Mercy Among Children Paperback - 2001
by Richards, David Adams
- Used
- Paperback
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Anchor Canada, 2001. Paperback. Like New. Pages are clean and are not marred by notes or folds of any kind. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less.Dust jacket quality is not guaranteed.
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Details
- Title Mercy Among Children
- Author Richards, David Adams
- Binding Paperback
- Edition First Thus
- Condition New
- Pages 432
- Volumes 1
- Language ENG
- Publisher Anchor Canada, Toronto, ON, Canada
- Date 2001
- Bookseller's Inventory # G0385259956I2N00
- ISBN 9780385259958 / 0385259956
- Weight 0.76 lbs (0.34 kg)
- Dimensions 8 x 5 x 1.1 in (20.32 x 12.70 x 2.79 cm)
- Dewey Decimal Code FIC
From the publisher
David Adams Richards was born in 1950 in Newcastle, New Brunswick, the third of six children in a working-class family. Though he didn’t grow up as poor as Lyle, he knew something about feeling different in a rural community, having a “townie” father who owned a movie theatre and suffered from narcolepsy. He found his calling at the age of fourteen, after reading Oliver Twist, and embarked on a life of extraordinary purpose, which he says didn’t help the family finances: "Sometimes…I thought it would be better if I were a plumber, but I wouldn’t be very good."
He studied literature at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, and while working on a second novel he attended an informal weekly writers workshop, known as the Ice House Gang for the converted storage room where they met. There he received encouragement from established writers including the late Alden Nowlan, whom he names as an important influence along with Faulkner, Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Emily Bronte. He published a book of poetry, Small Heroics, in the New Brunswick Chapbooks Series in 1972. When the first five chapters of The Coming of Winter won the Norma Epstein Prize for Creative Writing in 1973, he left university three credits short of his degree to write full-time; the book was published the following year, and translated into Russian.
He and his wife Peggy, who had met at 17 and married at 21, spent several years travelling in Canada, Australia and Europe (they particularly loved Spain), where he found he could write about the Miramichi he loved regardless of where he lived. Gradually, he took postings as writer-in-residence at universities in New Brunswick, Ottawa, Alberta, and Virginia. In 1997, they moved to Toronto, where they now live with their two young sons, John Thomas and Anton, and their dog Roo. Living in Toronto where Peggy has family allows the rest of the family to live a normal life when Richards is absorbed in his work and writing late at night.
Though Richards has won or been nominated for almost every award for which he's been eligible, one of only three writers to win both fiction and non-fiction categories of the Governor General’s Award, his writing was often criticized for being too bleak or too regional, and it was years before he made money. He laughs at the sales of his early work: “For a long while if I sold 200 books, I’d be saying: Oh, great! And, you know, a $50 advance! That's great. I only worked three years, I don't know if I can spend $50.”
His screenwriting career was launched in 1987 with the premiere of Tuesday, Wednesday. The screen play for Small Gifts, a Christmas special first aired on the CBC in 1994, received international acclaim at the New York Film Festival and won him his first Gemini; he won his second for the screen adaptation of For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down. He continues to adapt his own work for the screen.
As he documented in a passionate and humorous meditation, Lines on the Water, he loves fly-fishing on the Miramichi river. No longer a resident, he was recently made an honorary Miramichier by the people of New Brunswick so he could get a fishing licence. He has also written a non-fiction book on the place of hockey in the Canadian soul, and is working on a hunting book, though hasn’t hunted big game for several years.
His fiction shows his deep interest in rural men and women, who are “extremely condescended to and misunderstood so much of the time”. Characters like Cynthia and Mat Pit and Leo McVicer he sees as brilliant and strong, and not particularly unusual in a rural environment. He remembers people who were “reading the classics when they were 11-years-old and lived in a dirt shack”, like Sydney Henderson.
Hand in hand with this goes a fascination with power, whether economic or intellectual, and its capacity for corruption. He recalls his university years during the Vietnam War, when “power was the main focus of the people”, and seeing friends use the peace movement for their own gain. “I saw how lives were bullied and humiliated by this… And Peggy and I became outcasts because I refused to participate... I thought that if power is so easily attained and misused by people who say they're for peace then there must be something fundamentally wrong with it… I'm not saying these people are good or bad, I'm just saying it's a human failing.”
