The titular beast and Scandinavian setting of Carl-Johan Vallgren’s novel appear to hint at something chimerical…not fantastic, per se, though certainly alien and bizarre. But The Merman does not read like magical realism—a label that comes close yet is worn as comfortably as pointe shoes. It’s far too intimate, too concerned with the depths and gyres existing between older and younger siblings and, most of all, between abusers and victims. The titular merman is real in the flesh and scale and siren, but he is unromantic, covered both literally and figuratively in a patina of filth, blood and slime. He is as powerful as a pin in a grenade, and Vallgren’s expert availing of the merman’s presence on the periphery greatly enhances the true meaning of the novel.
The social depths and shades of love that are The Merman’s real concern are drawn with a naked tenderness and violence, expedited by Vallgren’s—in Ellen Flynn’s translation, at any rate—surgically laconic prose. In a small town on Sweden’s western coast, Nella lives with her younger brother Robert. They are, for all intents and purposes, alone in their bleak yet beautiful world, shepherded with a broken crook by their haint of a mother, their mercurial dad and various school and government officials. While the siblings find some comfort and aid (not to mention food) in the eccentric Professor and Nella has a close friend in schoolmate Tommy, it’s in each other that they take refuge. Nella protects Robert—bent, broken, blind, the victim of brutal adolescence and adolescents—and Robert gives Nella a reason to live and breathe.
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