AL Kennedy has made no secret of her despair about post-Brexit Britain under the “rage-tweeting, Nazi-curious” Tories. “My government has become more radical, and that is difficult to explain to someone living in a European democracy,” she told the Swiss German-language newspaper NZZ in 2023. “Very dark people are at work here.” Kennedy, the author of acclaimed short stories and novels including Paradise, Everything You Need and the Costa-winning Day, has claimed that her views make her work less welcome in Britain. In her book The Core of Things, published in German, she writes: “I may not be the kind of writer our media watchdogs like.”
Alive in the Merciful Country, her 10th novel, was first published in translation in Germany and Switzerland back in 2023. As the book opens it is 2020 and, with her London primary school in lockdown, Anna McCormick is teaching her year 5 class online and doing her best to keep their spirits up. Together they discuss the story of Rumpelstiltskin, the “tricky wicked goblin with a secret name”. They invent Stiltskin dances and do Stiltskin sums about spinning and the weight of gold. For thousands of years, Anna tells the children, people have told versions of this story about lying and the misuse of power, reminding themselves “that the way to defeat all monsters is by knowing who they really are”.
Anna, a single mother to a 20-year-old son, is determined to model to her pupils “functional adulthood of a type that can still insist on expecting a better world”. But Anna’s own faith in that world has been fundamentally broken. As a student in the 1980s, she fell in love with Buster, a fellow performer in the UnRule OrKestrA, an activist street theatre collective. It was only after he vanished without trace that Buster was revealed to be an undercover cop. Decades later, Anna encounters him, her very own “Stiltskin among Stiltskins”, at the Old Bailey trial of five of her OrKestrA colleagues, exhuming long-buried anguish. Then, as the Covid crisis deepens, she discovers an unaddressed envelope propped outside the gates to her flat. It contains a manuscript: Buster’s own story in his own Stiltskin words.
The spine of the novel is Anna’s private journal as she struggles to make sense of both past and present. Traumatised by Buster’s betrayal and a subsequent abusive partner, Anna is furious and fearful in equal measure, raw with pain and paralysed by self-doubt. But although her country is “trapped in a national Bad Relationship”, bullied and gaslit by its Stiltskin government, she still believes in kindness and hope and silly jokes. She wants desperately to believe in her new partner. She tells her year 5 pupils the story of the murderer who kills 99 people and finds forgiveness. She knows that “the Stiltskins must get mercy, because the acting out of mercy cleans and saves us all”.
Into her account Anna interleaves extracts from Buster’s manuscript, detailing his shift from spy cop to self-funded vigilante killer targeting sex traffickers and racist Tory MPs with predilections for cocaine and underage sex workers. “The narrator is part of the bargain when you let a story in,” Anna warns, and Buster – who has as many names as he has stories – is far from reliable. Perhaps he is, as Anna insists, an out-and-out villain. Perhaps, like her, he is on the side of righteousness, his violence an inversion of her own valiant efforts to mend a broken system. Or perhaps his story is like the story of Rumpelstiltskin, a fable to reinforce our faith that goodness will ultimately triumph, and his words do not belong to him at all.
Alive in the Merciful Country is an ambitious novel that asks potent questions about abuses of state and personal power. It is also something of a curate’s egg. At her finest – and there are many fine moments in this book – Kennedy combines a beadily bleak eye with a standup’s comic timing and a profound humanity that breaks open the heart. Too often, however, she shows her political workings. For all her anguished contradictions, Anna is simply too perfect, her sensibilities – and those of all her friends – unwavering and irreproachable. As for Buster’s wearyingly long sections, they all play the same dogged tune. While he remains opaque, his targets are caricatures, numbingly unremitting assemblages of every cliche of their type. The effect is not eased by his stilted writing style: Buster claims to be Scottish but “I am small indications of self-harm and limp aloneness. I am a perfected personality and also clean effective within my truth in a place where I rest and play” reads more like Google Translate.
Whatever game Kennedy is playing with the reader, and she deliberately leaves that question open, it is a game that demands a primary school teacher’s patience. The tilt of her politics is not the problem here – anger at the toxic Tory legacy and the act of national self-harm that was Brexit is hardly unique among British novelists. The frustration of this novel is that she has allowed her absolutism to compromise her remarkable literary talents.
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