Saltswept by Katalina Watt review: 'grating'
There’s very little sense of danger in this adventure story, writes Stuart Kelly, but the real problem is the prose
I have often said that all novels have their guilty secrets – a kind of Freudian slip that is revelatory. In this novel it is not a matter of detection. One of the principal characters announces “It’s a jumble of words that don’t string together to form sentences of any meaning”.
Fantastic work was my entry drug to literature: Tolkien led to Milton, Mr Never-Lost led to Angela Carter. There was always a sincerity and openness about those books. You were nudged, not force-marched. You were enlightened and not scolded.
This novel is the absolute opposite. I do not like the word “woke” in contemporary discourse, but when a book comes with – and I quote – a “trope cheet [sic] sheet” that includes “queernorm world”, “animal sidekick” and “vampirism / necromancy”, then one wonders. One also wonders that the author is a former Literature Officer at Creative Scotland, who presumably had oversight when it came to giving out public money and judging the aesthetic worth of applicants.
So, let us delve. We have three main characters: a bisexual pirate captain who is on his uppers; a good-hearted female farmer who wants to care for her daughter but is suffering from environmental depredation; and a sort of nun who is sent off to tend to the Queen. None of them are particularly likeable. Although the book is quest driven, none of them seem very engaged, and one of the characters only joins the rest two-thirds of the way through. No amount of krakens and talking otter-cats (yes, really) can dispel the lack of humanity in this. It takes many pages for the adventure to get going, and by the end I didn’t care if they succeeded or not. They are supposed to go to the Maelstrom, where some have been before and barely survived, for reasons that are unclear.
The real problem is the actual prose. The decision to write in the present tense is grating. Writers like Hilary Mantel have managed to do this, but in her work it had an urgency and a sense of not knowing about the future. Here it is hasty and slapdash. The interiority of the characters verges on the comical: “I want to tell them everything, to exorcise the memory of that horrific day. But the words die in my throat. I have to put it away. I have to do what I couldn’t then and be strong and lead my crew”. The clichés are bad enough, but the strangulated sentences are worse. The first person present tense is a simple condition of narration question. How – why - is this character telling me this now? Why are they blathering their thoughts?
There is very little sense of danger or threat. The reader knows the kraken won’t sink the ship. The magic child will not perish. But given the book is advertised as the first part of a duology, we have a cliffhanger of sorts. I can’t guarantee I’ll read the sequel. I remember reading the first part of The Lord of the Rings and both caring and being frightened when Frodo was huddled in a ditch as the Ringwraiths sought for him. I can’t say I would hurry to hear about the characters here again.
Towards the end one character says “Even if the royals are dead, that doesn’t mean something good will take their place…” To which another character says “We’re going to need more tea”. That is the kind of platitudinous inanity that makes me despair about contemporary writing. There are repetitions that seem like typos – do we really need to know so much about their penchant for cider? – and mentioning autoerotic asphyxia as a bit of an untried kink is, well...
Let me be absolutely clear. Literature is subtle and complex, not simple and blatant. We deserve better. It’s not, as Truman Capote once said, just typewriting. Judge for yourselves: “pools of cerulean and turquoise spill onto the flagstones… it feels like someone is trying to pull my insides out through my belly button”. Or – I kid you not – “I use the hydraulic screw to bring the boat to the ocean, and the sky is illuminated with lightning, like there are cracks in the clouds and they glitter”. That there is an agenda is not problematic. That the book is risible is.
Saltswept, by Katalina Watt, Hodderscape, £20
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