York lives up to accolades, awards

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/01/2003 (8586 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IN Mercy, Winnipeg author Alissa York makes a solid debut as a novelist and substantiates the accolades and awards she has attracted for her short stories.

Mercy is constructed of two connected parts of approximately equal length, both set in the fictional Manitoba town of Mercy and a nearby black-spruce bog. The first section opens in June 1948 when love, lust, several varieties of childhood abuse and a range of consuming passions entwine to destroy the lives of three of the novel’s four main characters.

These are: Mathilda, 19, rescued from a Winnipeg orphanage 10 years earlier by her aunt, who is the longtime housekeeper at Mercy’s Church of St. Mary Immaculate; Thomas Rose, the town’s butcher, who has waited four long years for Mathilda to be old enough to marry; and the youthful Father August Day, St. Mary’s new priest.

The fourth significant voice in this section is that of a visionary drunk with the marvellously appropriate name of Castor; he lives in the middle of the bog, in a house he’s constructed of empty liquor bottles.

From the moment she sets eyes on the young priest, Mathilda can love no other.

Her taste is beyond question: the priest is young, attractive, educated, while her new husband is dull, with a “helpless smile” and a nearly pathological passion for killing and butchering. At one point, he fashions a likeness of his face in head cheese and displays it proudly in the cooler.

It is moot whether Mathilda tempts the young priest into sin or whether he is drawn into it by his own past associations, but fall from grace they do, and the outcome sets the scene for the second section of the book.

It is now more than 50 years later. Divine retribution has been exacted on Carl Mann, evangelist preacher, for sins of the flesh committed, but a vision has offered him hope for his redemption.

He is determined to fill in the black-spruce bog near Mercy and build a children’s camp. “Bog Mary,” 53, raised from babyhood by the now-dead Castor, is determined to prevent development — and she is a fortunate spider indeed when a great grey owl attacks and fells the preacher close to her house of bottles.

For a night she works to raise Mann’s environmental consciousness while ministering to his wounds.

Where the first half of York’s novel was a dark and twisting interplay of images, characters and themes — reaching deep into the reader and finding resonance there — the second is disappointingly lightweight.

The sinful preacher, the ambitious female mayor plagued by a food obsession, Mary the medicine woman: these are all characters we’ve seen before.

The latter speaks with a worldly wisdom and eloquence that belies her more than 50 years of relative isolation, straining the credulity of the reader.

In 1999, York won the prestigious Journey Prize for her short story The Back of the Bear’s Mouth and received acclaim for her debut collection Any Given Power.

Here, in her debut with a major publisher, she has taken on admirably large subjects from original sin to environmental preservation and against that backdrop she’s created some intriguing characters and fashioned an intelligent and largely riveting story.

Her language is frequently spectacular: “The light amazed him– shafts of it mid-air, pools on the floorboards or trapped among the pews, great unnamed shapes shimmering on the walls. Crimson lapped over cobalt, gold over living green. He knelt long enough to witness its movement, a glacial benediction blessing every surface it stained.”

York may have applied a few of the daubs of paint to the small town she created with less than perfect skill, but there is no doubting her capability and promise. In Mercy, she has made a world.

Mary W. Walters is the author of two novels, The Woman Upstairs and Biters, and Cool, a collection of short stories. She recently moved from Alberta to Saskatchewan, where she is completing her third novel.