Leading up to Lent 2013 I was, metaphorically speaking, journeying toward Rome from Canterbury. My heart and mind were conforming to a new way of feeling and thinking, and I wanted my imagination to follow suit. To help with this I searched online for a novel written by a Catholic. I was already familiar with Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. I wanted something new. After looking at a few online lists, I happened upon David Adams Richards’s Mercy Among the Children,[1] which co-won the Giller Prize with Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost. Years before I had read and appreciated Ondaatje’s The English Patient and figured that an author who shared an award with Ondaatje must be worth reading. Mercy Among the Children was my Lenten read and what a read it was. The twists and turns, and the interplay of darkness and light, virtue and vice, tragedy and hope all come together to make a profoundly arresting novel. It haunted me long after I completed it. Its quiddity pressed a crucifix into the wax seal of my imagination. Several years ago, I sent the book to Fr. D. Vincent Twomey SVD as a Christmas present. He powerfully summarizes the reading experience:
The novel by Richards keeps reverberating in my mind: apart from a novel by Flannery O’Connor, I have not read such a vivid depiction of the depths into which human weakness prone to evil can descend, and the suffering it caused by all the establishments, including the local Catholic Church. . . . The occasional sparks of redemption and the triumph of virtue over vice were consoling, even if the ultimate triumph of the main figure . . . is like that of Our Lord, beyond a gruesome death.
Richards is a novelist in the full sense of the word. He tells stories, creates complex characters, and weaves together tight plots. He does not write for a Catholic readership. You will not find any of his 30+ books at your local Catholic bookstore. He has won more than 20 awards for his literature (fiction and non-fiction). But these accolades do not add up; Richards does not play the literary game. There is not a hint of wokery, nor anything politically correct about his work. He’s an outcast and happy to be one. He’s a Catholic; he’s pro-life. He’s critical of indigenous and feminist virtue signaling. At the same time, Richards is not a Catholic apologist. He refuses to flatter anyone or kowtow to any ideology. Instead, Richards is a novelist who is interested in the complexity of truth, and it is this that is most reflected in his characters. In the vein of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the line of good and evil runs down the center of Richards’s characters, whether they are priests, politicians, police, First Nations, social activists, children, or women. His heroes are often alcoholics, and almost always they are misunderstood outcasts.
Richards’ understanding of human brokenness is shaped by René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire and C. S. Lewis’s notion of the inner ring. Group think serves the devil.
She paused, putting cream on her hands, and looked at him. “But for God’s sake, you don’t believe in Catholicism?” Vivian asked.
This caught him up. “No—of course not.” He sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the corner of the wall in thought. Then he looked at her without his glasses, which made his eyes squint. “Still, sometimes I wonder if Weaver isn’t similar to a lot of mimics. Mimics only do one thing—it’s the only thing Catholicism may have taught me—”
“What do mimics do?”
“Oh—they destroy—they dig our graves.”[2]
Evil is real, and in this world appears to have the upper hand. But Richards raises the question “Is evil better than good?”[3] Certainly not. We rely on goodness and goodness will abound because it is spontaneous, and “that is the real portent of every novel and poem and play I have ever read. The truth being that without goodness, man himself would not exist.”[4]
So how does an “unpolitically” correct Catholic continue to have traction in the literary world? The answer is simple but paradoxical: he’s Catholic.
The intense drama of Richards novels, most of which involve a murder, have a Dostoyevskian feel. Every decision is of immense importance. Every choice is a move toward faith or destruction. Faith in God is the move away from sin, away from self-righteousness and self-seeking. Faith is the recognition that there is someone more important than me, a move toward self-surrender. Faith is the embrace of life. Whereas “all sins seek one great sin. And it is this: murder.”[5] But there are many paths to murder beyond cold blooded killing. Richards argues that “to take someone innocent and destroy him/her as I’ve seen conniving men of wealth do to the ignorant poor, or to take someone’s best and trample it, is a kind of murder. . . . So often the acts that aren’t prosecuted are the ones that are as deadly. The impregnating of a young woman you do not care for and then rebuke . . . is a kind of murder, too.”[6] All sin is an attempt at killing. Faith does not save one from being killed but saves one from killing, and this, in truth, is more important. An unjust act harms the doer far more than it does the victim. We see this with Sydney Henderson in Mercy Among the Children. As a twelve-year-old boy he pushes a kid off the church roof because the kid stole his sandwich. Thinking he has killed the boy, Sydney makes a pact with God that if the boy lives, he will never hurt another soul again and will attend church every day for the rest of his life (even though he was abused by the priest at his local parish)—the boy does not die. With the unfolding of Sydney’s life Richards gives us a harsh portrayal of what it is to live a just life, to be harmed rather than harm, to stick by one’s word. Richards does not preach, and after finishing the novel one wonders if Sydney made the right decision in honoring the pact.
