Mercy Among the Children
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Mercy Among the Children: A Novel |
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| Author: | David Adams Richards |
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| Publisher: | Doubleday Canada |
In the years that follow, the self-educated, brilliant and now almost pathologically gentle Sydney holds true to his promise. Yet others in the small rural community in New Brunswick view Sydney’s pacifism as an opportunity to exploit and torment the defenseless Hendersons. Tragedy strikes when a small boy dies as a result of an act of sabotage and revenge gone horribly wrong. It is a death for which Sydney is blamed. Guilty only of being different, Sydney refuses to defend himself and his family. Raised on the books his father has long collected, Sydney’s son Lyle shares a deep respect for the power of words. But when he is forced to watch his family ridiculed and attacked, Lyle turns his back on God and literature, and adopts an aggressive strategy for protecting his mother, sister and brother. In the end it is Lyle who must decide what legacy his family’s tragedy will hold. Amid the squalor of their lives, Sydney and Lyle demonstrate how humanity faces inhumanity, how lies and disappointments cannot and will never destroy truth or human greatness.
Written with the characteristic control, intelligence and compassion for which Richards has been widely acclaimed, Mercy Among the Children is a story set in a particular time and place, yet its message is universal.
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Reviews
Amazon.com
Transpose Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure to New Brunswick’s rugged Miramichi River. Surround Job with loose fists, malicious boots, and cold, gallon wine. Invite the Macbeths over for drinks. Add a lame dog named Scupper Pit and you’ve got the raw ingredients of David Adams Richards’s Mercy Among the Children. Set in an isolated, wind-besieged house with bullet holes in the tarpaper walls, Richards’s novel wonders—pointedly, beautifully—whether goodness is merely a luxury.
At the age of 12, having borne more suffering in his child’s body than any adult should endure, Sydney Henderson vows never to harm another human soul. Turning his back on the violent alcoholism of his upbringing, self-educated Sydney wins the honest respect of the beautiful Elly and the children they bear. Honest respect, however, is rarely a match for fear and base human opportunism. Manipulated, attacked, and abused by a small community eager for a scapegoat, Sydney loses his job, the health of his wife, and, most importantly, the respect of his son Lyle. “There is no worse flaw in man’s character,” Richards knows, “than that of wanting to belong.”
The superb, controlled, and unapologetic Mercy Among the Children is nothing less than an inquiry into human strength. Richards uses the crack of ribs on a frigid night to remind us of the opportunistic populism of much so-called morality. Mercy, which shared Canada’s premier fiction award, the Giller Prize, with Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, combines the hound dog’s attention to locale of fellow Maritimer Alistair MacLeod with the quotidian insight of countryman Timothy Findley’s The Wars, especially its reminder that the emotions behind war also drive fights over who should scrub the dinner dishes. —Darryl Whetter
Barnes and Noble
Award-winning Canadian writer David Adams Richards now brings Americans his gentle and beautiful saga of family, love, and courage in this poignant novel.
Sidney Henderson is an outcast in the rural Canadian mill town in which he has lived out his life. Committed to a pact he made with God never to raise his hand or voice to another living soul, Sidney is no match for the jealous, greedy, and conniving neighbors around him. His goodness, his love of books, and his determination to turn the other cheek, regardless of the cost, are confusing and threatening to them, and they regularly take advantage of his good nature. But his fellow townsfolk are especially incensed when Elly, one of the most beautiful and desirable young women in the community, chooses Sidney as her husband.
In Mercy Among the Children, the story of Sidney’s love for his wife and two children, and of the price he must pay for refusing
to abandon his principles, is told by Lyle, Sidney’s grown son. A child who had initially renounced his father’s values and who later struggled to understand and appreciate them, his point of view makes Richards’ novel as much a story about the relationship between fathers and sons as it is about the nature of good and evil.
Sidney and Elly are two of the most gracious and compassionate characters we’ve yet to encounter in contemporary literature. And their engrossing story of loss and strength is one that haunts.
(Fall 2001 Selection)
