The Flight of the Mermaid (review)

Since the 1990s Tara Books has built up a formidable international reputation as a quality producer of exquisite handcrafted books. These books, boasting a strong graphic component and avowedly produced beyond the “publishing mainstream,” have showcased the formerly underrepresented wealth and variety of folk art from India on the world stage. Tara’s Flight of the Mermaid lives up to this raison d’être by offering a modern picture-book adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale about the ill-starred marine ingénue.

According to the publisher’s catalog, Flight addresses adult and child readers alike and sits equally well as an art lover’s or collector’s item or as a read-aloud book. Each page, dense with the gently rasping texture of hand-made paper, evokes the reassuring feel of human skin. The book, jacketed in a dark teal reminiscent of the deep sea, is also a toy. The front cover insets a jigsaw puzzle: the reader finds a fish with a humanoid eye. As the first page opens up, this eye transforms into the eye of the Little Mermaid. She is the centerpiece of a focused light beam surrounded by familiar deepwater creatures. The book’s prefacing gambit is also more than a gimmick, as it physically initiates the process of discovery that corresponds to the narrative of the mermaid’s restless forthcoming adventures through human existence and romantic love. The device prefigures the themes of metamorphosis and mutability that dominate the plot, as the protagonist switches identities successively through mermaid to human and then to a daughter of the air.

The jacket illustration is a prelude to the delightful artwork within the book, which fleshes out the publisher’s commitment to empowering voiceless and nameless folk artists, for whom the speech-shorn protagonist of this tale plays an apt figurehead. Based, as the jacket blurb tells us, on the conventions of Gond tribal art from central India, Bhajju Shyam’s images span single pages, their exuberance spilling over into quiet silhouettes on the adjoining pages of text. The artwork makes for a gestalt in itself, offering not mere illustration but thoughtful interpretation and commentary on the accompanying text. A few pages into the story, the text recalls the frequent artistic compression of mermaid and siren myth by describing the role of singing mermaids in luring passing sailors to their death (6–7). Here, the text makes an aleatory connection between the mermaids’ presence and the sailors’ drowning: “Sadly, the only ones who did visit the sea bed were those that drowned.” The artwork, instead, suggests a causal connection: the body of a man catapults itself into the predatory ring of the little mermaid’s five seemingly welcoming sisters, positioned at the maw of a leviathanic fish. The fish is oddly featureless except for a telltale eye, but it sports human and marine remains within its innards. The remains are in ominous blue and white, in contrast to the lusty oranges, reds, and greens of the living mermaids and seaweeds rounding in on the hapless sailor.

The artwork unpeels underlays of the grotesque to anodyne words with success, but the verbose text lacks equal panache in bringing home the archetypal force of the tale. On the introductory page the opening words frame the narrative of the main plot: “Mermaids live in the deep. A place where day and night are the same thing, filled with creatures so fantastic that it can hardly be believed that they exist” (2–3). Departing from Andersen’s folkloric opening, which assumes the reader’s knowledge of the mermaid myth, Flight sets the tale’s context through its encyclopedic characterization. Possibly, the impulse to posit an alternative, scientifically unverifiable reality—privileging the imagination over factual and scientific information—is owed to the publisher’s professed ideological pull against the prevailing didacticism of children’s literature in India. However, Tara’s countercultural impulse is undone, in practice, by the faux magisterial register of the passive voice. The clause...