A Big Splash

Imogen Hermes Gowar’s much-talked-of debut novel on sex and sensibility—and mermaids in Georgian London—is as deep as it is wide, finds Cheryl-Ann Couto.

- Cheryl-Ann Couto

Imogen Hermes Gowar is polite, measured, scholarly and has total Impostor Syndrome about her debut novel, The Mermaid And Mrs. Hancock (on stands now), which was a literary hotcake long before it came out. Following a 10-way bidding war of publishers in June 2016, Harvill Secker (part of Penguin Random House) acquired the plump historical fiction, scoring Gowar a sensational £2,15,000 advance, according to The Sunday Times.

“It was weird and disorientating having publishers bid for it,” says the 30-year-old, even though it had presciently won The Curtis Brown Award in 2013, when it was just a 15,000-word dissertation for her creative writing MFA at the University Of East Anglia (UAE). “I couldn’t trust what was being said. I felt there was a catch. And I felt like I couldn’t really talk to anyone about it. I know so many writers, and how hard it is to get a book taken on. You don’t want to be like, ‘Oh, poor me. Everyone wants to give me loads of money.’”

Well, there was a catch, and it was that her audacious novel about the unlikely coupling of a mercurial courtesan and a bumbling merchant in 1785 London, after the latter acquires a mermaid is very, very good. Braiding the politics, racial anxieties, crushing patriarchy, blooming industry and folklore of the time, Gowar has rendered a red-blooded portrait of Georgian society through the prism of its flesh trade, with detail, control and style. What’s more, it goes down like a breezy beach read.