Mermaid Fillet by Mia Arderne

I know nothing about Mia Arderne and I know nothing about Kwela Books, the publisher of this 2020 South African “noir crime novel”, but what I do know is that I fucking loved it.

Regular readers will know that I spent a couple of weeks in August travelling around South Africa, and in the many bookshops I visited during that trip, Mermaid Fillet was a book I picked up and nearly bought on so many occasions that eventually I decided – despite deciding against it a few times – that this was something I should have a copy of. And I’m very very glad I did.

What is this novel?

Yes, in part it is a polyvocal noir crime thriller about various gangsters trying to locate (in late 2019) a Tamagotchi lost by a child who died (as collateral) in a gang hit in the nineties, but to say that this is the beginning and the end of the this text would be extremely reductive: despite its clear thrillery elements (there is also sex and secrets and assassinations and corruption and regret and loneliness and alcoholism (all classic noir tropes)), and also its very contemporary explorations and discussions of social media culture, influencers etc, Mermaid Fillet is a densely packed short novel that nods to complex and serious issues without ending up essayistic, without not being thrilling, without not being funny, sad, artful, neat, surprising, articulate, confusing (in a good way!) and deeply deeply meaningful.

This is a novel that, yes, includes a goddess who creates rains of menstrual blood, it includes the existence of mermaid meat as an important but illicit internationally-desired foodstuff, it includes physical transformations in the moment of death, but it also includes discussion of trafficking and FGM, it includes discussion of sexual assault and rape culture and the complicity of institutions and individuals in the maintenance of a world that is so unsafe for so many people… It also discussions fashion, it discusses guilt and capitalism, travel and strength, family and friendship, loneliness and depression and education and class and prejudice and history and legacies of colonial oppression.

What Mermaid Fillet is, is quite possibly a flawless fucking masterpiece. It includes lots of South African slang and – what I presume is – non-English vocabulary (rather than dialect?), and it includes a lot of detail about local politics and neighborhoods, as well as lots about international niche movements, for example furries. There are discussions here of regret and guilt, of asexuality, of pansexuality, of old school heterosexuality, of polygamy and monogamy, of bodily modifications, of dysmorphia, of joy, of pain, of schadenfreude, of child sexual assault and its repercussions, and of basically every meaningful discussion that one could take part in in this decade in this globalised society.

Are there too many ideas here? No, fuck no. There are so many ideas here that it’s fucking impressive. There is beautiful prose here, there is wit and insight and intelligence, there are incredible gags and deeply moving scenes of emotional responses to both real and unreal circumstances.

It’s about relationships and life, about consequence and desire… But it’s also about gangsters searching for a Tamagotchi and a perfectly cooked mermaid fillet.

It is, in short, an incredible novel, and if this is Mia Arderne’s debut or even Mia Arderne’s tenth novel, this is a text from a writer with a hell of a pen.

Highly fucking recommended!

–///–

Excerpts below:

“His feeling about people who were happy – it was bigger than envy. It was a lack of understanding how. Not even a sarcastic ‘how’, but a really ‘How?’. It was a desperate, desperate question.”

Yes. Exactly that. Sharp lines like this, too:

“And maybe that’s all love is […] being comfortable enough with someone for them to watch you deteriorate.”

Short sections that function as perfect, complete, short stories:

“The Golden Arrow bus was full, hardly any standing room, when it jerked and two standing passengers bumped into each other. They exchanged quick shy smiles, checked that the other was okay and then reverted. There was no chise. There was no lust. It was something else. Something warm. When Perd thought of love, he sometimes thought of this moment.”

There’s a neat phrase about a person considering ending her marriage, who listens to music as she is “contemplating how laborious it is to leave a life”

There’s also a lot of wit, especially around the influencer character:

“Class will outlive both race and gender, she almost tweeted. Almost.”

“What is fame but a lot of notifications?” and – very millennial, very dark one liner herr –

“Michaela knee it wasn’t okay to mourn the violated bodies of girls and the remix to ‘Ignition’ in equal measure. But”…

This is a funny book, a serious book, which overall means something simple: it’s a very fucking good book.

More info from the publisher here