He admires writers who “leave a lot unsaid”, and tries to put that quality into his own work now, having pared down his technique. His short stories and articles have been published in literary magazines and anthologies, and he has two unpublished plays, The Dungarvan Whooper and Water Carriers, Bones and Earls: the Life of François Villon, and one unpublished novel, Donna. His literary papers were acquired in 1994 by the University of New Brunswick.
He studied literature at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, and while working on a second novel he attended an informal weekly writers workshop, known as the Ice House Gang for the converted storage room where they met. There he received encouragement from established writers including the late Alden Nowlan, whom he names as an important influence along with Faulkner, Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Emily Bronte. He published a book of poetry, Small Heroics, in the New Brunswick Chapbooks Series in 1972. When the first five chapters of The Coming of Winter won the Norma Epstein Prize for Creative Writing in 1973, he left university three credits short of his degree to write full-time; the book was published the following year, and translated into Russian.
He and his wife Peggy, who had met at 17 and married at 21, spent several years travelling in Canada, Australia and Europe (they particularly loved Spain), where he found he could write about the Miramichi he loved regardless of where he lived. Gradually, he took postings as writer-in-residence at universities in New Brunswick, Ottawa, Alberta, and Virginia. In 1997, they moved to Toronto, where they now live with their two young sons, John Thomas and Anton, and their dog Roo. Living in Toronto where Peggy has family allows the rest of the family to live a normal life when Richards is absorbed in his work and writing late at night.
Though Richards has won or been nominated for almost every award for which he's been eligible, one of only three writers to win both fiction and non-fiction categories of the Governor General’s Award, his writing was often criticized for being too bleak or too regional, and it was years before he made money. He laughs at the sales of his early work: “For a long while if I sold 200 books, I’d be saying: Oh, great! And, you know, a $50 advance! That's great. I only worked three years, I don't know if I can spend $50.”
His screenwriting career was launched in 1987 with the premiere of Tuesday, Wednesday. The screen play for Small Gifts, a Christmas special first aired on the CBC in 1994, received international acclaim at the New York Film Festival and won him his first Gemini; he won his second for the screen adaptation of For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down. He continues to adapt his own work for the screen.
As he documented in a passionate and humorous meditation, Lines on the Water, he loves fly-fishing on the Miramichi river. No longer a resident, he was recently made an honorary Miramichier by the people of New Brunswick so he could get a fishing licence. He has also written a non-fiction book on the place of hockey in the Canadian soul, and is working on a hunting book, though hasn’t hunted big game for several years.
His fiction shows his deep interest in rural men and women, who are “extremely condescended to and misunderstood so much of the time”. Characters like Cynthia and Mat Pit and Leo McVicer he sees as brilliant and strong, and not particularly unusual in a rural environment. He remembers people who were “reading the classics when they were 11-years-old and lived in a dirt shack”, like Sydney Henderson.
Hand in hand with this goes a fascination with power, whether economic or intellectual, and its capacity for corruption. He recalls his university years during the Vietnam War, when “power was the main focus of the people”, and seeing friends use the peace movement for their own gain. “I saw how lives were bullied and humiliated by this… And Peggy and I became outcasts because I refused to participate... I thought that if power is so easily attained and misused by people who say they're for peace then there must be something fundamentally wrong with it… I'm not saying these people are good or bad, I'm just saying it's a human failing.”
He admires writers who “leave a lot unsaid”, and tries to put that quality into his own work now, having pared down his technique. His short stories and articles have been published in literary magazines and anthologies, and he has two unpublished plays, The Dungarvan Whooper and Water Carriers, Bones and Earls: the Life of François Villon, and one unpublished novel, Donna. His literary papers were acquired in 1994 by the University of New Brunswick.
Categories
Excerpt
The small Catholic churches here are all the same, white clapboard drenched with snow or blistering under a northern sun, their interiors smelling of confessionals and pale statues of the Madonna. Our mother, Elly Henderson, took us to them all along our tract of road — thinking that solace would come.
