Title: The quality of mercy
Author: Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
ISBN: 9781776380008
Publisher: Penguin
The quality of mercy begins with a story told to Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu by her grandmother – a fitting entry into a novel that weaves together multiple canons and borrowings across cultures and history, and which is characterised by a foundational oral tradition; the sense is that in reading the text, we are listening to a story. The unhurried cadence evoked by judicious use of repetition and domestic detail is a hallmark of this text, as it is of the first two books in the author’s City of kings trilogy: The theory of flight (2018) and The history of man (2020). And these two qualities – the rich layers of familiar references, both ancestral and Western, and the almost lulling rhythm of each apparently effortless paragraph – give us that rare sense that we are safe in the hands of this author. Within minutes of starting to read her writing, I find myself exhaling with something close to relief.
It must be acknowledged immediately that I am hardly a dispassionate reviewer. It is no secret that I considered Ndlovu’s first two novels to be exceptionally good (The theory of flight won the prestigious Barry Ronge Fiction Award in 2019); The history of man (which I reviewed for LitNet) was the finest novel I read in 2020.
In the case of this title, I had the good fortune to undertake close scrutiny of the text when the publishers asked me to edit it – a chance I seized with both hands and a great deal of joy.
It is also important to note that although The quality of mercy rounds off a trilogy, each novel stands alone in the series, and can be read independently of the others. But reading it with the others (although it is not necessary to read them in order) makes for an even richer experience, especially as Ndlovu circles back to questions that linger in the aftermath of her first two novels.
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This is indeed a novel not only about the quality of mercy, but with that quality itself.
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It is a testament to Ndlovu’s extraordinary skill that with each book in her trilogy, she switches genre. The first was a dazzling work of magic realism, which dealt with the unspeakable atrocities of Zimbabwe’s independence history by nesting them in a shimmering haze of beautiful or comforting images repeated almost on loop: fields of sunflowers, swimming elephants, custard slightly burned on a Dover stove. It had that slightly hallucinatory feel that is the hallmark of truly excellent magical realism.
The second was a magnificent, full-throated epic tragedy, with all the weight and pace of the tragic hero’s inexorable arc: humble beginnings, youth, rise to influence and glory in adulthood, the corruption that comes with power setting in – and then the fall.
This third book has a very different feel. Like the Victorian novels it references, it bustles with life. It very deliberately draws on the Western canon, from the Shakespearean title to the courtship at the outset that makes use of Austen’s classic opening lines of Pride & prejudice. Gaskell and Hardy are also referenced, but mostly it is suggestive of Dickens’s busier epics. There’s a huge cast of engaging characters, good, bad and ugly. The lyricism of the first and second novels is largely absent: this is a social novel, one about people and how they connect. The cinematographic qualities of the first two novels, in which the camera keeps panning across the landscape, is replaced with a tight focus on individuals – humble and powerful, poor and rich, urban and rural, white and black – more suggestive of a TV series or soap opera. Their homes (from the modest to the grand) and daily routines are closely observed, often with wryness, never with cynicism. There are small set pieces and snippets that might seem arbitrary until they peel back the minutia of apparently everyday lives to reveal adultery, madness, revenge, suicide, incest, poisoning and even more Gothic elements.
While the narrative pace never becomes hurried, the events suggest constant flux and movement, reflecting the tumultuous shift of a precise postcolonial moment in this country’s history – the day Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. The characters are always driving, walking, cycling, taking buses, criss-crossing each other’s lives in coincidental ways that might strain credulity if this were not a novel set alternately in a small Rhodesian/Zimbabwean city in which everyone knows everybody else, and in village communities bound by tight ties of kinship and affiliation.
The horrors of the previous novels (and indeed the history of Zimbabwe) are lightly (but always respectfully) handled here. Although most of the action takes place at a moment of social and political upheaval as the country celebrates its independence, it is a novel primarily of comfort. It weaves together elements of social comedy and even “cosy crime”, and it is often very funny indeed, especially in its observations of domestic life and relationships.
The hero, Chief Superintendent Spokes Moloi, a man of impeccable rectitude and moral spotlessness, is almost too good to be true – until we meet his paragon spouse, Loveness, whose purity eclipses even her spouse’s, without ever lapsing into sentiment. Spokes, with her support, solves long-standing mysteries (some lingering from the previous novels) and several murders, and the happy couple (literally) dance off into the sunset.
There are all the little allegorical set pieces one expects of the author, which are so artless that one almost misses their artistry – the saga of Philemon and the artichokes, for instance, or the pursuit of the “mystery woman” Zora Neale Hurston, and the fact that there is a character named Louisa Alcott who indeed lives inside a story. Then there is the tale of the Molois’ unofficial adoptive daughter, the gender-bending postman Dikiledi, who declares her own form of independence.
This is indeed a novel not only about the quality of mercy, but with that quality itself. The final reveal of the significance of the title (and its relation to a character addicted to justice) will have the reader applauding. Likewise, the epilogue wraps up the entire series with a deftness that might have been overly romanticised in the hands of a less skilled storyteller. In sum, the author and publishers must be congratulated, but most especially the author: to round off a series with a book that is as good, if not better than, its predecessors, is no small feat.
In terms of production values, the publishers have wisely followed the same elegant design principles and layout seen in the first two novels, and have used the same cover artist and designer to create a distinct visual identity shared by all three books. Gretchen van der Byl must be commended for creating yet another exquisite cover that invites closer scrutiny after one has read the book.
Finally, this book presents the postcolonial and decolonial literary movements with a masterclass in how to “tell all the truth/ but tell it slant”. As with its predecessors, The quality of mercy holds at its heart the notion that redemption is possible – it may gaze unflinchingly at the persistence of human evil and the horrors of a blood-drenched past, but it never ceases to balance these elements against those most underrated qualities: the decency and integrity of “ordinary” citizens living in extraordinary times.
Kommentaar
Great review. I loved History of Man. I am certainly looking forward to reading this one also.