60 pages • 2-hour read
The Sirens
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Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of sexual assault.
Part 2, Chapter 22 Summary: “Mary”
Mary wakes to find her feet stinging from water leaking into the hold of the ship. She notices that Eliza’s skin is “sharp and crusted as if with scales” (172), and she fears what is happening to them.
The ship stops in Rio de Janeiro, and the women are allowed on deck. The captain tries to sell the casks of rum he stored in the hold. He is unsuccessful, and the women note their rations are dwindling. Mary wonders if it hurts to drown.
Part 2, Chapter 23 Summary: “Lucy”
Saturday, 16 February 2019
Lucy wakes to find herself on the beach, near the edge of the sea. Her skin “is already burning and tightening from the water’s poison kiss” (177). She’d run to the beach after seeing the picture Melody showed her of her mother’s face. Lucy’s mother, Maggie Martin, is Judith Wilson; Jess is Baby Hope.
Max calls and says he hasn’t spoken to Jess recently but would like to. Lucy feels certain that Jess is her sister, not only because they share their father’s ears but also because she feels a biological connection.
Part 2, Chapter 24 Summary: “Jess’s Diary”
1999, 3 January
Jess thought that losing her virginity would be like shedding a snakeskin, “revealing a shiny new layer beneath” (181). Instead, she is afraid Max loathes the sight of her.
Jess feels like Pandora in the painting by John William Waterhouse, having discovered something she can never not know. Her father reminds her that Jessica means “God’s gift.” She’s stunned to think he’s not her father; she found her birth certificate and a letter addressed to Robert and Judith Wilson at Cliff House in Comber Bay. The tabloid that had accused Judith of abandoning her infant paid them a settlement.
Seeking solace, Jess calls Hennessey, whom she feels is the only person who “sees [her] flaws and thinks they’re beautiful” (187). He invites her to meet him at the art studio.
Part 2, Chapter 25 Summary: “Lucy”
Saturday, 16 February 2019
Lucy cannot bear to think that her mother might have abandoned Lucy in the sea cave, but also cannot bear to think she’s not their mother. She wonders what Hennessey did to her sister. Police knock on the door.
Part 2, Chapter 26 Summary: “Lucy”
When Lucy answers the door, the police think she is Jess. As she thinks of how to respond, Lucy notes that the rash on her hands is getting worse, and a silver web is emerging between her fingers. The skin between her toes is thicker, too.
The police are investigating Cameron Hennessey and believe he might have contacted Jess. Lucy wonders if Jess ran away with him.
Part 2, Chapter 27 Summary: “Mary”
The women are brought on deck as the sailors celebrate. Mary sees a carcass and fears they’ve killed someone, but Bridie says it is a shark. Aoife is upset that the sailors killed it. The women are given shark flesh to eat, and Mary thinks of Eliza’s story about the merrow woman.
That night, Mary recalls Byrne and how he watched them. Mary had dreamed of falling in love and having children of her own one day. On Samhain, when he came upon them in the stream, Byrne tried to rape Mary. Eliza hit him on the head with a rock. Mary blames herself, thinking she was weak, but Eliza says, “It’s the water that makes us strong” (202). Mary has the illusion that her skin is covered in scales.
Part 2, Chapter 28 Summary: “Lucy”
Saturday, 16 February 2019
A storm rages across the bay. Lucy feeds Jess’s cat and wonders how to tell her parents that Jess is gone. She looks at her skin:
The rash on her legs is peeling, coming off her in great pale strips, like the discarded skin of a snake. Below it, the flesh isn’t pink and raw […] Instead it glimmers, changing color with the light of the storm. Green then blue, then the pinkish white of mother-of-pearl. Iridescent as scales (204).
Lucy investigates the painting on the easel and finds the women’s skin is a snakeskin embedded in the canvas.
Melody visits. She tells Lucy that she briefly dated one of the Eight, Daniel Smith. He took her to the cave one day, something that kids did. Daniel tried to have sex with her but stopped when they heard women’s voices singing. Daniel went to the edge of the cave and disappeared.
Melody was afraid to tell anyone what happened. Danny was a local and she was considered an outsider, even though her mother was Indigenous. Melody says she has always felt safe in this bay. It protects women, and that is why she is certain Jess is okay. Lucy wonders if Bernard Smith’s work to establish the monument was not to commemorate the Naiad’s victims, “but to appease them” (212).
Part 2, Chapter 29 Summary: “Jess’s Diary”
1999, 10 January
Jess can’t bear to talk to Max, believing he can’t stand to look at her. She wakes up from a dream to find that she’s turned the bath faucet on. When she dries off, her skin comes away to show blue skin beneath. She lies to her parents about where she is going and bikes to the art studio. Cameron confides how his father insulted him because he likes art. Jess lets him touch her. He gives her a book on dreams, and she feels he understands her.
Part 2, Chapter 30 Summary: “Lucy”
Saturday, 16 February 2019
As it rains, Lucy thinks of her parents and feels certain that whatever they did, they meant to keep Jess safe. She calls to tell them that she is at Cliff House, Jess is missing, and she knows Jess is Baby Hope. Her mother instructs Lucy not to read any more of the diary. She and Lucy’s father will drive there immediately.
Part 2, Chapter 31 Summary: “Mary”
Mary dreams of a time when Mam took her and Eliza into the water. The sight of her mother, who had gills, terrified her. When she wakes up, to calm herself, Mary sings a song Da taught them about a maiden on the shore who lured a sea captain with her song and robbed him. As she sings, the other women join in, and “Mary wondered if the captain could hear it. The beauty they made of his prison” (225).
Part 2, Chapter 32 Summary: “Lucy”
Sunday, 17 February 2019
Lucy wakes to find she’s halfway down the stone staircase on the cliffs. She sings the song she heard in her dream; it’s a song Jess used to sing to her. She climbs back up the staircase and finds a gold wedding ring at the top. She looks up Cameron Hennessey and learns that allegations have surfaced that he sexually assaulted several girls at the private school where he teaches. She looks at the engraving on the ring and realizes it belongs to Hennessey. Lucy goes back to the diary and finds an ultrasound photograph labeled with her sister’s name and a date of April 20, 1999.
Part 2 Analysis
Part 2 continues to reveal and intensify the connections between the women, even as their family connections break apart. Just as Mary and Eliza are separated from their father and have already lost their mother, Jess feels she loses her father and mother with the discovery that they are Robert and Judith Wilson. Her sense of betrayal and abandonment results, in part, from not being told the truth, but also from a mistaken sense that, without a biological connection, the bonds of family aren’t genuine, interrogating The Pull of Familial Relationships from a different perspective. Lucy, too, is desperate not to have her bond to Jess broken and uses their shared dreams and childhood bond as evidence that they must be biologically connected in some way. Hart establishes these perspectives in order to subvert them later with a more nuanced idea of the connections of family.
All four female protagonists become further connected by the discoveries they make about their skin, furthering the theme of Discovering and Expressing Oneself. The hints that Lucy is transforming are hinted at in the way she notes webs of skin between her fingers and toes and the shimmering flesh beneath the skin of what she thinks of as a rash. Mary’s transformation is more overt, mirrored by her recognition that Eliza, too, is developing scales. Because of the way the chapters alternate, in the narrative, Mary and Lucy are transforming at the same time. Jess’s similar experience brings her into the circle, while her sleepwalking confirms that she is drawn to water because it reveals something essential about herself. This is the core, the truth of her, which she thinks Cameron Hennessey sees and appreciates, and which she believes Max saw and abhorred. While Mary is afraid and Lucy is concerned about what is happening to them, Jess feels liberated by understanding the truth, which she traces to her unknown origins. When she meets with Hennessey she is ready to celebrate this part of herself and be seen at last.
The tone of danger and vulnerability continues in these chapters with the introduction of more dangerous men and a reminder of women’s outsider status. The captain is another instance of an abusive male, like Byrne, like Hennessey, like Daniel Smith. In the case of Byrne and Daniel Smith, however, the women they’ve targeted find aid in the intervention of another female, supporting the idea of Female Connections as Protective Influence. Eliza physically defends Mary from Byrne, which earns her punishment for assault, though Byrne is not punished for his attack. Eliza’s assertion that the water makes them strong is a statement about their true selves that Eliza understands but Mary doesn’t, as she is actively repressing this knowledge about their mother. Melody tells Lucy that she felt safe when the sound of women singing lured Daniel away from her. A further vulnerability, shared by the convict women of the past and Melody in the present is that they are all considered outsiders to the English who have political control over Ireland and are settling in Australia to the detriment of the original inhabitants. Melody’s mother’s people were persecuted by British settlers and discriminated against by their descendants, a prejudice reflected in the irony that Melody is considered an outsider in Comber Bay while Daniel Smith, who was born there, is considered a native. As outsiders, finding a sense of community or means of protection is all the more valuable to these women.
The snakeskin emerges in these chapters as a powerful symbol of transformation, representing the change the women are undergoing. Jess uses the metaphor when she thinks about losing her virginity, but she employs the literal snakeskin, a gift to her from Lucy, to represent her own skin on the women in the painting. The snakeskin suggests, as do descriptions of the sea, that what seems deadly can also be beautiful, but what is beautiful—like Ben, like Cameron Hennessey—can have the power to harm.
The sirens continue the novel’s exploration of this tension between beauty and danger as they evolve from being a destructive force to being a protective one; the voices that lured Daniel Smith away from Melody are only dangerous to men who mean harm. Lucy’s discovery of the article about Cameron Hennessey reveals him as another predator, while his wedding ring heightens suspense about what he’s done to Jess. Lucy’s discovery of the ultrasound photo is not just a cliffhanger ending for Part 2 but adds urgency to her need to find Jess and begins to solidify the connection between the protagonists, which will be fully explained in Part 3.
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