Out of place

Salt

A Novel

Jeremy Page

Viking: 324 pp., $24.95

“FINDING a man buried up to his neck in mud. That’s how it’s meant to have started,” the novel begins. “She said she nearly tripped over him. That her wellies nearly kicked him like he was a washed-up fishing buoy, till at the last second -- the very last second, which was also their first -- he’d smiled politely, and said hello.”

Jeremy Page’s haunted three-generation saga is embedded as deep into the North Sea marshland of East Anglia as the German parachutist whom Goose -- a rough-mannered woman and cloud-divining shore scavenger -- rescues, washes and takes to bed. Its high cold skies, shape-shifting clouds and watery horizons are as much protagonist as setting.

Had Robert Frost been English, he could have reversed his celebrated phrase to read “We were the land’s before the land was ours.” Among the many mansions in the British house of literature, there is one where pages are turned not by the characters but by the countryside they share: with those buried in it, with ancient crimes, with hedgerows and haystacks and generations of lovers burrowing into them.

“Salt,” with all its fateful melodrama, would seem to have little in common with the serene, faintly stoic works and days of the great rural journal “Akenfield.” Yet in its spirit of place it recalls immediately, if briefly, Ronald Blythe’s classic, rooted in Suffolk, one windswept county down from Page’s Norfolk.

It’s Goose’s grandson Pip who recounts her life, his parents’ lives and his own. What gives the story its remarkable character is not what happens -- events explosive at times and permeated with a tragic sense -- but the way Pip delivers it. The narrative is discontinuous: a series of slides, rather than a running film, that suggest a dream falling into nightmare and rising up again. This effect is achieved in part through a device by which the stages of the past make up a kind of serial present. Pip tells us everything -- and not with the ordered perspective of something remembered but as if he were, chaotically and only half comprehendingly, there (and there long before he was born), witnessing Goose’s impregnation by the parachutist; the youth and marriage of his mother, Lil’; his own conception; and his stormy childhood and adolescence.

The past, in other words, is told with foreboding, with the simultaneous clarity and haze of prophecy. Page wields a language that plays between grandeur (and only occasional grandiloquence) and a make-it-new mastery of an erotic passage-at-arms, or a meal, or the marrowy knuckle of a storm.

Goose’s German airman stays with her, tending and repairing her broken-down cottage, but his blue gaze is fixed out to sea. When her birth pangs come on, he steals her quilt (he’d added patches to accommodate her swelling belly), attaches it to a decrepit skiff and heads (fatally) into an oncoming storm. To give you some notion of a style impossible to paraphrase: “And as my grandfather sailed his rickety craft into the choppy water of the North Sea, the bells rang from the flint churches in the flat country behind him.

The bells rang until his boat was a dot on the horizon he so adored. Ringing and ringing, and then the first cries of his child, catching on the wind and following him out to sea. My mother was born and the war was over.”

Two brothers court the adolescent Lil’; she rejects Kipper, masterful and saturnine, and chooses George, the quiet dreamer, adept at animal husbandry. He takes a job as caretaker on an estate away from the marshes. From the start, there is a silence between them. Pip -- speaking, though still unconceived -- mentions a first pregnancy, seemingly without issue. Several years later, motoring along a canal on a boat that George has bought to cheer up the water-bred Lil’, they come across a couple with a flame-haired little girl named Elsie. Only at the climactic ending does Pip learn who she is.

Meanwhile -- again, Page’s expressive if sometimes confusing modus operandi -- Pip is conceived, born, and becomes Elsie’s cherished playmate. The years pass and an uneasy sensual attraction develops, which Elsie alternately goads and represses as Pip grows from childhood into an angry and anguished adolescence. After a quarrel with his father, he runs away to the marsh country that bred his mother and grandmother, where he helps out in the smokehouse and fireworks factory owned by Kipper, his uncle. Elsie reappears, now grown, and takes up with Kipper; at the same time, the erotic pull between her and Pip resumes. A garishly violent revenge sequence culminates in a glibly shaky note of hope and new beginnings.

The operatic quality of Pip’s story is something of a flaw, particularly with a finale whose fortissimo can’t compensate for its thematic weakness. Yet “Salt” is thrilling and memorable in what it does so remarkably: provide images and rhythms that in Pip’s voice seem to surge more from the landscape than from himself or the others. Again, to reverse a poet’s phrase: It’s as if Marianne Moore had written of real gardens with imaginary toads in them. •