What promises to be an entertaining story about a mermaid and a steamboat captain becomes a long and convoluted saga that leaves the reader about as disappointed as a sex-starved sailor who realizes he really can’t have carnal pleasure with a mermaid.
Mark Siegel’s graphic novel Sailor Twain or The Mermaid in the Hudson is a cute story, but Siegel takes on too much and spreads himself too thin. He sacrifices story to show off technique. He uses charcoal for his illustrations so the gray tones will serve to create a mysterious and spooky background for characters with features that are straight out of a Disney film: wide eyes and elfin mouth.
But Siegel’s mermaid is no damsel in search of her true love.
She is a demon who uses sex to lure men to their deaths. A point he makes clear by her displaying her ample bosoms as she looks up at her victims with angelic eyes. Siegel drawings are meant for thumbing his nose at Disney for watering down the mermaid myths. The ironic twist is clever, but that’s all it is.
He continues with the Herculean feat of trying to give depth to this story by showing off his research skills. He sets the story in 19th Century New York on a steamship that takes passengers down the Hudson Bay. Thus, Siegel gets to show readers what New York was like during a time when industry was coming into its own, ushering an age of great progress and change in American society.
In the middle of all this is Captain Elijah Twain, who is asked if he is related to the great author, Mark Twain. He answers in the negative to the question and goes on to explain that the author’s real name is not Twain. Readers can thank Mr. Siegel for that bit of information. The steamship traveling down an American River is a nice homage to Mr. Clemens.
Duality is the theme of this novel and Siegel uses hackneyed writing devices to emphasize it. The most obvious being the mermaid since she is part woman and part fish. She promises sex, but structurally is incapable of having it.
It’s Elijah who finds the mermaid after she is wounded by a harpoon. He hides her in his cabin as he nurses her back to health. She lounges on his bed and shows off her ample bosoms every chance she gets. Elijah, also, happens to have a wife who is, of all things, paralyzed from the waist down. Thus, he has two women in his life who can’t have sex with him.
Siegel continues hammering the point about duality with minor storylines involving other characters who are all struggling with some dual-natured problem or issue. There is a writer who is thought to be a man but is actually a woman, a philandering playboy who is a really a man of honor, a mermaid’s curse that splits people’s spirits in two, so they are left searching for themselves for all eternity
The reader is left searching for a real story in the murky waters of Siegel’s attempts at clever writing.
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