The setting of this
story, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall while the two Germanys
remained uneasy about their pasts uncertain about their future, is so
rich that it has significant potential to overwhelm a storyteller of
inferior quality – it is credit to Lauppe-Dunbar that she weaves
her tale seamlessly into this historical backdrop.
There is Sophia,
young West German Police officer, realising that the Wall coming down
is opening up not just a country but also her past – her past as a
star of the GDR swimming team. Mia, teenager, orphan, raised by her,
now dying, Grandmother, for whom the Wall may have come down but fear
of the power of the state, of the Stasi, remains real. Their separate
lives are drawn together intertwining as they unravel.
For much of the
journey it certainly puts the “Dark” in Dark Mermaids – murder,
doping, lies and betrayal, sexual abuse pile up, survival for Sophia
was only possible through emotional shut-down. But as she faces her
demons so she discovers the possibility of tenderness and love again.
While it is a tale of the astounding capability of human endurance
under ultimate strain, and in that way is a story of hope –
Sophia's endurance is set against a backdrop of many others who did
not survive.
It feels like we
live in a world that needs to learn the lessons of this tale – a
world that perhaps needs to learn these lessons more urgently now
that at any point since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is not just
that the corruption of sport continues, there are suggestions of
state sponsored programmes as far reaching as those of the GDR, but
even outside of such state programmes the stakes have been raised so
high that taking the advantage that drugs bring seems to too many
worth the risks. But more pressingly the ways in which national pride
is rising and with it claims to national interest can be used to
justify stripping individuals of rights and basic human dignity –
reducing them to mere instruments within the exercise of power. Ends
claimed to justify means, when we need to turn the spotlight on
whether the ends are even desirable in the first place?
A powerful novel in
its own right, but all the more powerful for speaking to the
Zeitgeist.
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