FICTION
Adam Begley
Mercy Street
by Jennifer Haigh
Ecco £20 pp338
A funny, hopeful book about an
abortion clinic? An abortion
clinic in Boston, Massachusetts,
besieged by protesters wielding
epically stupid hand-painted
signs (“ABORTION CAUSES
BREAST CANCER”)? How could
you write about it without
invoking the American berserk
— Philip Roth’s priceless phrase
— and dismissing the whole
hot mess with cheap satire or
bitter rage? Jennifer Haigh,
the prizewinning author of
six novels and a short-story
collection, has pulled it off in
Mercy Street. The secret of her
success is to mix compassion
with deadly wit, and to stick
close to observable facts.
It helps to have a smart,
capable, clear-eyed and
hugely likeable heroine such
up and down the aisles of
an expo hall stacked with
“night-vision goggles, antique
swords, a vast selection of
helmets and body armour.
There were blowguns and
stun guns, Gadsden flags and
kukri knives, an enticing
display of high-end surveillance
cams.” Victor is also our
window on to the world of
online anti-abortion agitation.
In each case Haigh shows us
the human being behind the
placard, the ideology distinct
yet not separate from the lived
experience of the individual.
Here, for example, is Claudia
musing on matrimony: “She
hadn’t disliked it, exactly.
Married life was like walking
around in shoes that almost
fit. She wore them every day
for two years, and still they
gave her blisters. Like most
shoes designed for women,
they were not foot-shaped.”
Another character in this
compulsively readable novel
is Boston itself, with all its grit
and raucous diversity. In
wintertime the city is under
constant meteorological
assault, each new snowstorm
roaring up the coast,
“spinning and kicking like a
kung fu fighter”. With the
spring comes a reckoning for
each of Haigh’s characters
— not tidy but equitable and
highly satisfactory. cas Claudia Birch, a 43-year-old
counsellor who’s been working
at the Mercy Street clinic
for nearly a decade. Claudia
has seen it all twice but isn’t
jaded. When her ex-husband
tells her, “I’m on your side.
You know I have no problem
with abortion, assuming
there’s a good reason,”
her answer is typically
blunt: “There’s always
a reason. Define good.”
Who gets to decide what’s
a good reason?
Among the protesters
picketing the clinic is
Anthony, who pines for the
Catholic Church of fasting
and indulgences, fish on
Fridays and “the Latin Mass
in all its lugubrious perfume”.
As a young man he was
injured in a construction
site accident, a blow to
the head that earns him
lifetime disability pay and
the suspicion that he “had
gotten his eggs scrambled”.Anthony and Claudia have
something in common: the
recreational use of marijuana.
For Claudia, it’s an antidote
to the stress of working at a
clinic where heckling, bomb
threats and active shooter
drills are perks of the job. “In
middle age, smoking a joint at
bedtime made life possible.”
Anthony smokes because^
it helps with the nausea,
a lingering symptom of
brain trauma.
By coincidence
(the only notable
one in this
sparingly
plotted tale),
Anthony and
Claudia
share the
same dope
dealer,
Timmy, who
smokes “all day,
every day”, sports a
magnificent tattoo on his
back and radiates a gentle
benevolence. Faced with
the possible legalisation of
marijuana, Timmy ponders
a post-pot career.
Also in the mix is Victor,
a white supremacist with
an impressive arsenal, an
obsession with the end
times and unusual theories
about the reproductive
responsibilities of Caucasian
women. With Victor we ambleTHRILLERS
ROUND-UP
The Foot Soldiers (Hodder
£18.99) is clearly Gerald
Seymour’s answer to Tinker
Tailor Soldier Spy — once again
a Russian mole is operating in
MI6, and a donnish veteran
spook interviews the suspects.
This is Jonas Merrick, the
eccentric threat analyst who
averted a terrorist atrocity in
The Crocodile Hunter, and he’s
not, like George Smiley in^
John le Carré’s masterpiece,
a returning Sixer quizzing
colleagues. Instead, the
arrogant snobs of the foreign
Deadly wit Jennifer Haigh
finds light in dark placesIf le Carré had written about spies on the front line...
Pot and pickets
A hugely enjoyable slice of East Coast life,
where marijuana and street politics mix
intelligence service have to
endure insolent interrogation
by a funny little man from MI5,
the rival outfit they despise.
Seymour makes more
than le Carré of treachery’s
potential impact on frontline
personnel, with subplots
devoted to a leaky operation
to exfiltrate a comically
repulsive Russian defector,
and to a panicking young
MI6 mole embedded in a
provincial branch of Putin’s
GRU. As his masterly novel
intercuts Merrick’s civilised
investigation in MI6’s
Thameside HQ with violent
action abroad — settings
include Denmark, Berlin and
swathes of Russia — there may
be an implicit critique of the
great chronicler of Cold War
espionage. Was le Carré,
perhaps, too much of a Circus
insider, and thus too focused
on deskbound bosses rather
than their foot soldiers?Spies loyal to Moscow also
appear in Charlotte Philby’s
Edith and Kim (Borough Press
£14.99) as its protagonist, the
real-life communist agent
Edith Tudor-Hart, introduced
the author’s grandfather Kim
Philby to his Soviet handler in- Essentially a fictionalised
biography, this atmospheric
and rigorously researched
novel follows Edith from^
1920s Vienna to mid-century
London. It’s only a thriller in
so far as we’re slyly induced
to fear that Edith (who is also
juggling roles as a single
mother and photographer)
could be arrested or prevented
from working, before realising
that we’re rooting for a
Stalinist enemy of Britain.
Emma, the narrator of
Sarah Pinborough’s Insomnia
(HarperCollins £14.99), is
sleeping less and less in the
run-up to turning 40 — the age
when her mother went mad —
and the resulting erratic
behaviour is alienating her
family and making her
unreliable at work as a lawyer.
Detailing a series of disasters
that threatens to leave her
without a family, home or job,
Pinborough’s unsettling,
remorseless psychological
thriller is horribly plausible
and expertly plotted (she’s also
a screenwriter, and it shows).
Those still vexed by the
controversial ending of her
hit Behind Her Eyes can be
reassured that this time there’s
no last-minute flip to fantasy.Half of Robert Goddard’s
This Is the Night They Come for
Yo u (Bantam Press £20) is
highly original and very good
indeed: the search by Agent
Hadouchi and Superintendent
Taleb for a fellow Algerian
suspected of a murder
avenging a notorious (real)
racist massacre in Paris in- This boasts a delightful
double act, crunchy dialogue,
strong action scenes and
provocative historical aperçus.
Misguidedly, it’s interwoven
with a second plot centred on
a confession relating to the
same events, presumably
designed to give the book a
British angle. Happily, the
ending hints that the Algerian
sleuths may enjoy a second
outing, and hopefully this
time there won’t be any
repentant Brits interrupting
their adventures. c
John Dugdalebooks
thriller
OF THE
MONTHGARY DOAK/ALAMY28 10 April 2022