The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

I would like to thank Picador for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Picador

Published – Out Now

Price - £14.99 hardback £9.99 Kindle eBook

Inspired by the real events of the Vardo storm of 1617, The Mercies is a story about how suspicion can twist its way through a community, and a love that may prove as dangerous as it is powerful.

On Christmas Eve, 1617, the sea around the remote Norwegian island of Vardo is thrown into a reckless storm. As Maren Magnusdatter watches, forty fishermen, including her father and brother, are lost to the waves – the menfolk of Vardo wiped out in an instant.

Vardo is now a place of women.

Eighteen months later, a sinister figure arrives. Summoned from Scotland to take control of a place at the edge of the civilised world, Absalom Cornet knows what he needs to do to bring the women of Vardo to heel. With him travels his young wife, Ursa. In Vardo and in Maren, Ursa finds something she has never seen before: independent women. But Absalom sees only a place flooded with a terrible evil, one he must root out at all costs…

Disaster can bring out the best in us and the worst. We can see humanity come together in adversity we can see it become divisive as we seek who is to blame or just to blame those we have never liked anyway. The impact of which can stretch on for years into the present. Kiran Millwood Hargrave takes the double tragedy of a storm in Vardo and then exposes the even darker horrors that then arose which exposes racism and sexism with even deadlier consequences.

The novel has two key characters Maren the native of Vardo is horrified to see her father and brother wiped out in a ferocious sudden forty-minute storm. A storm that wiped out all but a handful of the village’s menfolk. The island is remote, and the remaining women cannot rely on charity from afar, so the women make do – farm, fish and trade themselves and slowly life continues but very different. But Vardo’s ruler is aware of this weird survival and it’s rulers are suspicious that supernatural forces may be in play. To it is sent Absalom Cornet a man from Scotland with a reputation for finding witches and with his new wealthy Norwegian wife he intends to find the truth. Ursa has had a remote upbringing she has never even had to make food before and slowly her and Maren bond and in spending so much time together grow closer. But Ursa is also picking up that Vardo has simmering tensions between the women of the town. Old rivalries and prejudices are about to explode; and Absalom is more than ready to seize the moment.

I really think Hargave has done a great service in exposing yet another of history’s darker secrets. The chaos and tragedy that strikes the women of Vardo is not well known and it shows prejudice against women for daring to take men’s places (even when there was no other choice) also the appalling treatment of the Lapp community who in Norway were viewed with a combination of suspicion and fear. The best bits of the novel for me was the initial set-up watching the storm and it’s direct aftermath and then the finale as the tension finally breaks and a very different type of storm arrives to destroy the place in a very different way. Hargrave captures the immediate horror and grief of the time well in both it’s terrifying beliefs plus the way those suspected would be then be treated.

I do enjoy the balance of perspectives between Maren who finds herself weirdly liberated but also aware how slight this sense of freedom is. In parallel Ursa the outsider finds herself strangely tempted helped by Absalom being an uncaring and often scarily unaware of his more violent moments; a husband that wants obedience rather than love. Again, the start of the novel really draws out these two women’s very different lives and backgrounds and leads the reader to decide who really is the least free here – the wealthy or the penniless?

But I felt the novel struggled to add more to the story. Its not hard to imagine the disaster that Vardo is about to experience and while this story isn’t well known we have seen many versions from this over the years. You can sense the other shoe that will drop very early on and there is little to surprise you in how the story will develop. The middle section of the tale feels very slow taking us the bitter finale and here I think focusing mainly on two characters has denied us really exploring the rest of the village. In particular the points of view of Kirsten a strong independent women daring to push social conventions with outrageous ideas such as wearing trousers and the more mysterious Diinna (a Lapp woman who married a Norwegian man) – their worldviews would have been great to explore and instead it’s viewed from the outside. Even Maren and Ursa’s relationship feels explored too briefly when they finally accept their feelings for one another. It feels a novel that could have pushed its boundaries a little more to really make the rest of Vardo come alive.

The Mercies is a very well written tale and as with Hargrave’s earlier YA novel The Deathless Girls there are some beautifully written atmospheric scenes exploring the world and character relationships but I needed a little more to chew on and felt some opportunities to really explore the issue were missed. I think those who appreciate a good histrocial fiction tale will enjoy this and we should all still honour the victims of Vardo – sadly we all know history can often repeat itself far too often.