2007-08-05 "Remember, we all need a map to follow in life"

A tale of family history and legend, Salt takes place on the Norfolk salt marches, a low sweeping bank of sand, gravel, mud and dunes, which stretches along the Coast of East Anglia all the way to the North Sea. The novel begins at the height of the 2nd World War and while the German bombers growl through the sky, "their bellies full with steel and cordite," a young, reclusive girl called Goose half carries half drags a man from the shore, across the salt march and to her cottage.

It is here in her room that she throws down the mud-man in near disgust. Crumpled and guilty, he shivers and coughs while she unhooks a tin bath. "You stink like cod," she says" when he reveals that his name is Hands, a German airman with the palest blue eyes she's ever seen along with thick blond hair and thin-skinned features. Hands stays for a while, helping fix Goose's ramshackle cottage, he even fancies himself as a bit of a gambler and wins a few card tricks a few card tricks at the local pub.

Even as he gets Goose pregnant, Hands is steadily planning his escape, intent to bail on the impending birth of his daughter. Using Goose's favorite quilt and a map from the local pub to navigate, Hands caulks and pitches a clinker boat called the Pip and sails his rickety craft into the choppy water of the North Sea and a newly backing wind, which takes him away for good. The man's last known whereabouts was bailing the Pip in the middle of a storm.

Having been abandoned by Hands, Lil' Mardler, Goose's daughter, grows older and at sixteen inhabits a landscape that is so big and flat it seems the edges slope up into the sky. She also becomes in tune to Goose and the way her mother can read the clouds, the flat caps and tidal clouds, and the scale clouds that fall out of a "mackerel sky."

Lil remains her mother's silent partner, spell-bound by her side as Goose works fast, listening to all the clouds, as she hearing all these stories filling her head." But when she meets George and Kipper Langore after so many solitary years as a marsh girl, she is decides to desert her mother, heading off for a new life with Shrimp George driving a car he's borrowed, her crabbing line her only possession.

Buoyed along by a type of youthful enthusiasm, George promises Lil that he'll dig up his great-uncle's farming past, comforted by own reputation for understanding bloodstock of all kinds from his position of gamekeeper-cum-stockman created on a local estate. This world, however, is a place where Lil feels totally excluded, she received no visitors and no phone calls, the birth of her young son Pip does little to assuage her loneliness and the severe depression that steadily seems to enclose her world.

Narrated by Pip, Salt is a loving and affectionate homage to the landscape of Norfolk where a complicated fabric of stories, lies and mythologies is effectively passed down from each generation. Author Jeremy Paige does a beautiful job of presenting the ceaseless choreography of tides, creeks, birds and salt and the story is generally refreshingly vigorous. The problem is that there isn't much of a plot, so consequently, the novel often comes across as a bit sluggish and even boring, especially towards the end.

Still, Paige manages to imbue his story with a special kind of descriptive magic as he traces Pip's journey from a boy, where he cannot speak, to his bourgeoning adolescent sexuality, and his eventual attraction to Elsie, a young local girl who catches his eye, and also his heart. This is undoubtedly Pip's story as he orbits his mother and father, where time is pulled elastically all around him, layering his new world with overlapping visions, "the silent avenues over the dark countryside of Norfolk taking me this way and that, linking scenes and stories into which I drifted.

There's no doubt Salt is a fascinating insight into the lives and loves of the marsh people of Norfolk, but the problems of structure and also the lack of a definitive plot, ultimately make the novel a bit of a slog to get through. Mike Leonard August 07.