IN THE OPENING CHAPTER of Imogen Hermes Gowar's first novel, "The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock," we meet a merchant in 18th-century London, Jonah Hancock, anxiously awaiting the ship full of trade goods that will cement his fortune. The somewhat timid Hancock wonders if he can now call himself a gentleman, without realizing that if you have to wonder, then you're not. He "sees no benefit in questioning how things are, and avoids the society of what he calls 'clever men.'" His chief measure of all things is money. Meanwhile, in a parallel story, a beautiful courtesan named Angelica Neal, penniless after the death of her aristocratic patron, has decided to abandon the protection of the madam whose top attraction she once was. Her bawd, Mrs. Chappell, is a gloriously grotesque "abbess" whose whores are "nuns" and whose "nunnery" is one of London's most exclusive brothels. She's the sort of buttery tyrant who chides her girls for not offering her a seat and orders one to recite a sonnet while another rubs her feet. As for Angelica, the question that comes to haunt her is: At the age of 27, am I over the hill? Readers who think we're in the familiar territory of books like Michael Faber's "The Crimson Petal and the White" or Emma Donogue's "Slammerkin" - or even of Masterpiece Theater's upstairsdownstairs chestnuts - may be surprised when the first actual gentlemen who show up turn out to be hilarious caricatures speaking to one another in baby talk. They may even balk when Mrs. Chappell stages an orgy that would make the sleaziest servant on "Downton Abbey" blush. Gowar's lens focuses not so much on the high and low as on the middle: on country girls ensnared by prostitution and merchants waiting for their ships to come in. And the world she describes is one whose sexual license is an 18th-century given. Mr. Hancock's vessel never arrives. Instead, he learns that it's been sold for something supposedly more valuable, a dead mermaid, and at first he's indignant. But the "wizened freak" with sharp claws and teeth turns out to be a moneymaker when displayed for admission at a local coffeehouse, and customers bewitched by the attraction of repulsion make Hancock a wealthy man. Initially, this mermaid is the novel's MacGuffin; it figures in most turns of the plot and will strike savvy readers as a sly joke: The emblem of beauty and sexual temptation is a "malevolent little beast." In a vivid set piece, after Mrs. Chappell rents it for display she orchestrates a Busby Berkeley-style bacchanal with priapic sailors dancing in lines, whores whose pubic hair has been dyed green and a servant offering a marble dish of condoms soaked in milk. Gowar's mermaid is this vividly realistic novel's touch of magic realism, and its genuineness is teasingly ambiguous. It is said to be stuffed, but then actual fauna are routinely stuffed. Later in the novel, the live mermaid who shows up is "not a solid creature" but a sort of semi-dissolved being that can be removed from its vat of water only in separate parts, with buckets. One of the delights of this knowingly preposterous story is the dialectic it constructs between the real and the fantastic. Its period details - de rigueur in historical novels - dutifully create the ambience of a different time and place for tourist readers, and do so beautifully, with, for example, a variety of foodstuffs described with linguistic abundance and with other striking touches, like gold wires glinting behind a woman's teeth, moth holes in a man's wig, papered windows, "barley-sugar glass sconces," walnut ketchup and a bourdaloue, a portable chamber pot used by the incontinent Mrs. Chappell when she rides in her carriage. The effect is that each quality, the real and the fantastic, infects the other: The real world of 18th-century London seems both lavish and perishable, and the fantastic world of mermaids feels deadly real, especially when the live mermaid pollutes everyone in her vicinity with anxiety and melancholy. Other recurring themes in this splendid novel, which was a best seller in Britain, are handled with skill and broaden its scope. Is a woman's subjection, her second-class status in society, more evident in a brothel or in a marriage? Is love compatible with the practical strategies of survival that drive some women to prostitution? The strongest theme, however, is perhaps the most subtle. Nature is the strange other in "The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock" - the "live" mermaid turns out to be viciously hostile to the novel's urban dwellers. Repeatedly, Gowar tames common nature with descriptions that rely on human terms, like the grasshoppers that leap as if they were popped buttons, while her mermaids are identified with raw nature, with "gray seawater, its surface leaping, its depth incomparable." Mermaid lore doesn't merely emphasize the temptation of their hybrid and highly sexualized bodies, as in the age-old identification of women with nature; it also includes sunken ships and barren marriages for those who try to capture the creatures. Accordingly, the safest mermaid in this novel appears in the decorations of a mussel-shell grotto. In other words, Gowar, as an ingenious artificer herself, locates her most authentic reality in artifice and art. JOHN VERNON'S novels include "La Salle," "Peter Doyle" and "The Last Canyon." This 'wizened freak' bewitches with the attraction of repulsion. |