In November the lights shone after seven o'clock on the stained-glass windows. The windows show the crucifixion or one of the saints praying. The hills where those saints lived and dropped their blood look soft, distant and blue; the roads wind like purple ribbons toward the Mount of Olives. It is all so different from real nature with its roaring waters over valleys of harsh timber where I tore an inch and a half of skin from my calves. Or Miramichi bogs of cedar and tamarack and the pungent smell of wet moosehide as the wounded moose still bellows in dark wood. I often wanted to enter the world of the stained glass — to find myself walking along the purple road, with the Mount of Olives behind me. I suppose because I wanted to be good, and my mother wanted goodness for me. I wanted too to escape the obligation I had toward my own destiny, my family, my sister and brother who were more real to me than a herd of saints.
My father's name was Sydney Henderson. He was born in a shack off Highway 11, a highway only Maritimers could know — a strip of asphalt through stunted trees and wild dead fields against the edge of a cold sky.
He did poorly in school but at church became the ward of Father Porier. He was given the job of washing Porier's car and cleaning his house. He was an altar boy who served mass every winter morning at seven. He did this for three years, from the age of eight to eleven.
Then one day there was a falling-out, an "incident," and Father Porier's Pontiac never again came down the lane to deliver him home, nor did Father ever again trudge off to the rectory to clean the priest's boots. Nor did he know that his own father would take the priest's side and beat him one Sunday in front of most of the parishioners on the church steps. This became Father's first disobedience, not against anything but the structure of things. I have come to learn, however, that this is not at all a common disobedience.
Back then, harsh physical labour seemed the only thing generations of Canadians like my grandfather considered work. So by thirteen my father wore boots and checked jackets, and quit school to work in the woods, in obligation to his father. He would spend days with little to comfort him. He was to need this strength, a strength of character, later on. He had big hands like a pulpcutter, wore thick glasses, and his hair was short, shaved up the side of his head like a zek in some Russian prison camp.
He worked crossing back and forth over that bleak highway every day; when the June sky was black with no-see-ums, or all winter when the horse dung froze as it hit the ground. He was allergic to horses, yet at five in the morning had to bring the old yellow mare to the front of the barn — a mare denied oats and better off dead.
My grandfather bought a television in 1962, and during the last few years of his life would stare at it all evening, asking Sydney questions about the world far away. The light of the television brought into that dark little house programs like The Honeymooners, The Big Valley, Have Gun Will Travel, and The Untouchables; and glowed beyond the silent window into the yard, a yard filled with desolate chips of wood.
My grandfather Roy Henderson would ask Dad why people would act in a movie if they knew they were going to be shot. He would not be completely convinced by my father's explanation about movie scripts and actors, and became more disheartened and dangerous the clearer the explanation was.
"But they die — I seen them."
"No they don't, Dad."
"Ha — lot you know, Syd — lot you know — I seen blood, and blood don't lie, boy — blood don't lie. And if ya think blood lies I'll smash yer mouth, what I'll do."
As a teen my father sat in this TV-lightened world; a shack in the heat of July watching flies orbit in the half dark. He hid there because his father tormented him in front of kids his own age.
I have learned that because of this torment, Father became a drunk by the age of fifteen.
People did not know (and what would it matter if they had known?) that by the time he was fifteen, my father had read and could quote Stendhal and Proust. But he was trapped in a world of his own father's fortune, and our own fortune became indelibly linked to it as well.
In November the lights shone after seven o'clock on the stained-glass windows. The windows show the crucifixion or one of the saints praying. The hills where those saints lived and dropped their blood look soft, distant and blue; the roads wind like purple ribbons toward the Mount of Olives. It is all so different from real nature with its roaring waters over valleys of harsh timber where I tore an inch and a half of skin from my calves. Or Miramichi bogs of cedar and tamarack and the pungent smell of wet moosehide as the wounded moose still bellows in dark wood. I often wanted to enter the world of the stained glass — to find myself walking along the purple road, with the Mount of Olives behind me. I suppose because I wanted to be good, and my mother wanted goodness for me. I wanted too to escape the obligation I had toward my own destiny, my family, my sister and brother who were more real to me than a herd of saints.
My father's name was Sydney Henderson. He was born in a shack off Highway 11, a highway only Maritimers could know — a strip of asphalt through stunted trees and wild dead fields against the edge of a cold sky.
He did poorly in school but at church became the ward of Father Porier. He was given the job of washing Porier's car and cleaning his house. He was an altar boy who served mass every winter morning at seven. He did this for three years, from the age of eight to eleven.
