The elements are enveloping and constant in "Salt," Jeremy Page's first novel.
The scene is set in Norfolk, England, and the story is strange. The history of Pip's family can be traced through the clouds, is mired in the marshes, carried away by the water, and blemished by fire.
The people that populate Pip's story are the salt of the earth. Layers of the crusty compound are hazards of their occupations and environment. Salt is symbolic in its ability to sully soil, undermine fertility, and wreak havoc on the balance of things. It can also enhance flavors, bringing dishes to life.
Pip traces his story back to its roots, trying to discover what went wrong. But, his is a story that cannot be undone or refashioned.
Pip speaks from the end of a lineage that has madness running through it like salt through the sea. His mother and grandmother are looked at askance, his uncle is distrusted and scorned. Pip does not speak for most of his life, which is hardly mad, but certainly odd. As a toddler, he expresses himself in drawings, which cover the baseboards, stairwells, and chicken coop of his home.
Pip's grandmother, Goose, finds his grandfather buried to the neck in the marshes during WWII. The reader never hears him utter a word and he's gone as quickly as he comes, leaving Goose in the throes of childbirth. Sailing into the distance he so coveted, in the rickety craft "The Pip," or so the story goes. It is nearly impossible for Pip, and harder for the reader, to distinguish the facts.
The truth is buried deep in the hulls of broken vessels, mixed in with the samphire sauce, and can be culled from the fishy wealth of the sea.
"Salt" is ambiguous measures of myth and fact. Goose is either guilty of stretching the truth into something she can bear, or, as is more likely, of warping the truth to suit her purposes. When Goose is not gathering samphire from the marshes, she is scrutinizing the sky, on the watch for rag clouds amidst the cumulus and nimbus.
Page writes of the marshes with fens with fogs and mists hanging above his words. The story he unravels feels like a reflection of the eerie moisture of the environment. He's been there, and you can imagine the whispers of Pip's story flickering up through the density of the air.
There is a very masculine essence to Page's narrative. But much of the story hinges on women: Goose, Lil Mardler and Elsie. The undeniable gender of the narrator makes it difficult to accept his presentation of the women's truths. Their motives remain shrouded, difficult to grasp and, for these reasons, questionable.
Parts of the narrative feel pieced together like the patchy quilt Grandfather Hands uses to sail away. Page includes anecdotes that lend little more than bulk to the narrative. Perhaps these excess episodes lend a more accurate documentation of time, but the novel is so steeped in its own sense of space and time that one wishes the author had allowed the scraps to remain in the rag box.