The Salt of Broken Tears [Hardcover]

Michael Meehan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 18, 2001

On the edge of the remote salt flats of Australia, a young woman blows in from nowhere and disturbs the precarious equilibrium of a family farm. The boy is fascinated by her, his mother despises her, and the brutish farmhand wants to possess her. When the woman mysteriously disappears, the only trace of her a bloodied dress, the boy sets out in search of an Indian hawker who may or may not have the answers. As he journeys through the broken landscape, accompanied only by his horse and his dog, the boy becomes aware of another party converging murderously on his destination.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The vast, sparsely settled wilderness of the Australian outback is the setting and true protagonist of this manifestly heavy-handed and obscure (in both language and theme) debut "walkabout" novel, which was published in 1999 to high praise in Australia. A sensual, free-spirited young woman, hardly more than a teenager and offering few clues to her past, stumbles half-naked into the mundane existence of a family farming the margins of the desolate Australian salt flats. Accustomed to being the focus of male attention, the wife is jealous and resentful. Aroused by the young woman's sexuality, the farmer's postpubertal son indulges his voyeuristic obsession, spying on her clandestine late-night trysts with a loutish farmhand. She suddenly vanishes the morning after the boy sees the handyman strike her in anger, and the only clue is a bloody dress neatly laid out across the straw in the stable and a smashed cardboard suitcase spilling her possessions. Convinced she has gone off to join Cabel Singh, a charismatic, nomadic Indian peddler, the boy takes his horse and dog and sets out across the wasteland to find them. Repetitive, tedious, overly detailed descriptions (an exhaustive inventory of the contents of a minor character's car stretches over several pages) of featureless landscape and gratuitous characters mar this convoluted, disjointed narrative as the dispirited odyssey moves back and forth in time. Bright spots are a scattering of strongly crafted musings by the central characters. In the end, however, there is little resolution and virtually no sense of redemption.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This is an extraordinary and beautifully realized first novel about a 12-year-old boy who lives on a farm in a remote region of Australia. The novel begins with an astonishing event: a young woman staggers out of the wilderness and on to the family farm. Bold and enchanting, Eileen is informally adopted by the family, and the boy is quickly enamored of her. When Eileen vanishes one night a year later under suspicious circumstances, the boy sets out on his horse to search for her a search that becomes an epic journey into a world of sudden violence, unexpected generosity, and dangerous passion. Meehan describes the unusual people the boy meets, the heartbreaking stories they tell, and the foreboding grandeur of the desolate landscape he traverses with language that approaches the condition of poetry. The boy emerges from this heroic journey at the end of the novel battered, exhausted, and transformed. Enthusiastically recommended for all libraries. Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing; First American Edition edition (May 18, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559705671
• ISBN-13: 978-1559705677
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,196,649 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Aussie Desert Lover, June 11, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Salt of Broken Tears (Hardcover)

