The Mermaid of Black Conch: A Love Story - Winner of the Costa Book Award 2020

Product Information

And in this other interview with the New Statesman, Roffey also talked about the hybrid form of the novel — where an omniscient narrator appears alongside Aycayia’s verses and David’s journal entries. She says: And inexplicably overlooked for the Booker Prize and Women's Prize, which says rather more about those prizes than the book. On one hand, it can feel discouraging, the amount of work — largely uncompensated “labors of love” — that writers of color and small or independent publishers like Peepal Tree Press have to do to get their work out there. But clearly, the readership is there. And I just love Roffey’s excitement about the contemporary Caribbean and diasporic writing scene, which you kind of talked about too in discovering all these writers. In one of her interviews with Advantages of Age, she says: Although it’s funny — I have to say that when I didn’t know anything about the book except for its title, I was a little skeptical that it would be something I’d enjoy. But then I saw the cover art by artist Harriet Shillito for the Peepal Tree edition. And so, it depicts how the Taino mermaid named Aycayia is described in the story: “something ancient … the face of a human woman who once lived centuries past”; “her tail … yards and yards of musty silver … She must weigh four or five hundred pounds”; her tattoos “looked like spirals, and the spirals looked like the moon and the sun,” she must have been “a woman from the tribes that lived in these islands when everything was still a garden.”

The transformations in the novel are messy and difficult and often general mermaid lore is turned on its head. There is a curse, but it is not one that is easily broken. Instead of the necessity of keeping something belonging to the mermaid, David gives the mermaid (named Aycayia) a pair of sneakers to help her walk. She is taught language by a good friend of David (Arcadia) and befriends Arcadia’s ten year old son Reggie who uses sigh language as he is without hearing.One day while David is singing, he attracts the attention of “sea-dweller” he thought only existed in fairy tales and island “ole talk”. David sees the Mermaid, goes through a range of emotions one being curiosity. Daily he revisits the spot where he first sights the Mermaid, she begins showing up to hear him sing and play the guitar. They form a sort of bond that continues for weeks until the Mermaid begins listening for the hum of David’s boat.

One comment that I had was that I wrote it to cause social unrest and racial disharmony,” she says of Potiki. “I wasn’t a very politicised person at all.”

Retailers:

And this passage for me wrapped up very tightly but very powerfully this lasting and unchanging impact of colonialism. Aycayia in a way is a symbol of that for me — the impact of patriarchy, the impact of a people slaughtered, then found, just to be objectified and treated like property by these American fishermen in the Caribbean. For me, it was such a powerfully loaded passage. I mean, it’s such a complex response to such a complex issue, right? For me this book was just amazing, this complex love story being shared about these two couples whose lives are intertwined. But that these relationships are both impacted by forces outside of their immediate impact and control, primarily the curse of those women centuries ago and the lingering impact of colonization, amongst other things.

David upon hearing about the capture of the Mermaid heads to the jetty, cuts her down and takes her home. He doesn’t have a plan, but he knows he cannot let the Mermaid come to ruin, he also knows doing this may lead to his ruin, but he takes the chance. And so what did we think of this unusual novel that weaves together sex, misogny and race with love, music, magic and myth, plus it throws in a few spliffs, a virginal mermaid, a crooked cop, and a chorus of vindictive women. All that in one book? Yes, indeed. Did it make for a good book club book? Was Kate able to cope with reading all the sex? If you buy a book about a mermaid is it then ok to complain it’s unrealistic? Listen in to find out. So, what about you? How did you hear about the book, and what made you want to read it and recommend it for the podcast?

Monique Roffey

This book was unique, intriguing and beautiful. But it was also very melancholic, and there was much sorrow and sad moments. Old woman, pretty woman, both rejects. Womanhood was a dangerous business if you didn’t get it right.

It’s really not as simple as that, Roffey points out: “I think if you unravel female jealousy, you find the patriarchy. It’s a competition for the alpha male, and we’ve ever been thus. Our patriarchy is highly internalised.” He wanted to keep her safe, always. But he also suspected that wasn’t what she necessarily wanted, or needed. In fact, now she had the sneakers, he expected her to disappear some day, just like she’d appeared. […] He wanted her, but he also hoped she could be free to be whatever she wanted. Actually, when I think about it, we’ve looked at a number of books that grapple with the legacy of colonialism from all over the world, right? There was Insurrecto, which centered on American colonization of the Philippines and more recently Potiki, which talked about the displacement and cultural subordination of the Māori people by British settler colonists. And so, it was interesting to notice similar themes that have come up in these books or that have been pointed out to us by the writers. So for instance, the appearance of untranslated Waray in Insurrecto and te reo Māori in Potiki not only gives cultural texture to our reading experience, but I think it also symbolizes an act of resistance against colonialism. The novel is a unique Caribbean fable that takes the familiar story of a mermaid abruptly thrust onshore and brings it to a new place. It reads like the work of a novelist in command of her material and focused on using a mythic ‘then’ to speak to now.” —Malachi McIntosh, fiction chair, OCM Bocas Prize 2021 This enchanting tale of a cursed mythical creature and the lonely fisherman who falls in love with her is "a daring, mesmerizing novel … single-handedly bringing magic realism up-to-date (Maggie O'Farrell, best-selling author of Hamnet).This may be a novel about a mermaid but it's definitely not a Disney tale. At the centre of this story is the destructive effects of female jealousy, the dizzying impact of heartfelt passion and the deleterious legacy of colonialism on a fictional Caribbean island. Monique Roffey is a writer whose work I enthusiastically follow because her books are so varied and creative. The three I've read previously “The White Woman on the Green Bicycle”, “House of Ashes” and “The Tryst” each use inventive stories to approach different social, political and emotional subject matter. I was also inspired to read this new novel since I've joined in #Caribathon, an online readathon of Caribbean literature. A searing blend of Caribbean magical realism and contemporary examination of misogyny and the reverberations of colonial oppression . . . Roffey’s fable is a moving love story, full of messy, glorious eroticism, but she also shines a light on the dangers of toxic masculinity, racial inequity and the difficulty of understanding our true natures.” —Connie Ogle, Star Tribune Rounded down from roughly 4.5 stars ⭐️ Going into this book I never expected I would love it as much as I did. This book is about many things: feminism and colonialism, love, possession and jealousy, and a kind of erotic love that threatens to undo every other aspect of the characters’ lives. Aycayia is so strong and caring that we feel as if the magical realism of the novel has taken the genre itself into new and exciting territory. Readers surely will fall in love with the love story that plays like Shakespeare in island patois. David’s voice is so heartbreaking and Aycayia’s thoughts are so modern that their desires may overwhelm you as they do to themselves. As Aycayia comes to understand her new body and the new world in which she is now living, David, the man who found and saved her, must deal with the fact that you can take the woman out of the ocean, but you can’t take the ocean out of the woman. And so a mythical adventure unwinds, wrapping us all in its spell.