FICTION: Lively characters and a strong sense of time and place make this historical novel a rich delight.
And indeed it does when the ship’s captain returns to reveal he has sold not only the cargo but the ship itself to purchase Mr. Hancock a “genuine mermaid” — a desiccated, horrid creature with monkey head and fish tail — with which to make his fortune. “Only a fool could lose money on a mermaid,” Capt. Jones confidently asserts.
Author Imogen Hermes Gowar displays an unflinching eye for the economic calculations permeating a culture in which everything from human flesh to mermaids is monetized.
It’s hard to believe that this brilliant and sure-footed work is a debut novel. Gowar’s feel for the spirit of the period is spot on — unsurprising, given her background in archaeology, anthropology, art history and museum work. (Hancock’s mermaid was inspired by the “mermaid” displayed in the British Museum.) Gowar swims like a mermaid through the docks, slums and brothels of Georgian London with an unsentimental acknowledgment of the harsh entrapments occasioned by gender, class and race; her prose sparkles with sly wit, inviting inevitable comparisons to Jane Austen.
“The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock” is a superb historical novel, but there’s more. Interspersed with the realism is a series of lyrical passages in the Mermaid’s voice — yes, there’s a second mermaid, and, yes, she’s alive and real — that deepen the novel’s examinations of power and captivity, sexuality, freedom and independence. This is a long novel, clocking in near 500 pages, so it builds leisurely, in the best 18th-century tradition. But it richly rewards any reader willing to enter its world. Frankly, I was sorry to see it end.
Publisher: Harper, 487 pages, $28.99.