Word: mercier
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Sean Potts and Sean Keane work for the Irish post office. Martin Fay is a purchasing agent for a Dublin electronics company. Paddy Moloney is an administrator. Derek Bell has been an orchestral harp player for ten years. Peadar Mercier is a construction foreman and the father of ten children. Michael Tubridy is a consulting engineer. They are, in short, about as average a bunch as any country can produce and not the usual candidates for pop stardom. But when they sit down together to play, they are something else again: the Chieftains, Ireland's leading folk band...
...burglars have better hours than we do now," Patrolman Thomas Mercier said...
...their credit, the voyagers treat their predicament with the contempt it deserves. While describing the weather to Mercier, who cannot bear to look, Camier insults it in the careful cadences of French primer prose: "A pale raw blotch has appeared in the east, the sun presumably. Happily it is intermittent, thanks to a murk of tattered wrack driving from the west before its face...
...axiomatic in Beckett's work that the concept of purpose is beyond comprehension. This may not be true, but if granted only for the sake of argument, everything tumbles into place. Waiting for Godot was after all the critical knuckle cracking, simply a play about waiting. Mercier and Camier are waiting under the illusion that they have some place to go, though they do not know where or why. They keep returning home to look for lost possessions or items they have al ready junked as superfluous. Along the way, pub stops and a supporting cast of fellow grotesques...
Beckett's peculiar genius is to set up such Hobson's choices while squeezing them for all the farce they will yield. His is a Buster Keaton, deadpan humor that shrivels in the explaining. Mercier and Camier is as hilarious, in gasps, as anything he has written. The novel's coolly mannered prose disguises outrageous statements until the instant they land. There is also cruelty in Beckett's method (Mercier is comforted briefly by the sight of a dead and bleeding wom an) and surprising moments of compassion. When Mercier and Camier part, they lose...