by JULIET WATERS

One weird trend this year is women’s fiction that features butchers. First there was Louise Erdrich’s The Master Butchers Singing Club, and now Alissa York’s much heralded first novel, Mercy, which opens with the slaughter of a cow.

In town recently for a reading at Concordia, I decided to ask York about her interest in this subject. Though she did live in Montreal briefly during the ’90s, she now lives in Winnipeg. We met in the food court of Central Station, just before her train left. As food courts go, it’s one of the better ones, complete with a faux library cafeteria and a Première Moisson, but obviously there’s nothing like Rose’s Fine Meat. This is a butcher shop in the fictional town of Mercy, Manitoba, where the owner, Thomas Rose, also has a killing room. Here, town people can bring their own livestock to be slaughtered and then returned to them in paper parcels.

Notwithstanding her jet-black hair and dramatic features, York actually seems less goth in person than she appears in publicity shots. She explained how she did her research.

“I read books. I’m actually quite squeamish, but somehow when I’m writing about it I’m okay. I never cook with meat, sometimes I eat it. I thought maybe I’d have to go into a butcher shop to research. But I was lucky enough to find a couple of books, and one in particular that had just the right tone to it, and the right illustrations… It was from the right era too, the 1950s. And it had these brutal little subtitles that were almost always quite poetic, kind of like ‘beef, a good bleed.’”

Lest one assume Thomas is a nasty character, he’s actually one of the few truly sympathetic, almost normal characters in Mercy. Though she didn’t set out to create a kindly butcher, it was actually the research York did for an autistic character in the novel that inspired her.

“I had a sense when I started out that he wasn’t purely brutal, but at one point I read a book by Temple Grandin. She’s this really high-functioning autistic, who is a savant at architecture, and her area of expertise is designing animal facilities, including slaughterhouses. She designs it all in her head without any plans, and part of what she does is make these facilities kinder. There’s this thing that happens in slaughterhouses where people become dehumanized, and then they become cruel. But in the places she designs there’s a moment for each animal, and each animal is killed with consciousness. So this whole aspect of Thomas came out in that way.”

Sadly, this gentle quality of Thomas has few rewards for him. Mathilda, the young orphan he marries falls in love with the Catholic priest who performs their marriage. The spectre of Thomas’s brutal occupation is always there to hint that he could use his skills for vengeful justice. But that’s as far as I’ll go in revealing the plot. Mercy is not the kind of novel that would be fair to summarize.

I will say, however, if there are two kinds of women’s fiction readers in the world, the Emily Bronte fans and the Charlotte Bronte fans, Mercy is solidly in the first camp. This is the fiction of dark haunted landscapes (in this case a black spruce bog) and twisted unfulfilled love. It may feel somewhat oppressive for those readers who don’t mind a crazy wife in the attic but ultimately prefer to see intelligent love conquer all.

But it all falls down to a matter of sensibility. “I’m drawn to intense people,” says York. “I prefer the sublime landscape to the perfectly tended garden. I prefer bright colours to beige. And I’m drawn to dramatization over philosophizing. I think that’s just my personality. These are the ideas that come to me, these are the characters that come to me… so I do a lot of following that stuff before I even have an idea of what the hell I’m doing.” :

Mercy by Alissa York, Random House, hc, 332pp, $32.95