The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar

This book started out really strongly, but unfortunately progressively disintegrated as it went on. The descriptions are really sharp and vivid throughout, and at first, the lush narrative voice is captivating. As the book goes on, however, it starts seeming increasingly contrived and highly irritating. The occasional addresses to the reader in the second person don't make the voice any easier to place, and the pseudo-18th century tendency to use adverbs without -ly (for example, 'marvelous big' instead of 'marvelously big') was really getting on my nerves. The word choice was sometimes also distressing, namely referring to a vagina as a 'commodity' and a 'cauliflower' (yes, that's right, a cauliflower). The element of magical realism (the mermaid and her effect on those around her) was very well-done, but would have been vastly better had it not been squeezed into the last quarter of the book. It also tackles certain issues that are definitely contemporary, hidden beneath a thin (a very thin) veneer of period vocabulary. An aristocratic character ranting about how all the ex-slaves should be put on a raft and shipped off to where they came from is clearly about issues with migrant workers and deportation (maybe even Brexit), a black woman being unwilling to see herself as part of a community of black people deals with very post-1970s issues of identity, and Mr. Hancock's attitude to his wealth as something that must be shared and ought to be spent locally (rather than in the metropolis) seems to me to be clearly engaging with that wet dream of the British political left of the past hundred years, the successful and profitable marriage of capitalism and socialism. The issue I have with this is that it makes the 18th century narrative into a sort of allegory for our time, without suggesting any solutions (as an allegory usually does) and instead just making the 18th century very much less believable. I also couldn't really get a good sense of the characters, at first I thought that Angelica, a reckless whore who enjoys the good life, was a really appealing character, but she sort of just collapsed into a total mess when she became a proper wife. This was certainly compelling reading, and I enjoyed it, but there's a lot that's just not up to scratch, and I'd say it was more of a promising book than a really good one.