THE TIDE TURNER (9+)
by Angela McAllister
HarperCollins, £12.99; 336pp

TO BE COMPARED WITH a fish is never a compliment to a human being, so just why is growing gills and a scaly tail so appealing to our children? This summer a fresh wave of mermaid books, and the timely release of Aquamarine, a fishy tale from 20th Century Fox, will be washing into bookshops.

Aquamarine is adapted from Water Tales by the American author Alice Hoffman, whose brand of small-town realism leavened with the supernatural enjoyed success with Practical Magic. The touching tale of how two best friends have their lives changed by a mermaid washed up in a storm is a gentle romantic comedy that has its roots in something much sadder.

“I had always been interested in mermaids,” Hoffman says, “but Aquamarine as a book began to form when my sister-in-law was suffering from advanced brain cancer. She lost the ability to walk, to see, to move. She became obsessed with mermaids — well, the obvious reason I think would be the freedom to move without legs, the freedom to exist in another world, an alternate universe where you can be half woman and half mythical creature.”

Yearning to breathe underwater is by no means confined to one sex — as Eric Linklater’s rumbustious boys’ adventure The Pirates in the Deep Green Sea and Harry Potter in The Goblet of Fire both make clear — but it is more common among girls. Andersen’s Little Mermaid, who bleeds and loses both voice and her independence when her tail is “split” into legs, seems to symbolise girls’ fear of becoming women. But mermaids can also be symbolic of ferocious cruelty, as in Alan Temperley’s chilling thriller Huntress of the Sea, and also of erotic power. Fairytales abound in stories about fishermen lured away from mortal wives to live with mermaids — as in the legend of the Merrymaid of Zennor, which is being used by Helen Dunmore’s Ingo novels.

The second of these, The Tide Knot, has Sapphire and her brother Conor becoming increasingly involved with the world of the Mer, where their father, believed drowned, now has a new family.

Sapphy is drawn irresistibly to the sea, in which she can breathe and race and forget her troubles; but far away in the Deep a terrible disaster lurks when the Tide Knot is undone. Intensely compelling and written in gorgeous, pellucid prose, the projected quartet knits together adolescent anguish, sexual attraction, environmental concerns and a profound sense of mystery. Like Hoffman, Dunmore is herself drawn to the sea, especially to West Cornwall, where she lives.

“When you are on that peninsula narrowing towards Land’s End, the vastness and power of the ocean isn’t an idea, but a reality which you feel in your bones as the sea thuds against the cliffs. And for people who live on an island the sea is the great unknown, the place of adventure and mystery.

“If you’re prepared to walk and climb on the Cornish coast you can still find deserted coves even in the height of summer — and gateways to Ingo. That figure sitting on the rocks in a lonely cove could be a boy with his wetsuit pulled down to his waist . . . or it could be one of the Mer . . .”

But who, or what, are these creatures? Dunmore says: “I’m not writing about human beings with tails, or complacent figures who sit on rocks combing their hair with golden combs. The Mer are stranger and wilder than that. They are not human and their world is quite different from the worlds of Air and Earth; it has its own laws, dangers, delights, its own language, its own history. They mistrust the Air and the humans who live there — and often with good reason, as sewage pours into the sea, coral dies and dolphins are trapped by nets and drowned by trawlers pair-fishing. But the Mer are also fascinated by humans and recognise that their own fate is entwined with the fate of the human world. The Mer are not victims; they can be tough, even ruthless.”

Disney’s Ariel, in her sea-shell bra, is the popcorn version, spoilt but kind-hearted; Liz Kessler’s Emily Windsnap and Angela McAllister’s Cal are more troubled teenagers, bravely facing up to life with single parents above or below the waves. Although their adventures, like Sapphy’s, involve danger, they are more playful, optimistic creations than Dunmore’s, Temperley’s — or, indeed, the heroine of Franny Billingsley’s outstanding romantic thriller The Folk Keeper, who must keep dark supernatural powers at bay with marine magic.

Kessler’s Emily Windsnap, who discovered her embarrassing ability to turn into a mermaid when immersed in a school swimming lesson, is now on her third outing this year with The Castle in the Mist (forthcoming from Orion). She is, Kessler says: “A normal girl, with normal worries about fitting in and about having a best friend and so on . . . but she becomes a mermaid, too! To me, mermaids symbolise the merging of the real, everyday world that we inhabit, the mystery of the ocean and the fantasies and possibilities that exist just on the edges of our lives.”

McAllister starts from the reverse point of view in The Tide Turner, with Cal begging her father to tell her the truth about her mother before she leaves home. It’s only at the end of the first chapter that you realise the whole scene has taken place underwater, in a sunken village, which Cal leaves for the surface. An exciting, well-written fantasy, it gives us the pleasurable shock of seeing life from an unexpected angle.

All mermaid tales are essentially a celebration of being a bit different, as Jan Mark’s classic picture book, Haddock, concerning a hopelessly funny love triangle between a mermaid, a fisherman and a haddock, makes clear. Whether the denizens of the deep are as pretty, flirtatious and helpful as Aquamarine or mysterious, malign and magical as the beings we will shortly see in the second Pirates of the Caribbean film next month, the Mer embody both our joy in swimming and our fear of drowning. As beach holidays beckon, there is enough on the shelves this summer for those who love both the sparkling shallows, and in the immeasurable deeps.

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