Sly, sensual debut about mothers and lovers
336pp, Oneworld, £9.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£9.99, ebook £6.99
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The premise of the Australian writer Madelaine Lucas’s Thirst for Salt is well-worn territory: it’s the story of a young woman’s formative affair with an older man. But there’s little jejune about this debut novel. Lucas’s writing is soft and sinuous, as sensual when she’s detailing the landscape – witness this description of a house surrounded by wilderness: “the blue gums and bloodwoods seemed to cradle it in their branches” – as she is about sex.
The novel is narrated by an unnamed 37-year-old woman, single and childless, who looks back on her experiences as a 24-year-old. After her graduation, she and her mother took a holiday together in Sailors Beach, an isolated coastal town in New South Wales, nestled between the bush and the sea. There, on the beach, she met Jude, a rugged salt-lick of a man, 20 years her senior but irresistible.
First they fell into bed, then in love, and the woman, suspended somewhere between childhood and maturity, still timid (“I wore my shyness like a cloak that obscured me from view”) and unsure of her place in the world (“Always giving away too much, or saying too little”) moved in with him. The liaison was passionate but short-lived, and Lucas delicately captures the nuances of this May-to-December romance, its inherent imbalances and sometimes awkward power dynamics, the way the couple were perceived by outsiders, but also the heady intoxication of the honeymoon phase of a powerful attraction between two people.
Thirst for Salt is an expansive novel, somewhat deviously so. It purports to tell the story of two lovers, but as the narrative progresses, entanglements between mothers and daughters come to the fore. “I had always understood myself in relation to her,” the narrator admits, speaking towards the end of the novel of her relationship with her mother. Lucas subtly examines the ways in which the choices that a daughter makes about her own life can be influenced by those her mother made before her; and how these decisions swing between repetitions and repudiations of her mother’s identity as a sexual and romantic partner. The tug towards the former can be powerful – “The urge I felt sometimes,” the narrator confesses, “to lean back into the mould of her life and let it hold me” – but it isn’t, in any way, a guarantee of happiness.