Tom Barry Writes

When the Siren Calls by Tom Barry

I’m a member of my local bookclub. The only male member, if you’ll pardon the expression. We review a different book each month. I owe the bookclub a particular debt because they helped me better understand my target audience as I wrote When the Siren Calls. I’m often amazed how like minded people can have totally different perspectives on a book. It’s not just whether they love it or hate it, though that’s interesting in itself, it’s what they see in the book. Was the heroine likeable or detestable, was she right to betray her husband, can we forgive her for killing her lover?

These differences have something to with “sub-text”, what we read into the words on the page. We all go through life with our own filters which govern how we see the world,  and what we take out of the books we read. One reader sees the husband as a loyal provider, another as a neglectful workaholic. Where one reader sees a character as shrewd and thrifty, another sees him as greedy and miserly. It’s part of why we love books, and love talking about them.

Which brings me to book reviews. Any book will elicit a range of responses. The differences I mention above will be reflected in book reviews. What some love, others hate. Take a look at the reviews of some of the most acclaimed novels in the English language (Fifty Shades doesn’t qualify), and you’ll see that even the greatest classics, such as the works of  D.H. Lawrence, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, and Hilary Mantel, are rubbished by some; each to their own as they say. (And congratulations to Hilary on winning the 2012 man booker prize for Bring up the Bodies, well deserved.)

As an author, I devour book reviews, both good and bad. Any book I come across with a pile of only 5***** reviews, I know that something is wrong. If no-one dislikes your book, then it is truly mediocre..

But back to those filters. For an author, the great thing about independent book reviews  is that they throw up insights into your own story that you as the author were not aware of, at least at a conscious level. And of course they can highlight flaws in your story or your style that help you improve as a writer. And if that is not benefit enough, a further value is that smart reviewers  often give you a sound-bite or a turn of phrase which you can put to use in the marketing of your book.

Take a recent review of When the Siren Calls, in this case by Elizabeth Jasper, a gifted writer and published author who these days has the good fortune to be able to pursue her passion from sunny  Andalucia. Elizabeth describes When the Siren Calls as “a potent and thoroughly enjoyable mix of sex, romance and big, bad business.” How great a marketing line is that? It’s the sort of tag line grabber that book marketers and PR companies charge authors good money for dreaming up. So my thanks to Elizabeth, and everyone else out there who has ever posted a review of my work.  As I often say, if you like my books tell your friends, if you don’t like my books, tell your friends they might

Carpe Diem – Seize the day, if you dare.

In the inspiring movie “Dead Poets Society,” unconventional English teacher Robin Williams exhorts the schoolboys to “seize the day” before they, like students past, are nothing more than maggot food.  To follow their passion, to live in the moment, and to die free of regret.

How many of us hear this message, but carry on regardless, as if life is infinite when, in truth, we are dying from the moment we are born? We stay in places, jobs and relationships which don’t fulfil us, wishing life were different, but doing little to change it.  The answer, it seems, is almost all of us!  “The Top Five Regrets in Dying”, in the words of Australian care worker and novelist Bronnie Weir, are I wish:

1.  I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me
2.  I didn’t work so hard
3.  I’d had the courage to express my feelings
4. I had stayed in touch with my friends
5. That I had let myself be happier

When the Siren Calls

These were the five most common regrets of those at death’s door, of those who could no longer do anything about it. Isobel, my restless and neglected heroine in When the Siren Calls is suffocating in a stagnant marriage, painfully aware of the ticking of her own body clock, but afraid to take responsibility for changing her own situation. In the words of poet Tagore:

“I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room.

The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death; I hate it, yet hug it in love.”

In an intimate conversation with her worldly friend Maria, Isobel probes  Maria’s affair with her young Italian lover.

“Do you think it’s all worth it?” said Isobel.  “What if Arnie ever found out?”

Maria shrugged. “Better to lose a husband than waste a life.”

“That is easy to say, until you lose him,” said Isobel.

Isobel fears that, unlike hedonistic Maria, she does not have the courage to live a life true to herself.  She fears she is destined to die the cosseted but unfulfilled wife of a workaholic husband. Whether she will or not remains the issue at the heart of the story till the very end.

So the question I pose today is what would be our greatest regrets as the curtain is drawn around us for the last time, and what are we doing to ensure we don’t have them? Is it perhaps that we lack courage, like Isobel, or that we put work before those we love, like her husband? Let me leave you with this thought:  “It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.” Seneca

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When the Siren Calls

In my romantic suspense novel When the Siren Calls, a woman with high ideals falls in love with a man with low morals. Wealthy but neglected Isobel, feeling trapped in a stagnant marriage, believes that suave and sophisticated Jay can bring the excitement and passion that she yearns for. She pursues him to Tuscany and abandons herself in a passionate affair, as the controlling Jay encourages conservative Isobel to continually push beyond her sexual boundaries.

Isobel does not try to change Jay; she recognises that he has been a lothario in the past, but seems to rely on the idea that by giving herself completely to Jay, he will respond in kind. And isn’t it generally true that we get back in life what we give out, that what we radiate we attract?

Isobel cannot help her feelings for Jay. Although the reader is privy to his dark side in his relationship with his mistress Lucy, when Jay is with Isobel he is warm, attentive, and generous. And, also, he is an accomplished lover in the bedroom. A heady cocktail for a woman starved of emotional fulfilment.

It is easy to dismiss Isobel as naive. Yet something like 50% of us, those of us who have been divorced, presumably stood at the altar (or whatever) very much in love and at the time believed that love could conquer all. I say this because in all likelihood we tied the knot, made a commitment to be bound until death, despite plenty of evidence that ours was not a match made in heaven. Maybe we believed our parents, that marriages were relationships like any other that needed to be nourished and worked on if they were to endure. But despite all the work and all the nourishing, many more marriages fail than succeed, because the divorce rate only measures those broken partnerships that have been legally dissolved.

Does this prove that love cannot conquer all?  I’m afraid so.  But we must not despair; this is why god and authors have given us romance stories with dashing heroes and determined damsels,  where a beauty can come to love a beast, and a handsome millionaire can fall for a street hooker.  So we can all live in hope that one day we too will fall in love with someone who truly deserves us