Rumpelstiltskin retold: Alive in the Merciful Country, by A.L. Kennedy, reviewed

The narrator of Alive in the Merciful Country is a woman weighed down by past trauma ‘like a bag full of broken kaleidoscopes’. Anna is a teacher steering her nine-year-old pupils through the 2020 lockdown while coping with life as the single mother of a troubled teenage boy, trying to rebuild trust after a shattering betrayal: ‘I didn’t ask to be in a spy scenario, or an action scenario, or a political thriller, but I recurringly have been.’ Damaged by life, she has learned to question misuse of power, personal and political: quis custodiet ipsos custodes indeed.

Fans of A.L. Kennedy will love this book. Her trademark features are reassuringly present – reality and fantasy, sweetness and horror; a good soul struggling to survive in a bad world. There’s a lot of crying and deadpan laughs, all delivered in prose that soars and swoops like the birds she references throughout. 

For Anna, wickedness is typified by the villain of a fairy tale – Rumpelstiltskin, the sprite who spun straw into gold for an endangered princess and then demanded a terrible price. To drive home her point, she names all wrongdoers Stiltskins. Switching between various pasts and the present, Kennedy paints a diptych: a woman reaching out for a belated chance of happiness, contrasted with an atrocious villain.

In the hope that isolation might bring solace, Anna has hidden herself away in a rundown corner of London. She plants honeysuckle in the concrete courtyard and paints the front door a defiant bright blue. Daring to feel she might risk love again, she feels safe here – until a thick envelope lands on her doormat and puts an end to her fragile security. Her own Stiltskin has emerged from the shadows of her past: a man of many parts, a shape-shifter, quietly deadly.

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In unsettling counterpoint Stiltskin’s words and Anna’s memories sweep us back into Anna’s life as a street performer, part of the OrkestrA, a group of idealistic young people who stray from entertainment into protest and activism, encouraged by a charismatic newcomer who dazzles them all with his skill and charm.