Alive in the Merciful Country by AL Kennedy review – peace of mind meets a monster from the past
Anna McCormick, as many people did, is discovering that the first pandemic lockdown is playing havoc with time. Becalmed in her deliberately fortress-like London home with her young adult son Paul, she is simultaneously under pressure – teaching primary school children on Zoom, maintaining her stockpile of tinned goods, attempting to communicate with her mother’s care home – and forced into unnatural, unwanted inaction. As a survivor of domestic abuse, and several other threats to her safety and sanity, she is aware of the immense prize – a sanctuary, a job, meaningful relationships – she has secured, but also of its precariousness. Amid these conditions of unbidden contemplation, she begins to write a sort of memoir.
So too does Buster, the shape-shifting, monstrous undercover cop who once infiltrated the OrKestrA, the “merry little band of very harmless kazoo players” who 20 years previously travelled the country juggling, breathing fire and singing songs to bring hope to the hopeless; Anna herself, as Annanka Ladystrong, was one of their number. But whether Buster’s disjointed, weird document – which he hand-delivers to Anna’s house – is confession or manifesto is unclear. For the reader, these two wildly different accounts of personal and political events begin to resolve into an exploration of identity and purpose – or, in their less convincing passages, as very different civics lessons, at their most successful as a meditation on either adopting or escaping from nihilism.
Anna’s central motif revolves around the existence of “Stiltskins” – men (generally) of violence and coercion who inveigle their way into good people’s lives and minds and wreck them; their disguise, whether they are spy cops or intimate partners or callous governments, constitutes a large portion of the damage they do. Buster – whom Anna has recently glimpsed in the aftermath of the trial of a group of protesters including former OrKestrA members – is a prime example of a Stiltskin, but, as his own narrative reveals, he is not without insight.
Reinvention, deception and hyperviolence have become Buster’s meat and drink
His passages – conveyed in bursts of sans-serif stream-of-consciousness writing – reveal a terrifying amorality that is nonetheless capable of moments of acuity. Telling his story in language that is both verbose and at times so clumsy that it appears computer-generated, he moves malevolently among the crowds, accurately singling out their weakest links. We gather that he may once have been a police officer aspiring to do good, but that he has been singled out to join “The Squad”, and to execute its “glorious whims and impunity and government hatreds expressed in maximum forms and methods”. Constant reinvention, deception and hyperviolence have become his meat and drink, but Kennedy obliquely asks us to consider whether he too is a victim of a more sinister process.
Key to this provocative, thoughtful and mysterious novel is the location of the title’s “merciful country”. For Anna, it is not to be found in the wonky bricks and mortar of her London house, but in the stable mental landscape she has eventually reached, in which her belief in cooperation and collective action still survive. Part of that is to believe that the Busters and the Stiltskins of society may yet be deserving of forgiveness, and mercy; whether they will actually seek it remains a troubling and untested question.
• Alive in the Merciful Country by AL Kennedy is published by Saraband (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
