The Three Sirens

What happens when a varied group of men and women, married and unmarried, from our own complex culture is thrown together for six dramatic weeks with the people of a simpler, happier society, free from the inhibitions and tensions of the twentieth century? Irving Wallace’s provocative novel is the story of this confrontation, as an American field team of anthropologists and laymen descends upon a remote Polynesian island to study a unique and hitherto undiscovered way of life.

The visiting Americans are supposed to be dispassionate observers. Yet each brings to the island his own problems, attitudes, and prejudices. The team consists of nine oddly assorted Americans, led by Dr. Maud Hayden, the world-famous woman who is America’s leading anthropologist. With her are her son and his young wife Claire; a liberal-minded photographer, anxious to remove his sixteen-year-old daughter from her fast adolescent crowd; a warm, homely nurse whose only attraction is her unique ability to give love; a fussy bachelor attempting to flee from a dominating mother; a female psychoanalyst whose private problems rival those of her patients; and the wealthy wife of the team’s sponsor, a one-time dancer oppressed with the knowledge that she is now middle-aged.

On The Three Sirens, these visitors are brought face to face with uninhibited behavior and customs that seem to be a shocking assault, a challenge, to their most cherished beliefs about love, sex, marriage, child rearing and justice.

In this Polynesian village they find a society where the monotony of marriage is relieved by the freedom to enjoy other mates one week of the year; where the dissatisfactions and repressions of men and women, both married and unmarried, are relieved in a mysterious Social Aid Hut; where women over forty can enjoy life without the destructive feeling that youth is the only happiness; where unattractive girls are desired for those attributes that are ignored in our own cult of beauty; where confused adolescents are given the security of learning firsthand the facts of life; where grown men do not have to prove their virility by means of their careers....

Irving Wallace’s powerful novel tells the story of the shattering impact that this seemingly Utopian way of life has on the Americans who have come to study the people of The Three Sirens and who suddenly find themselves instead studying the nature of their own desires, fears and passions. Their reactions are the theme of a dramatic and brilliant work of fiction that ruthlessly explores the inmost nature of modern man and his society.

Totally engrossing in its outspoken portrayal of an exotic culture, thoughtful in its examination of contemporary American morality, above all swiftly paced and exciting in its storytelling, The Three Sirens is Irving Wallace’s most ambitious and satisfying work of fiction to date.