Then one day there was a falling-out, an "incident," and Father Porier's Pontiac never again came down the lane to deliver him home, nor did Father ever again trudge off to the rectory to clean the priest's boots. Nor did he know that his own father would take the priest's side and beat him one Sunday in front of most of the parishioners on the church steps. This became Father's first disobedience, not against anything but the structure of things. I have come to learn, however, that this is not at all a common disobedience.
Back then, harsh physical labour seemed the only thing generations of Canadians like my grandfather considered work. So by thirteen my father wore boots and checked jackets, and quit school to work in the woods, in obligation to his father. He would spend days with little to comfort him. He was to need this strength, a strength of character, later on. He had big hands like a pulpcutter, wore thick glasses, and his hair was short, shaved up the side of his head like a zek in some Russian prison camp.
He worked crossing back and forth over that bleak highway every day; when the June sky was black with no-see-ums, or all winter when the horse dung froze as it hit the ground. He was allergic to horses, yet at five in the morning had to bring the old yellow mare to the front of the barn — a mare denied oats and better off dead.
My grandfather bought a television in 1962, and during the last few years of his life would stare at it all evening, asking Sydney questions about the world far away. The light of the television brought into that dark little house programs like The Honeymooners, The Big Valley, Have Gun Will Travel, and The Untouchables; and glowed beyond the silent window into the yard, a yard filled with desolate chips of wood.
My grandfather Roy Henderson would ask Dad why people would act in a movie if they knew they were going to be shot. He would not be completely convinced by my father's explanation about movie scripts and actors, and became more disheartened and dangerous the clearer the explanation was.
"But they die — I seen them."
"No they don't, Dad."
"Ha — lot you know, Syd — lot you know — I seen blood, and blood don't lie, boy — blood don't lie. And if ya think blood lies I'll smash yer mouth, what I'll do."
As a teen my father sat in this TV-lightened world; a shack in the heat of July watching flies orbit in the half dark. He hid there because his father tormented him in front of kids his own age.
I have learned that because of this torment, Father became a drunk by the age of fifteen.
People did not know (and what would it matter if they had known?) that by the time he was fifteen, my father had read and could quote Stendhal and Proust. But he was trapped in a world of his own father's fortune, and our own fortune became indelibly linked to it as well.
Media reviews
"Richards is a painfully sharp observer, who possesses one of the most distinct and compelling voices in contemporary literature."
—The Toronto Star
"Richards has a wonderful ear for the cadence of the language, and his compassion for his poorest characters' misery is infectious — the best of Richards' work is dark in tone, both harshly realistic and lyrically sympathetic to the most disadvantaged members of society."
—The Globe and Mail
"At its best, Richards' work has a touch of greatness, yielding up reminders, sharp as wood smoke on an autumn evening, of both the pity and the glory of being human."
—Maclean's
"His voice is one of the most powerful and necessary to be found in Canadian fiction."
—Ottawa Citizen
"Wit and acuity mark out this Canadian writer of unaffected, unsentimental integrity."
—The Observer (U.K.)
"Mercy Among the Children is a major novel precisely because it disavows concern for the structure of things in any one place and time in favour of the structure of things for all places and times."
—The Globe and Mail
"David Adams Richards is perhaps the greatest Canadian writer alive ... Although Mercy Among the Children is unrelentingly tragic, as with most great tragedies the undertone is one of boundless hope."
—Vancouver Sun
"In its depth of feeling and fierce drive, Mercy Among the Children makes even the best of contemporary novels seem forced and pallid."
—The Toronto Star
"Mercy Among the Children explores major issues with passion and high seriousness. It aims for the heart, not the head. If you give yourself to the experience of reading it, it will reward you."
—National Post
"A wrenching, soaring read ... It compels the reader to ponder the cruelty and grace of our relationships with each other and with an invisible unknowable God."
—The Calgary Herald
"Mercy Among the Children is a masterpiece."
—Maclean's
"With Mercy Among the Children, David Adams Richards assures his place among the CanLit canon as one of this country’s greatest authors. Unrelenting, bleak and grim, the novel delivers its story with the force of an old testament prophet. Richards’s voice is consistently powerful as he relates this heartbreaking tale of generational poverty and abuse."
