MERCY

Two devout Catholics, yielding to temptation, destroy three lives in this intermittently powerful first novel, a Canadian counterpart to Southern Gothic.

It’s June 1948 in Mercy, Manitoba, and Thomas Rose, the good-hearted butcher, is about to marry Mathilda Nickels, just turned 19. Mathilda spent her first nine years in an orphanage before being rescued by her aunt Vera, housekeeper to Mercy’s Catholic priest, who has just died. His replacement, Father August Day, marries the butcher and his bride. August is 26 but old in his ways and bathed in religious zeal, and that’s what captivates Mathilda, who shuns Thomas on their wedding night, pleading her period (a lie). When she confesses to the priest, all he can think is: Virgin! August knows all about the sins of the flesh. His loving mother Aggie was the town whore after her man had run off and she had to support herself and her son. Yet he cannot resist Mathilda’s advances and deflowers her in the sacristy, then immediately cuts off all contact. Mathilda becomes pregnant and, panic-stricken, offers herself at last to the long-suffering Thomas. Her panic returns as she is about to give birth: Who will the baby resemble? York tells this story of solitary souls driven to extremes in dozens of short takes, including glimpses of the town drunk, Castor, who lives hermit-like in a nearby bog and has truth-revealing visions. The wrenching climax will leave Mathilda and August dead and Thomas a broken man. But we’re not done. The novel’s final third jumps forward to 2003 in an overlong postscript about an encounter in the bog between Mary, Castor’s adopted daughter, and another clergyman, this time a slick, skirt-chasing evangelist, a far cry from the tormented August. These new characters have their problems, but the reader, powers of empathy depleted after that climax, will have little left over for them.

The fallen priest is an old story, but newcomer York’s searing images mark her as a talent to watch.