How to marry a mermaid (The River Girl - Wendy Cope)

Member Name: theediscerning

Product:	The River Girl - Wendy Cope
Date:	19/10/02 (100 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Short and snappy

Disadvantages: Short

I still think dooyoo should pay me twice for this. It's in two categories, y'see (at least in my mind), children's book and poetry.

Wendy Cope burst onto the poetic scene in the 1980s with Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, which although being from Faber and Faber, was a good poetry collection - with wit, humour and style, and not all this pompous verbal diarrhoea they keep flogging to us. I was introduced to this at uni in a basic get-them-to-actually-look-at-poetry way, having been put off much modern verse beforehand with Eliot and DH Lawrence, like many.

And so many years ago I was keen to see The River Girl in the library. It turns out to have been a handy commission for Cope, as she hardly published anything for many years after Cocoa, and yet to come were the heady days of the later '90s, when she had finally more collections of her own, and a host of editing comic verse books to be done to pay the hot chocolate bills.

The plot outline this book is based on was the work of some marionette puppeteers, who needed a handy, catch-all-ages rhyming narrative to go with their puppets for their upcoming show. And that is what they got.

The plot is really rather simple, boy gets girl, boy loses girl... But oh, that's where it ends. It's not even long enough for boy to get girl back. What? Are children-friendly books allowed unhappy endings? Wouldn't the littluns have gone away from the puppet show in floods of tears?

Anyway, the plot. John Didde ("a little like John Donne") is a wannabe poet, sitting by the banks of the Thames (upper part thereof - not even Cope can be romantic about the eastern end of it), where he is miserably failing to write anything worthwhile. Much like the usual Faber and Faber poet then. His heart just isn't in it.

But hey, his heart gets involved when out of the waters emerges the ravishing Isis, named after the way people at Oxford Unive
rsity mispronounce "Thames". She's spotted him and has him down as a looker. Her rising from the waters is the best indication I can find here of Wendy Cope's style and humour, so I will quote (for once) -

"As soon as Isis sees the handsome poet,
She breaks the surface. Floating in a dress
Of purest white, she's graceful as a lily
(Where most of us, of course, would look a mess)."

All the verses are in this form - rhyming scheme ABCB, three lines of eleven beats and one of ten to quicken the pace and snap the reader into the next verse even earlier. This makes for the whole thing to be very easy and comfortable reading. (My university might have tried one time to teach me some technical terms for things such as this, but if they did they failed.)

Anyway, they meet, it's love at first sight, and he obviously wants her for the rest of his life, which was her intention too. Things might just go his way, but first she has to check with Daddy - Father Thames, who is normally to be found in the riverbed asleep (geddit?)

Daddy grants her wishes and gives her a cracker of a farewell present - the ability to change into any animal form she wishes, at any time. Beats a double bed set and matching curtains.

It then turns out that Isis is practically our poet's Muse, and the pen flows as readily as anything else might in a young marriage - right from the river bank that first day he has been full of pleasant rhyming love verse. But as a marriage goes, has it much to recommend it?

"He writes and writes. She is his muse and soulmate.
The cooking and the housework? She does that."

Dramatic tension is served, in a way, by John's waiting to see if Tite and Snobbo actually publish him (I would here make another reference to Faber and Faber, but you'll have to make it up yourself).

Lo and behold, they do, and he turns into a super-
popular poet, parties and launch dos all over the place. Which soon gets to be the final straw for our lovely heroine. I would end my plot summary by saying the worm turns, but she doesn't turn into a worm. You'll have to read it yourself and find out what form her trying to regain attention does take.

Well, all this would make a decent puppet-show, for 40 minutes or so. But does the text make much entertainment? Well, yes and no. It is admirable the form of the poem is sustained so well, and the immense effort this must have taken is hardly visible. But get beyond that and you have rather a slim package.

The illustrations, by Nicholas Garland, are basic, done in thick black ink lines, of some skill themselves but a bit rough-and-ready to my eyes. They aren't your usual children's book pictures, but this isn't your usual children's book.

Should you desire it for your littluns then I might suggest a 7-11 age bracket, based purely on vocabulary used, and my own misguided instincts about what children are like, but I presume the intent of both Cope (and Faber &c) is to have created a book that the adult reader will also fall in love with, for its simplicity and charm. There is some of this in evidence, but it isn't a classic by any means. Scenes such as where John tries to swap phone numbers with someone who lives in a river are endearing, but on the whole it's a bit of entertainment, then it's over.

Like this op is now.

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