Happy New Year all! Hope you all had a
grand holiday. Despite appearing to have only read eleven books EVER, according
to Goodreads, I have been gorging on literature, which could account for my
poor blog output! The less said about that the better. Call me a slim volume.
Therefore, what better way to kick off the New year than with a review?
Saltwater is Lane Ashfeldt’s debut fiction collection. As the title suggests,
saltwater is the theme running through all the stories, whether it be sea or
tears. There’s tragedy here, but not the morbid, hang your soul out to dry sort
of tragedy. Boat trips go wrong, lives deviate unexpectedly from familiar and
unplanned routes, and new places are discovered, but there is no drudgery.
There is, however, a strong sense that life, like the sea, is unpredictable.
Ashfeldt is extremely good at revealing the
inner machinations of her characters. She writes with un-showy prose yet her characterisations
are visceral, even when describing the sea, volcanoes, the road to Titirangi (I
know well), these are things that matter, are tangible. These stories feel
real. It is perhaps no surprise, then, some of them are based on real events:
family histories and fictions indistinguishable and all the more fascinating
for the boundary blur.
In her own words, the author says:
“the title story, ‘SaltWater’, is a
fictionalised version of a family story. In August 1940 my grandfather’s cargo
ship the Loch Ryan was attacked by German fighter planes in the neutral waters
of the Irish Sea. My mother was already born, so the fact I am here does not
give away the ending. This is actually one of the very first stories I remember
being told as a child. Though of course I’ve gone and changed it.”
It follows on perfectly from “The Boat Trip”
in which pushed-aside, ordered-about run-around girl Nola is reluctantly invited
on a boat trip with her sister Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s friend Róisín.
Captained by Róisín’s uncle, the boat trip
changes Nola’s outlook (to say the least).
Indeed, all the stories in Saltwater flow from one another so effortlessly,
the settings evoked so clearly, this collection reads almost cinematically.
A favourite story for me was the magic
realist “Catching the Tap-Tap to Cayes de Jacmel”, particulary for the old
woman who speaks to the story’s protagonist in a “hoarse whisper” as they
encourage one another in the aftermath of an earthquake at a cinema. This story won a global Short Stories prize. It's easy to see why.
Many writers would shy from broaching such
subject matter, rightly so, but Ashfeldt manages to tell simply, stories of real and
imagined lives with empathy and respect for her characters.
Another favourite is “Pole House” where “authentic”
and “inauthentic” kiwi experiences are juxtaposed when a woman leaves the Piha bach
she shares with her kiwiana making boyfriend and heads into the city via
Titirangi’s Scenic Drive. This story could have gone horribly wrong in the
hands of a less skilled or culturally aware writer. But Ashfeldt writes with
intelligence and integrity and it’s clear from the locations of her stories she
is globe savvy. The result is as stand-out as the pole house described within
it.
The forbidden looms ever close in these
fictions, yet often it is not doing as they are told that saves a character's life.
Ashfeldt writes of the sea so convincingly
that her prose is imbued with the menace and familiarity of it, lending
suspense and drama to many of these stories, keeping the reader hooked until
the very last line.
Finally, like the sea, it’s the familiarity
of Ashfeldt’s characters combined with the unpredictability of these fictions
that makes them so very readable.
