Book Review: Don't wait for the adaptation - read Dennis Lehane's Small Mercies immediately

Dennis Lehane - is Small Mercies really his last novel?

• Small Mercies
• Dennis Lehane 
• Abacus, €18

IT’S been a long, long wait for Dennis Lehane fans: Small Mercies is his first novel since 2017. The author of 14 previous critically-acclaimed bestsellers, including Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, latterly, Lehane has been spending most of his time writing for television.

This book feels like one he had to write and, already slated for adaptation, you might end up watching it on a screen at some point. 

Don’t wait for it to show up on the telly. Small Mercies is something you need to read, ideally as soon as possible. In it, Lehane revisits the Boston of his childhood. One of five children born to two first-generation Irish immigrants, he grew up in Dorchester, between Irish South Boston (‘Southie’) and Roxbury, a mainly Black area. 

As he related to The Guardian in a 2009 interview that’s worth digging out, ‘When those two went to war, guess who was Poland? We kept getting overrun’.  

The novel is set in South Boston in 1974 against the backdrop of the court-ordered desegregation of public schools. 

Majority Black schools were historically underfunded and, in theory, equity was to be achieved by transporting students between schools (‘busing’) so as to even out the numbers of white students and students of colour. 

But in Boston that baking hot summer, busing policy ran into a brick wall of generationally entrenched racism. 

In an interview for Publishers Weekly, Lehane said, ‘People I saw every day were using the n-word... My parents didn’t do it but almost everybody else did... Racism is passed down like bad genes.’

Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane

 

The book’s origins lie in an experience Lehane had as a nine-year-old, after his Drimoleague-born father took a wrong turn and the family Chevy ended up in the middle of an anti-busing riot. From the back seat, Lehane watched as ‘what looked like life-sized dolls’, hanging from lamp posts, were set alight in a spectacle he described to NPR as ‘medieval’.

Like all good historical fiction, the book speaks as much to the present as to the past. As Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale, said of the rise of Trump and the storming of the Capitol, ‘This has everything to do with race, from top to bottom’. It’s impossible to read Small Mercies without thinking about other more recent events, both in the US and in Ireland.

It seems almost superfluous to add that Small Mercies is an outstanding thriller with brilliantly drawn characters and a depth of empathy that is Lehane’s trademark. It’s the story of Mary Pat Fennessy’s search for her missing daughter Jules; a quest that brings her into conflict with Southie crime boss Marty Butler, who bears no little resemblance to the notorious Whitey Bulger; and into uneasy alliance with Detective Bobby Coyne, the cop investigating the death of a young black man, Auggie Williamson, on the same night that Jules disappeared.

Small Mercies is also the story of Mary Pat’s journey from unquestioning acceptance of inherited toxic tribal certainties, towards a new and terrible awareness of their consequences for her, for the people she cares about, and for society as a whole.

Brutally authentic, this is a hard but essential read. Taut, tense, concise, and at least as good as anything else he’s done, it might even be Dennis Lehane’s best book. But, alarmingly, he’s been saying that Small Mercies could be his last novel. Readers will pray that it isn’t.