You may or may not agree with the New York Times, which a couple of years ago voted Toni Morrison’s Beloved the greatest work of American fiction of the past quarter century. (What about Updike’s Rabbit novels, you might ask? Or Philip Roth’s American Pastoral? Or Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping? Or, or, or ...). And you may or not agree with the Swedish Academy’s citation, when Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, praising her ‘visionary force’. You may have struggled with the increasingly poetic and mystic drift of her recent novels, Jazz (1992) and Love (2003). But there is no denying that Toni Morrison is a writer to be reckoned with.

Her new novel presents familiar challenges. A Mercy is set in 17th-century America. We know this because, on the second page, a character announces that ‘Florens, she says, it’s 1690.’ It’s good to get the steer: the book has six different narrative voices, all of whom speak in the kind of cryptic, maximal prose which Morrison has evolved in order to convey the complexity of the world she is describing.

Right from the start of her astonishing career, Morrison has sought to elevate storytelling into a kind of myth-making. Her books are all about Slavery, Race, Alienation and Survival, in florid and cursive capitals. Mercy is itself a recurrent motif in her books, and just in case you should miss the import of her tales, she gives her characters useful names like Pilate, and Heed, and Beloved. She doesn’t so much write as incantate.

In A Mercy she establishes her usual antimonies — black and white, natives and Europeans, women and men, enslaved and free — and then goes about carefully blurring the edges and boundaries between them. Shady characters in the new novel include Jacob Vaark, a young trader pursuing the New American Dream.

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