Elijah's Mermaid
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By Essie Fox
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1 review
Since she was found as a baby, floating in the Thames one foggy night, the web-toed Pearl has been brought up in a brothel known as the House of Mermaids. Cosseted and pampered there, it is only when her fourteenth birthday approaches that Pearl realises she is to be sold to the highest bidder. Meanwhile, the orphaned twins, Lily and Elijah, have shared an idyllic childhood, raised in a secluded country house with their grandfather, Augustus Lamb. But when Lily and Elijah go on a visit London, a chance meeting with the ethereal Pearl will have repercussions for all of them, binding their fates together in a dark and dangerous way…In this bewitching, sensual novel, Essie Fox has written another tale of obsessive love and betrayal, moving from the respectable worlds of Victorian art and literature, and into the shadowy demi-monde of brothels, asylums and freak show tents – a world in which nothing and no one is quite what they seem to be.
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St Just Thursday Evening Reading Group 7th February 2019.
Elijah's mermaid. Essie Fox.
In general, the reading group did not especially like this book. There were some positive comments: one reader thought it was a 'real page turner', and felt that Essie Fox is a good writer, the sense of time and place and descriptions of sleaze and semi-elegance being very well put; another said it was very cleverly written, with an academic or poetic feel to it; a further comment was that the 'fluid' style of writing conveyed the 'watery' elements of the book very well.
But the chief criticism, agreed upon by everyone present, was that the narrative was too confusing. Several people said that they wanted to get to the end to find out what happened to all the characters, but were not sure, even when they had finished it, that they had grasped everything. Similarities between some of the characters was part of the cause of this, particularly Pearl and Lily as dual narrators, but also the problem was that too many things were revealed too close to the end. The parentage of the children and the decisions made about their upbringing were the main sources of the confusion, and we spent some time discussing all this. It did seem apparent that the principal points of the plot were not made sufficiently clear to the reader.
Some found the descriptions of the brothel and its residents too lurid, and the content too graphic; others thought the subject matter unoriginal, and the whole thing 'over-written', almost to the point of being a pastiche of a Victorian novel.
