Mercy Among the Children

The implacability of authority in the face those who are “othered” is perennial in human history and literature. As a reflection on the legacy of American segregation, the oppression of the Hendersons is only uncommon in that the family is not black. The color of Autumn’s skin and the consequent ostracism of the community is evocative of this parallel with American racism. The writings of the American civil rights movement echo behind Richard’s story of oppression and enslavement. Several of the leaders of this movement were famously murdered for their work, just as Sydney and his family are abused by the more fortunate members of the community.

Sydney passively accepts this oppression rather than campaigning for justice. His failure to advocate for himself and his family secures their downfall. Martin Luther’s 1963 speech famously appealed to the fate of his “four little children.” Like the legacy of black slavery, it echoes ambiguously in Sydney’s contemporaneous life as a social outcast of a different kind.

Lyle writes an essay about the “reshaping of power in England in the 1840s and the burgeoning middle classes” (201), but industrialism offers his life no such impetus. His essay is torn into pieces and scattered by the wind in an empty parking lot. The workhouses of industrial England ultimately produced an affluent middle class, but they also applied a downward pressure on the wages of free labor. Like one of the industrialists, Leo McVicer holds the fortunes of the local families in a vice-like grip. Slave labor throughout the British Empire was responsible for the prosperity of the British elite until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Canada is part of that empire, its native inhabitants deprived of their land and liberty by the colonizers: “Now the natives were saying he [Leo] had stolen their land and demanding restitution” (310). Yet Leo, like a lot of oppressors, feels oppressed himself: “His people came from the Hill or Injuntown. His people were the ones who were betrayed, laughed at, scorned as much as the natives” (369). The final shootout between Leo McVicer and Mat Pit resembles a Wild West shootout, suggesting that society has not evolved much from lawless days of colonialism and enforced slavery: “When Leo threw the punch–the hardest punch he had thrown in forty five years–he himself fell to his knees” (394).

The smelt fight reminds Lyle of Down and Out in Paris and London, a novel that he is citing with some irony. Despite the grittiness of the Orwellian classic, its representation of poverty in the 1920s has been challenged. Yet Lyle’s motivation in telling his tale may reflect George Orwell’s. That the Hendersons are always planning trips without ever taking them bolsters the sense of the intransigence of their impoverished state. The parallel with Orwell’s novel emphasizes the repetitiousness of literary history. Lyle and Sydney epitomize Orwell’s definition of a plongeur:  

[A] plongeur is one of the slaves of the modern world. Not that there is any need to whine over him, for he is better off than many manual workers, but still, he is no freer than if he were bought and sold. His work is servile and without art; he is paid just enough to keep him alive; his only holiday is the sack [He has] been trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible. If plongeurs thought at all, they would long ago have formed a labor union and gone on strike for better treatment. But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their life has made slaves of them (Orwell, George. Down and Out in Paris and London. Victor Gollancz Ltd. 1933.).

Central to Richards’s novel are the slavish labors of Camus’s Sisyphus and the locus of a wider engagement with the ideology and questions of the French existentialists. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s pronouncement that “freedom is what you do with what has been done to you” is a maxim with which the entire novel wrestles, a fight which literally comes to blows. Camus’s 1942 essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, casts its shadow over the novel like the perennial covering of snow over the town. In his influential work about the absurdity of human life, Camus asserts that the proper response to this absurdity is not suicide, but rebellion. If Sydney is a kind of Sisyphus, endlessly pushing his boulder up the mountain, then Lyle is Camus’s rebel. In the French author’s eponymous essay, he writes that when human beings reject the justice that social and political structures present, they should rebel. Lyle speaks of his “contempt for propriety” (120). Yet, Lyle’s anarchism is still more futile than his father’s resignation. Lyle joylessly reflects “as Camus has informed us, I was only crying over something that no longer exists” (402).

Lyle aligns his father with Camus’s Sisyphus archetype, describing Sydney as “the embodiment of some great callous stupidity, comic in its futility” (120). Content with his absurd punishment, Sydney continues indefatigably to push his boulder. The absurd man, Camus writes, must persist in his task without hope for a better future without a need to create meaning. In so doing, he “enjoys a freedom with regard to common rules.” This radical freedom is precisely why the community fears and punishes Sydney Henderson and his son. In his years of pointless labor (the money he has amassed is stolen and his debt written off) and in his obscure end, Sydney embodies Camus’s absurd man. In Camus’s terms, he achieves a perverse kind of freedom. Camus famously concluded his essay: “The struggle itself [...] is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Éditions Gallimard. 1942.). Richards’s novel is anything but.

Lyle adopts Camus’s absurdist view of the world. In Camus’s formulation, revolutionaries reject both history and the transcendent dimension. The archetypal revolutionary aim, Camus claims, is to kill god. This is what Lyle accomplishes in sending his father away.

Richards designed his novel to be read on the parabolic level. Lyle’s testimony is a kind of parable addressed to the policeman, the representative of the law on earth, as God is in heaven. The concept of the scapegoat appears in the biblical book of Leviticus, in which the village priest releases a goat into the wilderness, having conferred the sins of the community upon it. Sydney Henderson and his family are the community scapegoats. Unlike Christ (the archetypal sacrificial lamb), Prometheus, or Sisyphus, Sydney cannot carry or absolve this weight of sin. In this secular yet theologically charged novel, the characters inhabit an Old Testament universe in which God tests man, and sin is not absolved but compounded. Whilst the narrator’s grandfather, Roy, is literally imprisoned, Roy’s son Sydney and his grandson Lyle are figuratively incarcerated by their familial sin in the community’s eyes. Sin passes through the generations as described in the biblical books of Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers. Still, Sydney’s suffering is that of a martyr, and Richards makes several references to his saint-like qualities, not least his refusal to avenge himself, or his ambition to be a teacher, which align him with Christ. The typographical question of redemption hangs in the balance at the close of the novel.

Like Adam and Eve in Eden, Sydney and Elly Henderson live next to nature, both opting for a life of innocence. As ever, the tree of knowledge threatens their happiness. Lyle says he doesn’t care about education, but knowledge. Like modern man rejecting God the father, Lyle rejects Sydney, who is passive in the face of his suffering. Lyle grapples with the concept of providence, reflecting sardonically: “[T]he man was about to be resurrected, and Rudy himself was cast into hell” (357). Here, Lyle positions Sydney as the Christ figure.

Lyle steals the church chalice, instigating a kind of allegorical joke, a search for the holy grail, and by extension, truth and exegesis. Ironically, in stealing the chalice, Lyle implicates himself in the hypocrisy of the community and must go to Mat Pit for aid. In the absence of the divine, the death of the sacrificial lamb (Percy) is not accompanied by the purgation of sin. Rather, Lyle’s guilt haunts him, and like the reader, he is left to reckon with these seismic moral and ethical quandaries.

Lyle reflects that “Gerald Dove’s trial [was] over the molecule, Dad’s trial was with his own human heart. Both were Old Testament trials” (349). The characters suffer without redemption or mercy at the hands of a seemingly callous God, as they do in the Old Testament. The novel, much like the Old Testament, is plagued with distrust and disease. Even the ground that sustains the community is afflicted with cancer-inducing pollutants. Elly Henderson suffers miscarriage after miscarriage, Teresa Pit is sickly, and Penny Porier dies at 18. This pervasive illness is reminiscent of the plagues before the arrival of Christ the Redeemer. Though Sydney’s name is redeemed, much is sacrificed, and Richards leaves his readers questioning the nature and sufficiency of redemption at the close of the novel.