Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Magnusdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the sea break into a sudden and reckless storm. Forty fishermen, including her brother and father, are drowned and left broken on the rocks below. With the menfolk wiped out, the women of the tiny Arctic town of Vardø must fend for themselves.
The novel delights not with surprise, but by pursuing its course of action with precision and purpose. Hargrave spares the reader no gory details, whether of birth, miscarriage or the scent of a body burning at the stake. The Mercies is among the best novels I’ve read in years. In addition to its beautiful writing, its subject matter is both enduring and timely ... as appropriate to its historical context as it is to our time.
I find that any book about witch trials creates first and foremost a feeling of impotent helplessness. What logic and reason can be applied when the law embraces malicious nonsense? And given that there's more than enough in the present to feel impotent and helpless about, what is the appeal of exploring women's senseless suffering 400 years in the past? ... For me, the appeal is in watching them find strength in each other. They labor, they teach each other, and they face the cruel sea and the even more capricious brutality of men. In every wind-blown crag and damp crevice of this book, women find ways to survive and live or die on their own terms ... In the end, I don't know that it was the book I wanted it to be, but it was unapologetically itself. The Mercies smolders more intensely than a pyre, whirling history's ashes defiantly into the wind.
... elegant and chilling ... begins with the frenzy of the storm and its deadly aftermath and finishes on a similar crescendo as the trial reaches its culmination. For the novel’s long middle, Hargrave slows the narrative down to explore the fascinating daily lives of a matriarchy isolated in the frozen north ... Hargrave teases out compelling questions about the effects of misogyny and xenophobia on the lives of women, both in the book’s 17th-century world and our own 21st-century world. Her unflinching depiction of the witch trials captures the visceral horror of the policing of women’s bodies, as well as the petty jealousies and power grabs that motivate it ... Though Hargrave’s prose is accomplished and poised, the characters' emotional lives often feel held at arm’s length. These are a taciturn people living in a cold land, and though the coldness of the book’s narrative voice fits that world, there are times when the retrained storytelling feels mismatched with the heat and drama of the book’s events ... Patient readers will find an exquisitely written story that works both as a parable for our times and as an absorbing account of women finding power and grace and love even under the most harrowing circumstances.
