Small Mercies

It’s 1974 and busing* is about to start in Boston. At the same time that a young black man is found dead on a train line, a white teenage girl goes missing. Her mother, Mary Pat Fennessy, starts looking for her and soon finds herself confronting the local crime mob. A homicide detective begins investigating the death of the young black man. Paths intersect.

You could read this a straight up crime thriller - which is how Dennis Lehane began, with his Kenzie and Gennaro private eye stories – and it’s a good one. Harsh, violent and relentless, and with a protagonist in Mary Pat who’s as harsh, violent and relentless as the mob she ends up fighting. She’s a genuine original.

But that’s only half the book. What it also is a truly scorching portrait of blind, unthinking racism, with absolutely no holds barred. The language is coarse and vile and Lehane doesn’t shy away from depicting the South Boston (Southie) neighbourhood where the action takes place in a blisteringly negative light. You can feel the hate boiling off the white protesters marching to City Hall and it makes you want to jump under a long hot shower to get it off you.

And at the centre of it all is Mary Pat, taking on the mob and being forced to confront her own baked-in racism. Which does not result in an I’d-like-to-buy-the-world-a-Coke group cuddle.

Have I made this all sound too depressing for words? Does it make you want to avoid the book by a mile? You shouldn’t. There’s more uncomfortable insight packed into this short explosion of a story than a stack of high-flown Literary endeavours. You might not like the world it depicts, but you’d be hard put to look away from the truths it offers.

 

*Moving black children to schools in white neighbourhoods, and vice-versa, in a bid to desegregate the city’s public high schools.