The friend who recommended this book to me didn’t explain what it was about. She simply told me so fervently how much she’d enjoyed it that I got my phone out there and then (we were in a restaurant) and ordered it. And I’m very glad I did.
I think it’s probably the first novel I’ve read which is set in seventeenth century Norway, the remote part, north of the Arctic Circle, and featuring a female gay love story. Full marks to Millwood Hargrave for originality – and for writing some of the most arresting prose I’ve read for some time in a modern novel.
First the real events which inspired The Mercies (2020): In 1617 a sudden catastrophic storm drowned forty fishermen off the island of Vardo. Soon King Christian, influenced by James VI of Scotland and his famous treatise against witchcraft Daemonologie, was sending in witch hunters to wipe out the extant paganism in the distant north of his country. And it wasn’t long before hapless women were being blamed and ruthlessly murdered for conjuring that famous storm. Of course, I’ve read both factual and fictional accounts of witch hunts in East Anglia and Massachusetts but hadn’t before connected it with Norway although in fact it was a blight which spread right across Europe.
Millwood Hargraves imagines the horror of a whole village of women left without their men in a bleak, underpopulated place which is dark for half the year. Maren struggles at home with her difficult mother and bereaved, rather distant sister-in-law. The latter, is Sami which means she is regarded as “foreign”. The women go out fishing which is strictly against social mores. It’s that that or starve.
Then a commissioner, Absolom Cornet arrives with his new wife Ursa, the other character from whose point of view the story is presented. Ursa has come from a comfortable home in Bergen and is both horrified and flummoxed by the primitive hut they’re assigned. So very tentatively she asks Maren to help her and, gradually a warm friendship evolves. The reader can see and feel where this is going long before the two women involved do. In their different ways each is as naïve and innocent as the other.
Meanwhile Absolom and his cronies are doing (enjoying?) what they regard as their ruthless duty to root out witchcraft in the community, using lies and torture to get what they want. First there’s Maren’s feisty friend Kirsten along with the only woman in the village who has a comfortable – and crucuially – covetable home. Political corruption is, of course, alive and well. The graphic accounts of what happens to these two women highlights the cruelty and despair. And we know that Maren’s sister-in-law with her runes and charms is on the hit list and that Maren herself is in danger. It is terrifyingly convincing.
Millwood Hargrave is very good at the geographical detail. When Maren abseils down a cliff to collect guillemot eggs, you can feel the granite beneath her hands and feet, not to mention the swirling of the icy sea many metres below. We journey northwards with Ursa on a ship too and just reading of the privations and the motion made me feel seasick. And the practical, physical detail is strong. How on earth do you deal with forty washed up bodies when you’re just a group of undernourished women and can’t get a pickaxe into the frozen ground? Answer: You have to store them until spring in a hut which acts as a quasi freezer. For months these women feel obliged visit the bodies of their dead loved ones. It’s heart-wrenching stuff but it’s also uplifitingly affirmative. Somehow most of these women will survive.
Inspired by this. I shall now order and read Millwood Hargrave’s other titles of which there are several. That’s the great thing about reading isn’t it? It’s like a treasure hunt. One good thing always leads to another.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Hollow Crown, Shakespeare on how leaders rise, rule and fall by Eliot A Cohen