We've just read and discussed this book in our local bookclub and what a lively discussion we had! I was one of the few who loved the book so perhaps I should get one of the other members to write about what they hated about it - some gave up reading it, one used up a whole box of tissues in sopping up her own tears as the tradgedies so related to where she was in her own jounrey of life, some found it very heavey reading (as I did in places and had to re-read several sections), others coundn't understand it or found the chaacters unreal, especially the barefoot lass walking out of the desert - and what did happen to her in the end? we all had our theories!!
I have only skirted the areas described in the book in North-West Victoria but have certainly travelled and stayed in the Salt Lakes country of Western Australia and lived 10 years in the Pilbara in the N-W of Western Australia (1976-87) on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert and we are now reaping the environmental destructive desserts of the massive clearing of the marginal lands for wheat and sheep. I have experienced the dust storms of the denuded and overgrazed land, bought fresh produce from an itinerant Mohommad and bought feral camel, kangaroo and donkey meats from a hunter/"character" of the N-W, had my fence built by the part aboringinal wife of a "dogger"(dingo hunter), lived next door to retired jockey/horsetrainer of the country race meetings, camped in a dry riverbed with an aboriginal "mob" as my husband conferred on government busines with them (he was an Aboriginal Affairs Officer), my husband's father was given a block of land as a returned soldier (he left after a few years - he wasn't a farmer) at a marginal place called Doodlakine. I read the book and it's all true. These people exist. These places exist. The hot headed racism and tragedies exist. The kindness and community exists. The "yobboes" like Joe exist. The lonely, isolated women "holding it all together" exist (one of our bookclub members[with the tissues] worked as a single 20 year old teacher in a desert school (1970s)- she knows]. The Government policies that look good on paper but are utter idiocy in "The Bush" exist. The isolation, not as extreme now, still exists (people recently lost in the desert have been rescued because they had their mobile phones with them!!)
The one thing the book brings out brilliantly, is the mysticism of the land, the desert, its' people and creatures. When you've lived there, you can't not be affected by it. And the magic of the rivers when they are full of water and the snow-white massive saltlakes.
When we (bookclub)got bogged down with the seeming unreality, especially of Eileen, I said "but she isn't real". If you look at the book as an allegory, Eileen represented what everyone in their hearts wanted most of what as missing in their lives:- the mother freedom and carefreedom; Joe a woman of his own; Hannah a soulmate; the boy stepping stones to awareness and adulthood; Aunt Aggie acceptance; Cabel Singh a fellow wanderer; the father understanding of the deep scars left by the terrors of war. This made more sense to more of us. Eileen represented a godess or person who made us too aware of where we had missed out. Have we ever had someone come into our lives and change it all so completely, and out of the blue?? Yes was the answer. But most of us don't want to know what we may be missing out on, do we? We have to make the best of what we have. But not at the end of the story - the boy (with his horse and dog) was stark naked, as if born anew, cleansed of his old life, ready and strong for the new. One of our bookclub people had lived in India (and several of us have an abiding interest in things Eastern),so, after much discussion, she said "Eileen is like the Indian godess Kali". Especially as Meehan makes Cabel Singh such a central character, this allusion to Hindu mythology was very apt and had us all thinking all ovcer again. Kali is the godess of creation and destruction - a very vigourous and violent entity depicted as a female with many arms, each carrying a different object of life and death. She wears a ncklace of human sculls and has the face of a demon. She stands upon the corpses of those she has killed. Great relationship to the wars the father and Cabel Singh have had to endure and the pains of others of the characters. But Kali also represents the life force of new creation, the blood and pain that accompany birth into the world, and after Hindu tradition, which supports re-incarnation, the re-birth and growth and energetic life and motivations that this brings. And "the boy" has all this at the end - and maybe some of the others on the way have tasted the "salt of broken tears" of the visit of Kali into their lives - which of us haven't? I may be way off in what Meehan intended but I share his love and awe of these so called "marginal areas" ,deserts and salt lakes and have wallowed in the mystic of it all. In fact, my husband and I are going on a trip out to Lake Ballard 100 km north of Kalgoorlie and camping up through the desert areas to Wiluna and then across west to Paynes's Find (go on, look up a map.) Anthony Gromley, the famous international English sculptor, has placed 51 elongated cast-iron statues of the residents of the local desert town of Menzies in this massive salt lake(this installation is part of the Perth International Arts Festival - PIAF). The statues have already begun to rust and the salt crystals are slowly creeping up the legs of the statues to look like encrusted boots. How's that for Kali-like birth and destruction? It's our winter and the desert will be pleasant during the day (26 Centigrade) and freezing cold at night (can get down to minus 4 centigrade). May your dealings with "Kali" be of light and life!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars COMING OF AGE IN AN UNFORGIVING LANDSCAPE, February 15, 2002

By 

Larry L. Looney (Austin, Texas USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Salt of Broken Tears (Hardcover)

I have to agree with one point made by the reviewer below -- Michael Meehan's darkly powerful novel is a difficult read. I can usually finish a book of this length in 2-3 days -- this one took me over a week. Upon reflection, after I completed the book, I believe that this effect might well have been part of the author's purpose in choosing the style in which he composed this work. His descriptions are intense and lenghty at times -- in many ways they are as relentless as the harsh environment in which the story takes place. They necessitate the reader taking a more leisurely pace. Things change slowly, imperceptably, in the Australian bush, and the style in which the novel is written hammers that home in the mind of the reader -- parallelling the way the characters' lives are pounded into shape by the forge, hammer and anvil of the world in which they live.

Set in the sparsely-settled Ausstralian bush country, THE SALT OF BROKEN TEARS is a heart-wrenching, moving coming-of-age story. The boy who is the focus of the novel -- we never learn his given name, and only toward the end of the book is even a nickname revealed -- lives on a farm with his parents, his sister, his silent aunt and a couple of motley workmen. One day, in the killing heat of the afternoon, seemingly out of a dusty whirlwind, a young woman wanders into the yard, clad only in a thin, torn dress. She is taken in by the family -- ostensibly on a temporary basis -- and soon becomes a fixture, touching the lives of everyone who lives there in ways they will not soon forget.

