Charting a shaken America

FICTION: A MercyBy Toni Morrison Chatto, 165pp, £15.99

A HANDFUL OF 17th century stock players stumble through their days, lives lived out under the shadow of slavery and inequality. Women hope at best to become wives, if they are lucky the children they bear may be born alive, they may even survive. A daughter will be handed over as a way of paying a debt.

Cultures meet and clash in an emerging society; America must deal with Europe and all it imposes on a new world. A black man may be a slave or a dangerously free outsider whose existence will irritate the less free.

Toni Morrison's first novel in five years is a rambling lamentation, an operatic song of sexual and racial politics of sorts, sung by thinly drawn characters whose thoughts dart freely across the pages. A Mercy is set in 1690, its events are contemporaneous with those of the Battle of the Boyne.

Initially it appears that Morrison is intent on catching the voice that sustained Beloved (1986), her fourth and defining novel and the one that helped win her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. In it she evoked the darkest, most shameful chapter of America's history, slavery. Never before or since had America treated its own so badly. Beloved sang out against injustice, a dead baby was the truth teller.

And present day, pre-election America continues to lick its wounds. Not even the civil rights movement in all its courage quite achieved the impact of Beloved, Morrison's dramatic ghost story in which mother love seemed to symbolise love of country and love of one's fellow man. This new book attempts to replicate that note of defiance.

A shaken America continues to fear for the future, aware that further horrors are on the way. Morrison is a political writer whose career theme has focussed on the injustices men and women perpetrate on each other. A Mercy looks even further back into the past, to an America that is all too often lost.

It is about the tentative European settlers taming a dark northern landscape. As ever, the narrative resounds with Morrison's theatrical prose: "Don't be afraid. My telling can't hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark. . ." The characters, young girls and slaves, tell their stories in an archly written, lyric cacophony of sounds and images. There are others, a young woman from England, widowed when her merchant husband dies of fever. Death and illness stalk the pages, girls travel across the sea to face a future of prostitution.

Morrison's heightened prose aspires to an urgency it never quite achieves as the narrative is oppressively, determinedly lyrical.

A young girl addresses her lover: "My head is light with the confusion of two things, hunger for you and scare if I am lost. . . From the day you disappear I dream and plot." As early as the forced opening chapter, the narrative is caught in an unconvincing, dream-like lack of direction.

If Morrison is looking to establish a chorus, this is not the way to do it. Urgency enabled two of her novels, Beloved and Jazz (1992), - which remains her finest book - penetrate the consciousness of her country's collective memory and with it, the national identity.

Paradise (1998), a daring, important performance, confirms how well Morrison can control her material. This disappointingly pretentious new work, which would be far more effective as a radio drama, as individual voices may well provide it with some substance, quickly becomes lost in a succession of daring images that never unite into anything cohesive. It is as if Morrison is merely striving towards a theatrical effect. One character, Jacob, does emerge as a three-dimensional personality. Hardworking and determined, he creates a home for his wife, a woman forced to live with the memory of her dead children. Jacob however also dies, felled by a fever.

Florena, the young girl who has arrived at the homestead as a partial payment for a debt is content in the love of an older servant, Lina, a native American. However Florena then discovers a different kind of love with a black man, a blacksmith who is free and able to take payment for his work.

All the while throughout the narrative, which undulates between the thoughts of the characters, lies the suspicion that Morrison may have intended this as a spoken work which draws on some of the pioneering cultures that contributed to the building of America. But nothing is developed. It is sketchy and melodramatic, rife with statements such as "The sky is the colour of currents."

Elsewhere we are told of another character, the merchant's widow to be: "Rebekka's understanding of God was faint, except as a larger kind of king, but she quieted the shame of insufficient devotion by assuming that He could be no grander nor better than the imagination of the believer. . .."

The females exist under the threat of exploitation. It is a political work but one in which the politics are as cloudily presented as the characterisation. Morrison is drawing on historical realities, settlers arriving and staking their claim yet the effect is so vague. It is as if she feels that theatricality and rhetoric can achieve political relevance.

It is impossible not to read A Mercy in the context of the present political dilemma facing the US, but then the sheer act of trying to read what is a chaotic, over-written and vague work is rather like tossing a basket of coloured ribbons into the air and trying to make sense of the patterns as they fall to the floor.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times