Alive in the Merciful Country

This pensive novel from Kennedy (The Little Snake) finds a London grade school teacher reflecting on her past and struggling to find a way forward during the Covid-19 lockdown. In between teaching classes online, Anna begins chronicling her life, remembering halcyon days of anti nuclear peace protests with a motley street theater troupe called the UnRule OrKestrA. She uses the Brothers Grimm’s story of Rumpelstiltskin, which she’s been teaching to her students, to make sense of the villains of her past, such as her former lover Buster, who turned out to be an undercover cop infiltrating her potest group. Buster inserts himself into Anna’s present-day narrative by leaving a diary at her doorstep, in which he confesses his more recent sins, which involve working as an assassin for a shadowy reactionary group called the Squad. Buster’s bizarre prose style and abstract claims nearly derail the book (“A place of dark waters wanted me and I wanted to plumb depths. The Squad was the ultimate library of concealments”), but Anna’s heartfelt and searching narration reels the reader back in, as she reflects on the strength of “ordinary people who can live in this world at this time without screaming” and hopes there can be a place for them after Covid. It’s a noble if uneven effort at capturing life during the pandemic. (May)