—The Edmonton Journal
"Mercy Among the Children is a major novel precisely because it disavows concern for the structure of things in any one place and time in favour of the structure of things for all places nad times. Literary fashions be damned; her is a fictional universe, fiercely imagined and brilliantly rendered, and everyone is welcome into it."
—The Globe and Mail (Charles Foran)
"…Richards makes a concentrated commitment to his plot and to his characters, who carry the book upward. It is passionately informed with his love and hate. He has a visceral belief in his story, and he never relents. His knowledge of the mind of evil is impressive."
—The Gazette
"It’s time to declare David Adams Richards Canada’s greatest living writer. The reason for this assertion is simple: Of all the country’s best writers he is the one who has steadfastly set out to do what all great writers do — define what it is to be human. And he has done this through a voice uniquely his own, influenced by neither literary taste nor reader fashion….His latest novel Mercy Among the Children is not only his most ambitious, it’s as close to a masterpiece as he has yet written."
—Kitchener- Waterloo Record
—The Toronto Star
"Richards has a wonderful ear for the cadence of the language, and his compassion for his poorest characters' misery is infectious — the best of Richards' work is dark in tone, both harshly realistic and lyrically sympathetic to the most disadvantaged members of society."
—The Globe and Mail
"At its best, Richards' work has a touch of greatness, yielding up reminders, sharp as wood smoke on an autumn evening, of both the pity and the glory of being human."
—Maclean's
"His voice is one of the most powerful and necessary to be found in Canadian fiction."
—Ottawa Citizen
"Wit and acuity mark out this Canadian writer of unaffected, unsentimental integrity."
—The Observer (U.K.)
"Mercy Among the Children is a major novel precisely because it disavows concern for the structure of things in any one place and time in favour of the structure of things for all places and times."
—The Globe and Mail
"David Adams Richards is perhaps the greatest Canadian writer alive ... Although Mercy Among the Children is unrelentingly tragic, as with most great tragedies the undertone is one of boundless hope."
—Vancouver Sun
"In its depth of feeling and fierce drive, Mercy Among the Children makes even the best of contemporary novels seem forced and pallid."
—The Toronto Star
"Mercy Among the Children explores major issues with passion and high seriousness. It aims for the heart, not the head. If you give yourself to the experience of reading it, it will reward you."
—National Post
"A wrenching, soaring read ... It compels the reader to ponder the cruelty and grace of our relationships with each other and with an invisible unknowable God."
—The Calgary Herald
"Mercy Among the Children is a masterpiece."
—Maclean's
"With Mercy Among the Children, David Adams Richards assures his place among the CanLit canon as one of this country’s greatest authors. Unrelenting, bleak and grim, the novel delivers its story with the force of an old testament prophet. Richards’s voice is consistently powerful as he relates this heartbreaking tale of generational poverty and abuse."
—The Edmonton Journal
"Mercy Among the Children is a major novel precisely because it disavows concern for the structure of things in any one place and time in favour of the structure of things for all places nad times. Literary fashions be damned; her is a fictional universe, fiercely imagined and brilliantly rendered, and everyone is welcome into it."
—The Globe and Mail (Charles Foran)
"…Richards makes a concentrated commitment to his plot and to his characters, who carry the book upward. It is passionately informed with his love and hate. He has a visceral belief in his story, and he never relents. His knowledge of the mind of evil is impressive."
—The Gazette
"It’s time to declare David Adams Richards Canada’s greatest living writer. The reason for this assertion is simple: Of all the country’s best writers he is the one who has steadfastly set out to do what all great writers do — define what it is to be human. And he has done this through a voice uniquely his own, influenced by neither literary taste nor reader fashion….His latest novel Mercy Among the Children is not only his most ambitious, it’s as close to a masterpiece as he has yet written."
—Kitchener- Waterloo Record
About the author
DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS is one of Canada's pre-eminent writers. His recent novels include Mary Cyr and Principles to Live By, as well as Crimes Against My Brother and Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul, both of which were longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Among his other novels, The Lost Highway was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award and nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize; The Friends of Meagre Fortune won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book; Mercy Among the Children won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award and the Trillium Award. Richards is also the author of the celebrated Miramichi Triology and has written four bestselling books of nonfiction, Lines on the Water, God Is, Facing the Hunter and Hockey Dreams, and most recently the collection of essays Murder. In 2017, David Adams Richards was appointed to the Senate of Canada on the advice of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
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