No mercy from melodrama in a complex narrative

Having once been faced with the possible death of another youth, Sydney Henderson makes a pact with God. The youth's life is spared and Henderson remains true to what he sees as his side of the bargain. But his promise acquires an extreme significance for him, effectively rendering him too passive to function within the vicious, mean-minded New Brunswick community he inhabits. Living by his determined code of self-imposed saintly forgiveness, which denies him the right of protecting himself from the crimes of which he is accused, Henderson certainly tests the patience of his son, Lyle, the narrator, never mind the reader.

Mercy Among the Children comes with the endorsement of having shared the prestigious Canadian Giller Prize with Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost. Yet, for all the narrative's chain of suspense, the novel never shakes off the melodramatic tone it acquires in the opening sequence, a prologue in which the awkward narrative structure is established. Lyle comes to tell his story to a retired policeman who has himself become "a buffer between out-of-fashion men and those who wished to change the life of those men". Once Lyle begins his account, there is no denying Richards has created a powerful cast of characters, misfits and dreamers, very few of whom have any notion of the truth. But the telling is laboured. Most of the many twists rely upon the disclosing of yet another act of deception.

The strongly philosophical, near-religious theme with its concentration of retribution and redemption that frequently tests the narrative, ultimately proves less problematic than the use of Lyle as narrator. Throughout the novel, the tension between Lyle's direct reporting of what he has seen and his supposed overly literary recreation of scenes he was not privy to, overwhelms the book. Also, by having Henderson self-educated beyond the contents of most university course lists, Richards strains the credibility of a novel that depends on all manner of stretching belief. Not to mention the amount of literary references his son Lyle, who is eventually forced by life to exorcise his demons through random and planned acts of violence, calls upon.

That said, the story, for all its pretensions, is certainly sufficiently complex, and it is mainly the characterisation that rescues Richards from many potential pitfalls. Sex, money and guilt are heady motivations and they drive most of the protagonists, who sound convincing only when they are arguing. Also, Henderson's refusal to defend himself when accused of a litany of crimes, most of the accusations based on his stormy pre-pact-with-God youth, ensure the narrative has some momentum. It is a strange story; Henderson's refusal to engage with Cynthia, the local wanton, is the root of most of his problems. Instead he marries the lovely Elly, whose tragic childhood and time spent in an orphanage have somehow rendered her the exact opposite of streetwise but prey to every man who sees her. Elly's attempts to ward off sex-hungry men are almost comic, yet then so too are many of the tragedies that drive the narrative. When the youth - whose survival the young Henderson had prayed for - has his suicide bid interrupted by the narrator, he remarks, on being cut down, "tea would be nice".

Although local opinion comes to act as a form of unofficial chorus, it is interesting the way Richards detects the shifts in this gossip that move from hostility to sympathy and back. Everyone appears to hate Henderson more for his acquired learning - the simple act of quoting from King Lear is seen as proof of his guilt - than for whatever crime he may have committed.

His major offence, however, is having married Elly. Henderson and his child-wife emerge as kindly innocents who accept their poverty, her many miscarriages and the hardship of having an albino daughter amidst people who jeer Henderson and forgive nothing. The coarseness of what passes for dialogue is at variance with Henderson's literary musings. Central to their lives is the local tycoon Leo McVicer who has fathered many children, made a fortune and is now about to lose it through a legal battle. His initial relationship with Henderson's father continues with the family through the years. Richards sets up his opposites; the saintly improbable Henderson on one hand; on the other, Mat Pit a local thug and his angry, white trash sister Cynthia.

At the heart of the narrative is the disease nurtured through Leo's business, a mill works on the river. Despite the suffering and cruelty - the plight of several sacrificial children and the particularly heroic endurance of Lyle's small brother - Mercy Among the Children never achieves the moral grandeur it is clearly striving for. Near the end of the novel when Lyle speaks of the dead girl he once loved and says "At night I speak to her and make plans. Once I visited her grave and sat down and cried", Richards cannot leave it at that. Instead he lards on the literary references; "But as Camus has informed us, I was only crying over something that no longer exists - is putrid and dead." And this from a narrator who claims to distrust books because of what they did to his father.

At times, the sheer badness and greed of some of the characters acquires a near-comic dimension, while the goodness or, rather, innocence of others is too simplistically handled. In Henderson's desperate deal lies the roots of much failure and grief. Such is the quality of contemporary Canadian fiction at its finest that we have come to expect much and almost feel cheated when, as in this case, it is flat and amateurish. Though presented as a great novel, this disappointingly clunky melodrama of good and evil, despair and hope falls far short of what it sets out to achieve, not least because of the limitations of a narrative voice that consistently fails to impress as either witness or commentator.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times