David Adams Richards: Mercy Among the Children

By MARGIE THOMSON

What is it about the harsh backblocks, the grungy, poor communities of Canada's far reaches that inspires such stunning fiction as Alistair MacLeod's No Great Mischief, and now this from David Adams Richards?

Canada's publishing scene shares some characteristics with New Zealand's: both countries produce some very good fiction that is not often read outside their own limited domestic markets.

Carol Shields, for instance, wrote for years before she was "discovered" by first the British and then the United States markets.

Likewise, Richards is huge in Canada but not - yet - well known elsewhere. He has won many awards, including Canada's most prestigious literary award, the Giller Prize, which he last year shared with Michael Ondaatje. He has been writing full time since his early 20s (he's 50 now) but, with his writing initially criticised for being too bleak or too regional as well as unfashionably concerned with good and evil, it was years before he started to make money from his art.

His latest work, Mercy Among the Children, is likely to be the one to propel him into international consciousness - and what a novel it is, its scope as huge as Canada itself, as deep as history, although it almost all takes place in the last two decades of the 20th century, in a tiny riverside settlement in the remote Miramichi region of New Brunswick.

As a boy, Sydney Henderson knocks Connie Devlin off the church roof and, as Connie lies still at the foot of the church, Sydney vows to God that if Connie survives, he will never raise hand or voice to another living soul.

Connie walks away laughing, and Sydney begins his life of self-destructive goodness.

Unfortunately, the world in which he finds himself - our world - is not one in which saintliness, generosity and turning the other cheek are viewed with anything other than acute suspicion.

Sydney's background is of extreme poverty and abuse. Nevertheless, he has a passion to educate himself and spends all his money on books, absorbing the ideas of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Marcus Aurelius and many others whose names are alien and feared by those around him. He applies to go to university but is spurned by a professor who, despite his famous liberality, cannot see beyond his own assumptions about the bedraggled man in front of him.

To the fury of his detractors, Sydney attracts the love of the beautiful, gentle Elly, who marries him and goes to live with him in his freezing shack. They have three children and an enduring love but, beyond that, lives of incredible misfortune, not only because of the evil and ignorance of those around them, but because of Sydney's refusal to defend himself by actions or even words. It is his refusal to belittle others by denying even their false accusations against him that sees him blamed for a series of crimes, including the death of a mentally retarded boy.

But Sydney believes to his dying day - and against most evidence - that truth will out, and that people who behave badly to others ultimately damage only themselves.

These are biblical themes with a humanistic twist. Christ's injunction that whatever we do to each other we do to Him is changed instead to a doctrine of personal culpability where it is the perpetrator who will pay the price, perhaps literally, perhaps spiritually.

But for much of the novel we find this as hard to believe as does Sydney's older son Lyle, the narrator of this sad story who is disenchanted and spiritually destroyed by his father's refusal to act in his own or his family's defence, and instead embarks on a tortured but morally empty life of drinking and violence.

What is greatness? What is failure? Richards' answers are not what you might expect, and a number of shibboleths come tumbling down under his penmanship: educated liberalism, the Church's charity, the humanity of social work, modern enlightenment about past wrongs, the idea that the advancement of time means social progress.

What Richards offers is the kind of compassion not achieved by some of his educated characters: the ability to look deeper than just the immediate fact, into cause and effect, into the true nature of things.

Humanity and inhumanity, justice and damnation are his themes, and they connect his grimy, localised cast of characters with all the rest of us.

Such morality as this stunning book proposes seems out of step with the jingoistic times we live in, but all the more urgently needing consideration for that.

Jonathan Cape

$34.95

* Margie Thomson is an Auckland journalist.