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Writer's pictureSteph

Book review: The Mercies

My first encounter with Kiran Millwood-Hargrave's writing was her children's novel, The Girl of Ink and Stars, which was a Waterstones book of the month before going on to win the company's annual children's prize. I loved its map-making heroine who was fiercely protective of her friends and missing father, but surprised at the violent edge of some of the action scenes in a children's book. So I knew, when Millwood-Hargrave's first adult novel was announced, that it had the potential to be razor-sharp and take no prisoners. It didn't disappoint.


The Mercies has many hallmarks of the sort of book I love to read. A historical setting, somewhere remote and forbidding, and the mere suggestion of witchcraft is a combination designed to pique my interest, and this deliciously tense novel delivered on every single promise.


Vardo, a fishing settlement on the very edge of Scandinavia, is brilliantly conjured in all its bleak beauty, a clifftop scatter of wooden huts completely at the mercy (pun intended) of the elements. When a vicious storm wipes out every fisherman, leaving only women alive, the survivors must eke out a living amidst mounting tension, with fear for their future threatening to drive the women apart rather than draw them together in their peril.


You'd like to think that a group of hardened fishermen's wives and daughters would pull together and form a new sense of community following their collective tragedy. Some of them make a good start at it, like the book's heroine Maren and the older Kirsten, who relishes the chance to wear trousers and command her own fishing boat.


But of course, this is the seventeenth century, and Puritanical men everywhere are taking it upon themselves to find the devil in all sorts of places, including wayward women. So the arrival of Absalom Cornet (great name) into this already fractious town spells danger.


Maren is a wonderful character. Her fear is so palpable, and she's a keen observer, noticing the slightest shifts in tension and goodwill that occur in her community. Every sentence is laced with frustration for her grieving mother, unwilling to even try and survive; and her enigmatic sister-in-law, a Sami woman who shuts herself off entirely after the tragedy and doesn't seem to acknowledge the danger that faces her once Cornet arrives on the scene.


But Maren realises every flicker of fear, every minute threat, and understands how carefully they all must tread around old enmities and new suspicions. I was reminded of the heights of tension reached in The Handmaid's Tale, the dreadful knowledge that one wrong move will lead to something catastrophic for the women, brought on by men with more power than anyone ought to have.





I really appreciated this portrayal of the witch-hunts. I'm something of an expert having studied Early Modern witches in great detail, and what many novels get wrong is the explicit nature of their witchcraft: the women are always healers, surrounded by potions and herbs, following some psuedo-pagan religion. In fact, witches were not usually wizened old women who lived on the edge of the village and offered help with childbirth. Witches could be anyone, your neighbour, your mother, your daughter, and that's what makes the witch-hunting mindset so scary.


Suspicion often centred around things which seem impossibly trivial and domestic to us now, like borrowed bowls or spoiled milk, but which meant the difference between life and death to women at the time who managed their households. I loved how The Mercies captured this sense that ordinary relationships between neighbours could shift from cordial indifference to vicious threats, with tragedy bringing the division between dislike and outright accusation down to a hair's breadth.


I was also reminded of Atwood's Offred secreting the butter from her meagre meal to keep her hands from getting dry. In The Mercies, every last scrap of food and cloth is accounted for; it must be fished, killed, skinned, butchered, rationed, stored. It's marvellous how much detail Millwood-Hargrave was able to create. The sense of historical place is so vivid and real, and the reader feels along with Ursa, Cornet's terrified wife from the city, how naive we are for not realising the workload and the strength required merely to survive in such a place. To eat, to keep warm.


In this claustrophobic atmosphere, up against misogyny and the elements, the connection between Maren and Ursa surprised and frightened me. I wanted so desperately for poor abused Ursa to find some happiness, and for Maren to have the courage to continue resisting Cornet's threats. The fact that they discovered this in each other was a thrilling, momentary victory and also wound the tension even higher, as I began to dread the inevitable discovery of their closeness.


The entire novel is written on the edge of a knife, balancing between the visceral terror of persecution, and the simple joy to be found in eking out a life with those who share a bond of love. From the harsh landscape to the overbearing misogyny, the difficulties of seventeenth century rural life to the overwhelming reality of grief, The Mercies paints a picture of women trying to survive against the odds, and it's a fight that is both terrifying and affirming.


As ever, thanks to the publishers for my proof copy.


My rating: 5 stars


You can also read my reviews on Waterstones.com here!


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