1692, Florens, now sixteen, is sent to find a black freedman who has some knowledge of herbal medicines. Her journey is dangerous, ultimately proving to be the turning point in her life.
Morrison examines the roots of racism going back to slavery's earliest days, providing glimpses of the various religious practices of the time, and showing how all the women are victimized. They are "of and for men," people who "never shape the world, The world shapes us." As the women journey toward self-enlightenment, Morrison describes their progress in often Biblical cadences, and by the end of this novel, the reader understands what "a mercy" really means. An intense and thought-provoking look at various forms of slavery from their beginnings, this short novel has an epic scope, one which admirers of Morrison will celebrate for its intense thematic development, even as they may somewhat regret its sacrifice of fully developed characters. Mary Whipple
Sula
Beloved
Jazz
Song of Solomon (Oprah's Book Club)
Love: A Novel
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
Book Review: 'A Mercy' and An Abandonment...why that title?
Summary: 3 Stars
Toni Morrison has once again, as in her previous novel 'Beloved', taken the reader into the painful inner experience of sacrifice and abandonment involved in slavery. This time she reveals the struggles of several people living and working together: a male slave owner, Jacob Vaark, his wife, Rebekka, two female slaves, Florens and Sorrow, a free black man, and a Native American slave, Lina. As another reviewer noted, all four women in this novel are enslaved.
It seems that Morrison has written something more than historical fiction. Frequently the author slips into a contemporary vernacular when she is inside the head of one of her 17th century characters...going back and forth in time. Is this Morrison's way of getting our 21st century minds inside the slave mind?
The story was difficult to understand, especially Florens' sections. A slave mother gives her young daughter away to 'help' her owner pay off a debt, and I guess hoping that she will find a better life. Is that the 'mercy'? If so, that would be from Jacob's, the new owner's, point of view, since he granted mercy to his debtor by taking the girl instead of the money. Or would it be 'a mercy' from the mother's point of view...that her daughter was taken by a kind man? From Florens' point of view it was an abandonment, so why isn't the novel called "an abandonment", since much of the story is Florens' own narrative? It is most certainly a tragedy, but you know that before reading the book. Florens' thoughts were too difficult for me to follow, with many sentences having no internal logic to them.
In many ways this work seems to be written in a poetic style, the meaning not apparent on the first reading. Some reviewers said they had to reread it several times. I felt that both the story and the characters needed more development and substance.
Book Review: A Dream that Dreams Back at You
Summary: 5 Stars
The harsh, cruel world of 17th century America is laid bare in Toni Morrison's elegiac A MERCY. With her usual mastery of roving narration and interweaving the past, present and future, Morrison paints a haunting image of our nation before it was a nation, when slavery and racism were not yet institutionalized but fear and hatred brewed wildly in an unforgiving stew.
The brilliance of the novel comes from Morrison's ability to paint the picture from so many different sets of eyes in such a constrained form--the book is a mere 167 pages long. Men, women, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, slaves, servants, Europeans, Africans, Natives...orphans...holding on desperately to the ideas of family and duty and hard-work...trying to survive in a brutal new world...all are represented here. The result is a haunting mosaic that is not so much a piece of history, but a dream of a past that was not so long ago in the grand scheme of things.
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.