In Orpheus Lost, Australian-born author Janette Turner Hospital attempts to rework the titular myth to frame a story of love and terror in the post-9/11 age. Though the idea is ambitious and interesting, the book suffers from an overabundance of cliché, superficiality, and heavy-handed reiteration of the theme, making it a bit of a mess.

Leela-May Magnolia Moore, who’s the wild-child daughter of a Southern Pentecostal minister, has made a name for herself at Harvard and MIT – not for her studies on the math of music, but for bedding any available male in her path. She falls for Mishka Bartok (no relation to the composer), a brooding violin virtuoso who becomes her live-in lover. When a quest for information about his Lebanese-born father lands Bartok in Beirut, he is spirited away to a secret facility in Baghdad for “interrogation” on suspicion of terrorist activities under the orders of Cobb Slaughter, Leela-May’s childhood “blood brother” (and one-time lover), who is now a member of a shady private security firm.

Torture, religious extremism, terrorism, passion, love – Hospital touches on all these weighty matters in the novel, but she barely grazes the surface of any. Playing too heavily on the Orpheus myth, she allows her prose to descend into vague and dreamy descriptions of everything from Leela’s childhood to Mishka’s torture. One need not be explicit to be clear, but Hospital’s images are so watered down as to render them ineffective.

Hospital, who spent many years living in Kingston, Ontario, is a writer of considerable talent, with a stable of previous efforts, including the award-winning novel Due Preparations for the Plague, that showcase her ability to craft solid fiction with solid plots and characterizations. Perhaps because she is such a known quantity in the literary world, the failure of Orpheus Lost is that much harder to swallow.