The girl -- Eileen -- is beautiful and alluring, a free spirit unlike anyone they have ever met. The boy's sister Hannah sees in her a friend and older sister for whom she has ached. Auntie Argie -- silent and believed lost in a world of her own for many years -- finds a kindness in Eileen's touch that brings back memories from her youth, full of joy and sadness and love. The mother eyes Eileen with suspicion and derides her for her 'loose ways' as a bad example for the children. Joe Spencer, one of the farmhands, strong and mostly silent, full of the pent-up loneliness and rage that comes along with the isolation in which the farm exists, finds in her an outlet for his lusts and aches. She is an enigma, a mystery to all.

The boy is smitten by Eileen from the moment he sets eyes on her, the day she wanders in out of the bush. He is a young teenager, entering into manhood in an unbelievbaly harsh environment, whose only experience with women has been within his own family. Eileen is keenly aware of her affect on him -- she pushes him gently down a sensual path, but kindly. I never got the impression that she was teasing him or treating him with any sort of cruelty or thoughtlessness.

Tensions build up on the farm -- it becomes increasingly clear to all concerned that Eileen's presence there is something that must end if order is to be restored and maintained. However, when she disappears, leaving only a bloodied dress and bits of other clothing, arranged like a deflated doll in the barn, any order that was expected to return to their lives is effectively blown to bits.

Convinced that she has left in the company of Cabel Singh, a travelling Indian peddler who wanders the vast wasteland from farm to farm, town to town, in his horse-driven cart, the boy takes his old horse, his pup, his rifle and what provisions he can carry and sets out to find them. The journey he takes -- and the incredible array of characters he meets -- through a landscape that Meehan describes in amazing, photographic detail, forms the bulk of this novel.

The boy experiences things he has never imagined -- and through it all we slowly learn more and more about him. The author metes out this information like rationing water on a desert journey. As the book progresses, we come to know him intimately -- and we come to understand more and more about his relationship with Eileen, and about his need to find her, to reach some sort of closure.

The book is apparently set in the years between World War I and World War II -- there are references to battles in Turkey, horrific memories of combat by veterans of that theatre of conflict -- some of the descriptions of the treatment of prisoners are gut-wrenching. Australia was still sparsely settled in this era -- the distances between farms and towns in the region was great. Many of the areas were not even connected by telephone wires yet. There were law enforcement authorities, to be sure -- but their resources were stretched to the limit, and in many instances things were 'handled' by those involved. The times were hard, the land was harsh -- and these things and more begat horrible violence in people. There is violence in this novel -- but there is also reality, and tenderness, and yearning, and love, and knowledge, and truth.

A difficult read, definitely -- but one I think that merits attention, which is ultimately both a richly rewarding and entertaining experience.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Blood, Sweat and Tears, December 5, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Salt of Broken Tears (Hardcover)

This is not an easy book to read--for more than one reason. The story follows the odyssey of the kid, his pup, and his pony as they search for the Christ-like figure, Cabel Singh, a traveler who sells wears to, and spins yarns for, the occupants of a brutal, sparsely populated landscape.

The pain and solitude of the characters is palapable. Meehan's poetic style captures the drudgery and hopelessness that surrounds the characters--all of whom seem to have given up dreams of happiness. It's rather bleak, sometimes violent and a little grusome, and in that way, hard to read.

The other difficult element is Meehan's style. The stream-of-consciousness style he uses (long sentences stringing together lots of "ing" verbs to keep the action perpetually in the present) is not difficult to follow, but so repetitive at times that it feels heavy-handed. He'll repeat the same word, for example "salt" or "blood" or "struggling," up to four or five times within a couple paragraphs--sometimes within the same sentence. After a while you start to think, "I get it..."

His repetition isn't limited to words. There is a three page stretch when Meehan lists everything in a family's wagon. EVERYTHING. After one page the point is clear--the family is carrying around all the baggage of their former, civilized life when the merciless landscape requires completely different accoutrements.

Even with the heavy-handed symbolism, constant repetition, and never-ending pain the characters experience, this was a readable book, worth it, if anything, for the portrayal of a landscape most of us haven't experienced.