The Unknown Witch Hunt: A Book Review of The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave
Maren Magnusdatter saw the whale approach the night before the women of the island watched their men, husbands, brothers, and sons, capsized into the ocean depth. There was never a whale; just a young woman’s momentous prophesy of a hulking, cataclysmic future breaching onto the island of Vardø.
Based on true events of a historic storm and proceeding witch hunt by the “Christian” king, The Mercies is a historical fiction book by Kiran Millwood Hargrave. The storm of 1617 wiped out half the population of Vardø, Finnmark (modern day northeast Norway), yet not much is recorded of the personal details of the surviving women. It was Hargrave’s intent to write into the echoing void and let the women’s voices cry out their struggles.
Maren, the protagonist, is without a betrothed, father, and brother. She observed the deadly aftermath of the storm with her prophesy secreted away in her heart. Ursa, the commissioner’s new wife, is afraid every moment of her days. She knows the fate of witches and that it is her husband’s sole job to find them. It does not take long, after the empty roles of the lost men are filled by new men, women’s names are whispered by the accusing few. Maren and Ursa’s friendship feels like the only sanity amidst the hysteria set on by the community’s grief.
In Hargrave’s own comments to Powell’s Book Blog, “But the way they died was not why I wrote The Mercies. I wrote it to examine how they lived, to explore their lives, loves, and friendships in this remote place.”
I have not read a novel this tragic in some time. Hargrave writes the expression of grief like poetry and the sense of longing like epic stanzas. I felt the pain of loss deeply while reading The Mercies. What struck me most of all was how desperate Maren, the main narrator, felt all her life. In contrast, the events described in the text were sounding boards only to contextualize these humans’ experiences.
Hargrave did flourish in her creative liberties a bit with the plot. Yet, she adamantly states this was her intent in her author’s notes. Hargrave commemorates the life of the women from Vardø so readers are upturned by their deaths. I appreciated Hargrave’s choices even if they were not historically supported or comfortable for the modern reader.
As many of the other works in the historical fiction genre of the past five years, The Mercies focuses on the marginalized, female voice. Hargrave penned a real event where all the men are killed off by page one. Personally, I find it harder and harder to swallow the stack of fiction recounting most men in history as either evil, harsh, or exploitive.
Similarly felt by Emily Barton of The New York Times, “A reader might guess where a story involving a stern Scottish witch hunter and a divided village of bereaved women might go. The novel delights not with surprise, but by pursuing its course of action with precision and purpose.”
There must be a way for us to proclaim all the stories from history without creating more of an either/or discrepancy between the genders. There were many neutral moments within The Mercies expressed by the protagonists which made this novel appropriate to a wide variety of readers.
The most impressive component of the book was the style of prose. Hargrave wrote a compelling, imaginative story in The Mercies. The imagery of the foreboding whale from Maren’s dreams stuck with me long after I closed the covers. Hargrave knew her narrators and wrote as if Maren and Ursa were writing their memories down to shed light on the atrocities on Vardø. It was hard not to hear their thoughts being whispered in my own mind. The structure and language did not read like present day writing. Nor were cheap, long passages of dialogue between characters used so words could be shortened and altered to sound like an accent or dialect. The Mercies was largely Maren and Ursa’s stream of conscience. Hargrave completed an excellent work through her written style.
I enjoyed The Mercies for its beautifully crafted voice, complex protagonist, and commitment to the genre. The book I would rate as a seek out at the library. Hargrave lands her book squarely in the historical fiction genre. She is well researched and a brilliant author. The unoriginality of the witch trials as the major plot point bored me because it appears so often in stories about fractured, paranoid communities.
But as Sarah Moss contended in her review published by The Guardian, “The echoing truth here is simultaneously four centuries old and sadly modern. Strong men in power can remake reality and invert reason to defend that power at any cost. Having ordained that women are weak, evidence of women’s strength must be evidence of dark magic – the more a woman survives, the more dangerous she must be. I admired the way The Mercies shows us the patriarchal fear of women’s strength and reason. It is the men in power who give themselves up to hysteria and superstition, abusing their control of others’ lives and deaths in the service of self-justifying conspiracy theories.”
Not often enough are we declaring the histories where the fear of women’s strength and reason was abated through understanding and a willingness to learn. Could we be stuck hearing this echo of men remaking reality because we fixate in our literature on the tragedy of ignorance? Extending mercy, seems to me, like recognizing the hurt while pointing to the healing.
Other historical fiction books that explore the same themes from The Mercies are:
