The Need for Lisa – the 'Soul of Siren' by J Patrick Armstrong

by Natalie key | 16 January 2025

The first finished draft of Lyttleton Siren was in two voices: Melvyn, a frustrated, middle-aged man, and Kevin, an afflicted teenaged boy, whose lives have become tenuously connected and parallel through two dreadful incidents in their shared small community. I remember, once I had the ending in mind, perched on a stool in the kitchenette of our tiny Taipei apartment, racing toward the violent crescendo with all the excitement of finishing a novel, followed by the strange anti-climactic feeling of ‘What do I do now?’

Author J Patrick Armstrong

Once the dust had settled, and I began, as all debutant novelists must, the process of working up a pitch for publishers and agents, the sobering notion that the book was ‘thin’ kept tugging at my consciousness. That was the word that kept pricking me as I read over pages and chapters, editing and adding, always aware that something significant was lacking, a kind of elephant that wasn’t in the room, so to speak.

Around that time, I happened to read a David Lynch interview in which he said words to the effect of, ‘you can’t go looking for good ideas, but you need to notice them and catch them when they come to you.’ Oddly, this reassured me, and I got on with my next novel, placing my new-found Lynchian faith in the belief that what was missing from Siren (as I had begun to call it) would come to me in a flash of inspiration.

When it did come, it was more of a dawning of the obvious, and I chided myself for not having earlier seen the necessity for the voice of the bereaved mother: the need for Lisa. And once she was in my head, I could not have removed her even if I had wanted to. So, I set about the task of working her into the novel, turning the parallel, masculine duet of Melvyn and Kevin into the more balanced, feminised triptych of Melvyn, Lisa and Kevin. And as Lisa’s chapters were planned and written, the thinness that had kept me awake nights was fed and fattened, and Lyttleton Siren gained weight and began to feel more like the story I’d set out to write.

I did not see it at the time, only on completing the new draft, that Lisa had become the soul of the novel (if there is such a thing) – a strong female survivor. She survives poverty, abuse, village gossip, coercion, bereavement, grief and isolation to become the quiet hero of the story, a character whom readers might admire and wish well, given the cards she’s been dealt and what she is put through.

Amidst the darker elements of Lyttleton Siren, Lisa is a beacon of hope, navigating the extremities of her heartbreaking situation with strength and dignity while her male counterparts fall foul of cowardice and vengeance. And this is where I hope the novel is most honest, as whenever we read or hear of these dreadful stories in the news, there is always someone, somewhere, suffering but surviving each day with a quiet heroism that too often goes unnoticed.