‘Wake, Siren’ Reads Like a Creative Writing Exercise

With the forthcoming 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in 2020, local Cambridge author Nina MacLaughlin’s “Wake, Siren” joins the influx of works focused on feminism and female empowerment. The novel, which is a collection of the various myths found in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” but reanimated in the voices of the female characters, seeks to “recover what is lost when the stories of women are told and translated by men.” Wildly original and creative in concept, the stories are nuanced feminist takes on classic Greek mythology, but they unfortunately suffer from major structural confusions that make the collection as a whole incohesive and disorganized, detracting from the overall message and reading experience of the novel.

There is no doubt that “Wake, Siren” is original and gripping. Retellings of classic Greek mythology abound, but a female-narrated “Metamorphoses” is a refreshingly new take. The story doesn’t mince words — if readers are expecting a soft, resigned telling of the stories by these women, they’re not going to get it. The stories are graphic, explicit, and raw in a gripping and terrifying way that forcefully shows the abuse and violence against women in these age-old stories. MacLaughlin’s take on these tales make glaringly obvious what the male handling of these stories missed — and it isn’t always pretty. Many of the stories in the book involve rape, and it is even more horrifying when pinpointed, drawn out, and placed next to each other in this collection. MacLaughlin gives these victims a voice by placing the focus of the story on them.

Structurally, the stories vary widely — each told in a different way. Formats vary between verse, normal first-person narrative, therapy session transcription, and dialogue — one chapter even contains emails. The use of so many different structures helps give shape to the widely different cast of characters in the novel, but unfortunately, it makes the book rather chaotic and muddled. The variance is a very creative and original strategy — however, the reader really gets the sense that this novel was no more than a creative exercise. In fact, MacLaughlin writes in the author’s note, “I thought it might be a good exercise…to rewrite the story [Callisto] in her voice,” in reference to the novel’s conception. Though it was a fruitful and ingenious endeavor, unfortunately, the book comes off as just “a good way to flex those writing muscles,” and not as a cohesive collection.

In her author’s note, MacLaughlin also writes, “Some of the figures called out with voices that seemed lodged in a time of gods, goddesses, nymphs, and satyrs; others seemed to speak in a language closer to our own time.” This too only confuses the overall cohesion of the novel. The flipping back and forth between the mystical, ancient time of Greek mythology and the modern world felt indecisive and made the book nearly incoherent and seemingly confused about its own contents. If the stories spoke to the author in the languages of different times, then perhaps, organizationally, the novel would have benefited from some sort of chronological order. Instead, MacLaughlin notes that she organized the stories in an “attempt to let the women’s voices be in better conversation with each other,” but unfortunately this venture fails.

Still, “Wake, Siren” is not a bad read by any means. It’s a truly entertaining, creative, original concept that does some important work by focusing on the female perspective in these classical, male dominated stories. Its raw language and bluntness brings attention to the horrifying female tales of “love, loss, rape, revenge, and change” that are often glossed over or lost in favor of the male story. Though chaotic and confusing, perhaps that is a side effect of pulling these threads from such a long and convoluted epic as Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” Fans of Greek mythology will enjoy the familiar cast of characters and appreciate the way they are being represented in a new light, and the novel certainly has its place in the current political climate.