Richards’s characters make major life altering decisions; some characters are downright hate-able and others lovable but none of them are one-sided. All of them are grasping for freedom and wrestling with their conscience. Sydney, a type of tragic hero, never wavered from his pact with God, but other characters are not so steadfast in their choices. The most broken of his characters are repeatedly given a second chance, a chance to move toward faith. In The Lost Highway Alex and Leo kill a man over a lottery ticket. The coverup is witnessed by a young girl named Amy, and the two men decide that they must kill her. Yet, Alex has second thoughts and tries to convince Leo that they should leave her be:
“But let’s ask this,” Alex said, holding him back. “What if, if, if there is a God?”
“Better off for it,” Leo said.
“Why?”
“God forgives.”[7]
Ironically, Leo speaks a deep truth to Alex but twists it: if God exists, they should kill the girl because forgiveness is a real possibility. Both characters engage in sophistry, but Alex is far more guilty because he should know better than Leo. Alex is an academic. He’s read Plato and Aristotle and teaches ethics courses. There are moments when truth breaks through to Alex, but he sophisticates:
He tried for the first time in a long time to think of his soul, and it registered in his mind as turning like a small leaf on the forest floor on a cold autumn day, shrivelled and dark. One part of him was thinking that he had a soul—and thinking of his youth, of praying as he struggled not to drown long ago, perhaps a very great soul.
It [killing Amy] would leave a scar, no doubt . . .
He was not thinking of the body being scarred. Of course he was thinking of the soul. But the scar would heal over, and in some future day, in some way, things would be normal again.”[8]
Like many academics Alex is too entangled in mimicry to see straight. All the necessary “material” for redemption is present. It is on the edge of his mind and has penetrated the surface of his heart. Acknowledging that the soul is real is a breakthrough. If there really is a soul, there really is good and evil, but alas Alex twists the truth to assuage his ill-formed conscience.
Richards does not pull his punches when it comes to academia. It is the place where intelligent people who are afraid of reality hide. White middle-class professors hide in the pristine towers of academia writing about First Nations problems but have never spent a night on a Reserve, hunted or fished with a First Nations man or woman, nor taken the time to listen to their stories.[9] Instead, from a comfortable distance, they incite rage and flout their opinions (in reality the opinion of their peers) as objective fact with the desperate hope of peer approval. In the university, approval and disapproval have replaced justice and humanity, posturing as the same realities. Teaching a modern ethics course at university,
He [Alex] realized something . . . In this new age, people were actually expressing something they might not realize. It was this: at least among the people he admired, forgiveness was no longer an essential part of man’s hope. What so many people had, as borne out by these privileged and radicalized young men and women, was one of two possible states. These two possible states were simply approval or disapproval. That is all that was required.
This new unspoken proclamation went on in all departments and in all circumstances.[10]
A white man with few friends and no firsthand knowledge of any First Nation’s person,
[Alex] wanted the poetry of a certain student banned for being too white and too male. He knew even as they tried to fire this student from the poetry journal, that the man was a fine and courageous writer. But the truth did not have to be present to pretend you were truthful. That was what masked truth at university.[11]
So how does an “unpolitically” correct Catholic continue to have traction in the literary world? The answer is simple but paradoxical: he’s Catholic. The very thing that is off-putting is what resonates in the reader’s soul (and Richards believes in the soul). As a Catholic, Richards knows what it is to be human. He sees and loves the men and women of his age, the outcasts, the poor, and the downtrodden. He roots for the underdog, and knowing that no one is beyond redemption, he hopes for the villain too. He’s Catholic. “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.” His novels delve deep into broken yet redeemable characters who live in a reality shaped by the theological virtues, whether illumined by their light or hidden by their shadows. In Richards’s own words, “Faith, hope, and charity play out as the only three things by which the universe is measured. All the rest either relies upon these three things or tries to defeat them.”[12]
Andrew T. J. Kaethler is Executive Vice President and Associate Professor of Theology at Catholic Pacific College in Langley, British Columbia, Canada. He is author of the book, The Eschatological Person: Alexander Schmemann and Joseph Ratzinger in Dialogue (Cascade, 2022). He lives with his wife and six children in Langley, British Columbia.
[1] David Adams Richards, Mercy Among the Children (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2000).
[2] David Adams Richards, Songs of Love on a December Night (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2025), 108.
[3] David Adams Richards, God Is. My Search for Faith in a Secular World (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2009), 119.
[4] Richards, God Is.,120.
[5] Richards, God Is.,79.
[6] Richards, God Is.,82.
[7] David Adams Richards, The Lost Highway (Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2007), 367.
[8] Richards, The Lost Highway, 260–61.
[9] For more on this but with a focus on journalists see David Adams Richards Incidents in the Life of Marcus Paul (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2011).
[10] Richards, The Lost Highway, 77–78.
[11] Richards, The Lost Highway, 182.
[12] Richards, God Is.,161.