Alive in the Merciful Country by AL Kennedy – activism and betrayal

A primary school teacher navigates lockdown in an ambitious novel that asks potent questions about abuses of state and personal power

AL Kennedy has made no secret of her despair about post-Brexit Britain under the “rage-tweeting, Nazi-curious” Tories. “My government has become more radical, and that is difficult to explain to someone living in a European democracy,” she told the Swiss German-language newspaper NZZ in 2023. “Very dark people are at work here.” Kennedy, the author of acclaimed short stories and novels including Paradise, Everything You Need and the Costa-winning Day, has claimed that her views make her work less welcome in Britain. In her book The Core of Things, published in German, she writes: “I may not be the kind of writer our media watchdogs like.”

Alive in the Merciful Country, her 10th novel, was first published in translation in Germany and Switzerland back in 2023. As the book opens it is 2020 and, with her London primary school in lockdown, Anna McCormick is teaching her year 5 class online and doing her best to keep their spirits up. Together they discuss the story of Rumpelstiltskin, the “tricky wicked goblin with a secret name”. They invent Stiltskin dances and do Stiltskin sums about spinning and the weight of gold. For thousands of years, Anna tells the children, people have told versions of this story about lying and the misuse of power, reminding themselves “that the way to defeat all monsters is by knowing who they really are”.

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