The Sirens by Emilia Hart

Emilia Hart’s debut novel Weyward involved generations of witches in the English countryside. Her follow up, The Sirens, involves a different kind of traditionally female mythological creature. Once again, Hart works across multiple timelines, using this structure to dole out reveals which, unfortunately, are a little too predictable.

The Sirens opens with a bang. Lucy wakes from a particularly vivid dream to find it is not a dream at all but rather that she is strangling Ben, a peer at university who, it turns out, cyberbullied her. Unable to deal with the fallout of this event, Lucy flees to her much older sister Jess, who lives in an old house in Comber Bay, a small fishing village on the South Coast of NSW. Comber Bay is famous for a series of strange, seemingly unconnected disappearances going back many years. On the way to the coast, Lucy is plagued by dreams of a pair of Irish sisters, convicts who are being transported to Australia. When she arrives, Jess is missing and in her studio are paintings depicting the same sisters that Lucy has seen in her dreams. So begins Lucy’s quest to find Jess and solve the mysteries of her past.

The Sirens brings Australian/English author Hart back to Australia. And in The Sirens she effectively captures the landscape, the characters and the cadences of Comber Bay and its inhabitants. Hart also uses The Sirens as a way of telling the very real, often harrowing and not often told story of the women transported to Australia during the convict era. This backstory also provides a neat way of explaining the transplantation of a very European form of mythology and mythological creature to Australia.

The convict backstory is a particular highlight of the novel, dealing compassionately with an important piece of Australian colonial history. As with Weyward, Hart also uses this very female-oriented mythology to explore gender issues. But the overarching narrative to carry all of this and give it relevance is a little too thin. The plot builds to a number of reveals that have been telegraphed well in advance (although there are still a couple of surprises). So that, overall The Sirens is an often interesting but ultimately unsatisfying piece of modern mythmaking.

The Sirens by Emilia Hart

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6.0/10