The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey

The Mermaid of Black Conch is an absolutely fucking gorgeous 2020 novel published by Peepal Tree, written by the highly acclaimed “indie darling”/”writers’ writer”-type writer, Monique Roffey. Though not quite as horny as I remember the previous Roffey I’ve read to be (though maybe it is and time has just erased the less sexual moments of The Tryst (Dodo Ink, 2017) from my sad, repressed, memory?), it similarly plays with notions of mythology and modernity coming together (pun not intended (not consciously but maybe subconsciously it was??? (“coming together” like sex, like shagging, like what one man does with one mermaid here))), this time – as you can probably guess from the title – focusing on a mermaid, who is captured by some Hemingwayesque depressed fishermen types then rescued by a young man who – of course of course of course – falls in love with her, though their love is doomed…

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It’s difficult to know what to write about a text that is so rampantly emotive, that is so intentionally and successfully emotional; this is a book that isn’t just a rehashing of Hans Christian Andersen’s Splash, it is a novel that draws its parallels and makes its comparisons without artifice or needless subtlety: David Baptiste and the mermaid Aycayia’s relationship isn’t the only relationship this novel is about, and it isn’t the only relationship that dramatises and contrasts and elevates the depiction of other relationships written here by Roffey.

This isn’t the sea against the land, the rich against the poor, the good against the bad, the corrupt against the virtuous, the victims of colonisation against those who perpetuated it, it’s not nature against humanity, magic against reason, young against old, education against instinct, it’s not these things but it is these things, all of these things, completely these things, but it’s more than all this, too. And in a good way, I mean…

It’s wide ranging and it’s complex.

But it’s also under 200 pages and a story about a woman who’s been cursed to live forever as a mermaid, who briefly escapes the water, but must then return return return because, as the late, great, Sebastien the crab said (I presume a crab who was singing in the early nineties is no longer alive, but maybe crabs do live longer than that?), “The human world; it’s a mess.”

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Jealousy in all its forms, for the lives of others, the possessions of others, the bodies of others, the the the-

The sea and its power, its potential, its fathomless depths and unknowable mysteries;

Hurricanes and firearms, magic and disease, curses and regrets and shame and fear and ageing and sickness and pain and pain and pain and generational trauma and cruelty and loneliness and lust and need and hunger and fear, so much fear, a lot of fear… and also a lot of never really doing anything because you’re stuck stuck stuck in the past, whether anchored there by choice or caused to be stuck there by external factors and and and and-

The Mermaid of Black Conch, then, covers it all – the pull of water, the pull of death, the pull of flesh, the pull of nostalgia, the pull of nothingness and the various means we have to try and reach it…

This isn’t a simple tale of love and a fish-woman out of water, it’s a wide ranging and complex evocation of the human condition and how fucking fucking fucking shit it is, y’know?

This is an emotionally and intellectually powerful novel, and it’s also a story of a doomed relationship between a man and a mermaid. She leaves the water, she fucks, she falls in love, but back to it she must return, she is unable to be out forever.

I’m not a fucking mermaid, y’know, but somehow it all felt fucking familiar? Like, this is it. This is what it’s like: we’re never truly free of the things we wish to escape, and no fleeting happiness, no fleeting joy can remove the irrepressible tug, pull, suck that holds and hauls humanity and humans back to back to back to-

Fuck.

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The Mermaid of Black Conch shows the pain and the reality of having a body and existing around and amongst others who do, too too too.

It’s excellent. You should read it.

Go weep like a fish.