Customer Reviews

Salt

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a fantastic first novel, the sort of highly-literary treatise on family that would be remarkable coming late in an author's career-but, as it is, it's a wonder and a treat to consume.

Once, long ago, there was a time when books could rise through the ranks of their peers to stand as timeless classics that needed only their title and author as an introduction. GRAPES OF WRATH, CATCHER IN THE RYE, THE SOUND AND THE FURY, MOBY DICK, LITTLE WOMEN, A TALE OF TWO CITIES, all of these monoliths will ever need is their reputation to proceed them. Those days are gone, my friends. In bookstores of today the shelves are lined with so-called classics that only need a stamp of approval from Oprah's Book Club (which usually requires a certain amount of sap oozing from the material) to gain attention. Fleeting attention, I should say, since the self-life of fame is short in the written world these days. And in the flood of ready-made popularity, true, timeless gems are swept away into the shoals of obscurity. Such is the case with SALT. When I found a copy of it sitting on the shelf of a local bookstore, I was intrigued by the unlikely cover, and so, ignoring the ancient warning, judged it to be a worth while expenditure. And this time, I was right to have done so.

The tale begins not with an introduction to the narrator, as one would expect, but on the windswept flats of Norfolk, England. The year is 1945, the "Good War" was almost over, and being incapacitated on the shores of enemy soil is one place a young German soldier would not wish to find himself. But there he is, sunk neck-deep in a salt marsh, at the mercy of a strange young woman who happens to be passing by. Without a second thought given to wartime etiquette, Goose, as we learn the girl is called, fishes "Hands," as she mistakenly calls him, from the grip of the marsh, takes him home, cleans him up, and cooks him a meal. And so Hands stays, at least until Goose, nine months later, goes into labor with the child they conceived. At this point, Hands vanishes out to sea on a makeshift boat, leaving Goose to deliver the child alone.

We are then privy to the tale of Goose and Hands daughter, Lil' whose strange upbringing causes her to be something of an enticing mystery to a pair of brothers with the unlikely monikers of "Shrimp" and "Kipper." This attention eventually sees her off the marsh in disgrace at age 16, with the younger of the brothers at her side. She and her young, almost-husband, move inland to start a different life together. At last, ninety-two pages in, we meet our strange narrator: Pip. A child born without a cry, much to his parent's dismay, and who, from his first moments out of the womb on, never utters a word. Pip communicates with the outside world by means of a notebook that always hangs about his neck, but we lucky ones are allowed a look inside Pip's head, which is a strange place indeed. He tells his tale in an almost non-linear fashion, alluding to future events as though they have already happened and describing his dreams and fantasies as though they were really happening, only to snap back to reality several pages later. Through his few lucid moments we begin to understand that the pain and suffering that spans generations has compounded to produce young Pip, a walking manifestation of his mother's and grandmother's shadows who is, at the same time, very much his own soul. So, it is through the eyes of a boy who may or may not be mad that we see this tale unfold against the haunting backdrop of the Norfolk salt marshes, a landscape that begins to become a character in and of itself, both sinister and breathtakingly lovely.

SALT is a difficult read, but one that calls upon the reader to rise the challenge, and dive head first into Mr. Page's lace-like prose. Whether or not the world may herald this tome as a classic or not, my copy sits firmly beside Hemingway and Steinbeck, never to budge. Bravo.

Rapid shipping, reasonable price. Thought I was ordering a different book (that was my fault), but enjoyed this one. Would have missed it otherwise.

"Finding a man buried up to his neck in mud. That's how it's meant to have started." With those opening lines of his first novel, Jeremy Page takes the unsuspecting reader on an enchanting journey rich with poetry and personal mythology. Salt is tragic and absurd, bleak yet abundant, mystifying and deeply satisfying.

The bones of the story tell a family saga as ordinary as can be: generations of eccentricity, depression and madness; poverty and ignorance; personal wreckage, communal despair, eventual redemption.

But its flesh and blood is the language used to describe a most bizarre set of circumstances. Page has created a gorgeous linguistic concoction out of the terse dialect of his characters and the insight and nuance of the narrator, a boy born mute who begins his own life story with the family history of how his grandmother--the eccentric marshwoman Goose--met his grandfather, a downed German paratrooper, in the mud of the English marshland in 1945.

Salt is set in Norfolk, England, an isolated sea town whose cruel geography dictates the fortunes of its inhabitants. It's wet, chilly and dreary with a constantly shifting foundation that seems to be half land, half water and all mud, and there is an undeniable acceptance among the local folk of how easily one's spirit can fall victim to the forces of such a shifting, unstable landscape.

The marshes and channels, the wrecked boats and the sinking houses, the huge skies and their ever-threatening weather all conspire to create an atmosphere of mystery and magic. It's a place where people have names like Kipper and Pip, where tidal flooding becomes part of the family lore, where cloud-reading leads to deep revelation.

"Their talking gave off the iron smell of strong tea, so similar to the rooty smell of the field and the tobacco odour of the bus seats; their words, their breath, the laboured progress of the bus and its dying engine, all part of the same."

The entire tale, which has the feel of a fable throughout, is laced with such poetry. Page tells the sad story of Pip, the boy who "sees" the lives of his grandparents and parents through dream, vision and empathy, with generous grace. Pip, whose coming of age rivals that of every literary hero so far, knows the sea and the marshes the way a New Yorker can speak about mean streets, the way a Westerner absorbs the mountains and deserts.

"And suddenly I'm staring into the liquid shadows of the wreck once more, and in those shadows I see two bright eyes looking back at me. The figure leans forward and I know it's Ol' Norse, finally revealing himself, as ancient as the sea, with weed for hair and scales for skin. His breath smells of salt as he tells me I am lost. I've lost my map in life. I've been looking at clouds all the time and they've got nothing to say. On land and at sea and I always wash up, shipwrecked, time after time."

The beauty of Pip's emergence from the despair of the marshes comes with a bittersweet finale as he is rescued by the village after a final family tragedy. Haunting, mysterious, luminous; Salt is a revelation.

This novel is so dreary and boring that not even the author's frequent poetic way with words can save it. I was intrigued at the notion of reading a story set in the Fens of England, but this book and its characters were so dark, wet, clammy, smoky and dirty that I no longer have any curiosity about the place or its people. This is a dreary tale of flawed individuals struggling against a bleak landscape, the weather and mostly each other. No one rises above his or her circumstances. I kept hoping someone would truly escape and make something of his/her life; that's the only reason I continued to read. In the end, I was disappointed. If you prefer uplifting and more spritely paced reading, you probably will be too.

After reading the jacket cover, I was excited about this interesting historical fiction. I thought it would not be run-of-the-mill story, which it was. However, the author decided to be "deep." And by deep, I mean vague. I think I missed half of the plot because the author was so busy discussing the events in metaphorical terms and saying what happened by not saying it that he never actually tells the reader what happened. It was extremely frustrating, because overall the story idea was good.

Unfortunately, a good plot idea doesn't go far if the author doesn't convey it. This book was so "deep" and "meaningful" that it was just vague and confusing.