It may well be that the Australian landscape lends itself to description more than our own. It may also be that there is something appealing about lush rain forests to those living in the concrete jungle. Or it may just be that I like the idea of floating around a harbor in a dinghy. In any case, Sarah Armstrong’s “Salt Rain” is a beautiful first novel with a triumphant character in 14-year-old Allie.
Armstrong encapsulates in Allie the sense of false omnipotence and lost innocence – ideological and, unfortunately, sexual – of a teenage girl. In so doing, “Salt Rain” recognizes the seemingly reversed conflict resolution that can occur across generations.
We enter “Salt Rain” as Allie begrudgingly leaves her home in Sydney after her mother, Mae, mysteriously disappeared in the harbor. Convinced this type of disappearance is simply force of habit for Mae – she would apparently take off for days at a time, hopping on trains to nowhere – Allie refuses to believe her mother is truly gone. As her Aunt Julia, now in charge of Allie, takes her back to her home, we watch the conflict arise in a young girl with absolute adoration for an essentially absent mother.
Julia takes Allie back to the farm where the sisters were raised, a farm Julia has sworn to give back to the forest, replanting it tree by tree. It is against this backdrop of arrested life rejuvenated that Allie begins to relive all the stories she’s heard of her mother’s youth. This leads her back to Saul Phillips, Mae’s first love and the man Allie assumes to be her true father. She enters unabashedly into Saul’s humble existence, demanding attention and, ultimately, answers.
Reopening the doors of Mae’s past, however, means forcing everyone to live again through that which caused her to leave Saul, and home, in the first place. In a quasi-karmic (and highly disturbing) twist, Allie ends up a bit too close for comfort to the realities of her vaunted mother.
Yet Allie is by far the most developed character, so much so that, while Armstrong rotates point of view from chapter to chapter, the other characters don’t quite stand on their own, and they seem strongest only when seen through Allie’s eyes. Aunt Julia’s impulses don’t seem quite clear, and her friend Petal doesn’t have much of a place in the novel, except perhaps as a foil to Julia’s stiffness, a role already inhabited by the missing Mae.
Furthermore, in a novel where sexual energy seems to be oozing from the bindings, some may be frustrated by the climax. Or should I say climaxes. Armstrong creates some truly intense scenes, the first two of which had me staring with that kind of wide-eyed gaze where you feel like the characters have harmed you and not just each other. But there were at least three scenes that would have sufficed as culminating points for the novel. By the time you arrive at the last, when Julia reveals the most horrific aspect of Mae’s young life, the sense of climactic surprise is all but lost. It feels oddly appropriate given the frustrated and demented sexuality running through the story, but I don’t get the feeling this was the intended effect.
It is with scenes like these, along with the imagery of rural Australia, where Armstrong allows for some lassitude when it comes to her writing. The images of water and the forest possess an almost palpable, cradling moisture, but then her language leaves story and reader behind: “This very drop may have once slid down Mae’s cheek, the clouds trapped inside the valley walls year after year, the same drops of rain falling back into the valley.”
The line, and others like it, lacks a certain subtlety, betraying the relative inexperience of the author. Yet her images of stunted youth, of a first love stopped in its tracks, of the piece of ourselves we leave in an unresolved place – these are the novel’s treasures. The inherent strength is evident throughout, and with a little honing, we can look forward to Armstrong’s next novel.
Miriam Robinson is a freelance writer.
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Salt Rain
By Sarah Armstrong
MacAdam/Cage, 220 pages, $22
