The Salt Bind by Rebecca Ferrier review: 'cliché after cliché'
Although it starts out entertainingly enough, this Cornwall-set fantasy ends up feeling like ‘Frozen in Penzance’, writes Stuart Kelly
Genres are perpetually splintering and fissuring. Just before Christmas I reviewed a new fantasy novel, The Shipwright and the Shroudweaver, by Rafael Torrubia. It would be called “immersive fantasy” by the excellent critic Farah Mendelsohn: a book, like The Lord of the Rings where the author imagines a complete world distinct from our own. This novel would be what Mendelsohn called “liminal fantasy”. Her key texts for this are Joan Aitken’s, but the best and most commercially successful recent example would be Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, where fantastical elements – magic and the supernatural – are interpolated into what is recognisably “our” world. Charlie Fletcher’s The Overlook trilogy is also good value, and I mention it here as, like The Salt Bind, it deals with a negotiated truce between folkloric entities. It is, however, very urban – another division in terms of fantasy – whereas this is very rooted in the rural, rather than the pastoral. The tendency of late has been for rural liminal fantasy to be horror, with works like Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starveacre, and it is noticeable that the second half of this novel is mostly more like horror than fantasy, though it reasserts its fantastical qualities in the closure.
The Salt Bind is set in Cornwall at the end of the 18th century. Our protagonist is Kensa, whose executed father was a smuggler. She is thrawn, confident and something of a tom boy; her half-sister, Elowen, is by contrast biddable and scholarly. Guess which one is the blonde. The girls find a beached sea-monster – the Morgawr – and are rescued by the local wise woman, Isolde. Kensa lies, claiming she found it first, and is therefore taken on as an apprentice. It means she will be special, which she likes, and not have to marry or go into domestic service, but she is haunted by the idea she stole her half-sister’s opportunity. Isolde introduces her to the Pact, a covenant between the land-dwelling witch and the Bucka, the Father of Storms, a sea spirit; while Elowen becomes sickly, even as she is crowned May Queen. It is superfluous to complain that all this is paint by numbers stuff.
I have had it up to my tear ducts with all the witch schtick. On the very first page we get “a spirit lay in the harvest at reaping. She was maid and mother and crone”. Of course, Isolde is a gifted herbalist and what Granny Weatherwax called a headologist. There is real magic but there is also common sense dressed up in the idea of magic. Why are we not getting novels about the likes of Mary Somerville or Sophia Jex-Blake or Kitty Atholl, women who fought hard to be seen as rational, equal and serious? It strikes me as a kind of false consciousness feminism, a retreat into fey stereotypes.
The apprenticeship parts are entertaining enough, but the broom snaps in the second part, which reads like Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction. One character – a new curate – is introduced and dropped. The ending is practically Frozen in Penzance. The sisterhood triumphs. It is cliché after cliché.
If there is magic in the real world, perhaps the publishers can chant “Editorus Necessitus”? Kensa and Elowen are constantly referred to as oldest and youngest, not older and younger. Archaisms – a-gathering, ‘twas, aplenty – are dropped in inconsistently. Parts are over-written – “one hundred hive-hewn hums woke Kensa, her window browned with their furred bodies, which were heaped together on the glass exterior”. I can’t decide if the alliteration is more tooth grinding than the pointless glass – I didn’t assume the window was made of clingfilm. The dialogue is cringeworthy: “She was a clever old bag and chose you for a reason, Kensa. It’s about time you chose yourself” – or “Even when I hated you, I loved you.” “I know that… You’re mine – we’re each others”. There is false poeticism – “midnight was as thick as cream” – and parts that are simply contradictory: “The wet bank where Kensa found herself was thick with dry seaweed, empty shells and tangled roots”. I don’t even know what “her chest was as malleable as an over-ripe apple” is even supposed to mean.
A few words of Cornish are deployed, particularly at the beginning, and it seems regrettable not to use the words the reader has learned (duw genes, meaning good bye, for example) at the end. It is as if the author got bored with the whole conceit. On the Cornish, it’s also a pity that the word for one of the maritime elementals, “asrai”, was invented by a Scotsman in the 19th century, given Cornish has a word, “morvoren”, that would have done just as well. As for the Morgawr – well therein does like a tale. All the evidence points to this mythic creature being a hoax from the 1970s. It would be like two girls finding Nessie at the beginning of a Scottish novel. I firmly believe that authors can use any words they like, but the idea of something phony here is almost metaphorical. A final note: the acknowledgments give thanks to Creative Scotland. I will let that stand with no further comment.
The Salt Bind, by Rebecca Ferrier, Renegade, £18.99
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