The final two pages of “Mermaids” that may serve as a motivation for wise and considered decisions in 2019.
Mermaids and renewed climate resolve in 2019
A lot of people hated the end of “Mermaids in Paradise,” the 2014 novel by the accomplished Lydia Millet. It followed previous work that saw Millet showered with praise, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. They were disappointed, and so were many lukewarm book critics.
It’s been four years but it’s hard to forget the critiques of people who said they wanted to throw the book at a wall. Yet maybe it was just a bit ahead of its time. As 2018 – a year of climate crisis and despair and alarm – comes to a close, perhaps it’s those final two pages of “Mermaids” that may serve as a motivation for wise and considered decisions in 2019.
Millet’s a novelist, but she also holds a master’s degree in environmental policy from Duke University and previously worked for the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) before moving to the Center for Biological Diversity. She’s been there for almost 20 years now, and it’s clear that climate issues are a consideration in her work, but many missed the cli-fi message in a tale about mermaids.
So here’s the spoiler alert and why it matters: For 300 pages, the mermaids are real and they’ve been discovered by a young couple at their honeymoon resort. Chip and Deb spend the entire book trying to save those mermaids, enlisting the help of other resort guests and family and friends, and exploring what the discovery means in multiple but intersecting layers of personal and societal relationship.
The reader is swept on a sea of elation when they succeed. Then, on the final page, one discovers that all of the daring and risk and ingenuity, all of the physical cost, all of the emotional and spiritual work didn’t even matter. There is no happy ending. The earth is doomed within a matter of months.
They knew that the whole time.
The mermaids have no future, and neither do Chip, Deb and their allies. The asteroid is unavoidable.
“It just doesn’t work in terms of the stakes Millet has set up throughout the story,” complained one reviewer. “Who cares about getting rich off mermaids when the world’s about to end? Who cares about the destruction of the (coral) reefs when THE WORLD’S ABOUT TO END? Why isn’t Chip calling his mom every day if the world’s about to end? Why does Deb go to work every day if the world’s about to end? Why do resort workers continue tending to tourists if the world’s about to end?”
Yet the stakes Millet set up may be precisely the point. Now behind us, 2018 was a year when much of the discourse centered on climate despair – from the reflections on grief of Dr. Kate Marvel, to the contemplative acceptance and clear-eyed resignation of author Roy Scranton, to the anger of young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. The bells toll. The enormity is suffocating. The innocence is lost.
They did it anyway.
That the mermaids were saved but it won’t even matter in a final and futile moment was never what “Mermaids in Paradise” was about. Rather, what we choose and what we do at this critical hour in the human story matters immensely; who we choose to be and what that humanity means matters more.
It’s a new year for thinking about mermaids.
