Salt RainSarah's novel Salt Rain was published by Allen & Unwin in July 2004 and launched at the Byron Bay Writers Festival. It was shortlisted for three national literary awards: the 2005 Dobbie Award for a first novel by a woman, the 2005 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the 2005 Queensland Premier's Literary Award. It will be published in North America in April 2006.
Allie’s free-spirited mother, Mae, mysteriously disappears on Sydney Harbour one night, her dinghy found drifting in the darkness.
Fourteen-year-old Allie is whisked away to the north, to a rainforested valley, by Julia, an aunt she barely knows. On the dilapidated dairy farm where Mae and Julia grew up, Allie waits for her mother to call.
As these anxious days pass, Allie learns about Mae’s childhood and about Mae herself through the eyes of others. Allie watches her aunt, who is determined to return the valley to its natural order, replanting the trees of the forest that her grandfather cleared for grazing. And she watches her mother’s first love, who she discovers still lives in the valley.
As the heat of the wet season builds, Allie tries to decipher the truth and lies that her mother has told her, and must come to grips with the many secrets held close in the valley.
Beautifully written, Salt Rain is an extraordinary evocation of the moods of the inexorable rainforest, of families and of the secrets hidden within them.
Click here to read an excerpt from the book (as a PDF, 17 pages)
COMMENTS FROM THE JUDGES OF THE 2005 MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD
After her mother goes missing from a dinghy found on Sydney Harbour, 14-year-
old Allie is left alone in an inner-city terrace. She is returned unwillingly to the
property which generations of her family have worked in the rainforest country of
northern NSW and where her Aunt Julia is reversing that labour by replanting the
paddocks to native vegetation. There are some things, however, that even
rainforest can’t hide. Allie’s return home is as revealing of a dark family past as it
is full of incident.
Sarah Armstrong writes in a distinctively Australian, vigorous vernacular. Her
characters ring true as does the way they speak; she balances the flow of action
perfectly with a deep love of place in the telling of her tale.
~ SALT RAIN REVIEWS ~
Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum7 - 8 August 2004
There is a tradition in Australian writing of stories about children who get lost in the bush. This book turns it around. In Salt Rain, 14-year-old Allie Curran does not exactly get lost. It is her mother, Mae, who has mysteriously disappeared on Sydney Harbour. Allie is sent north to the river valley from which Mae, a teenage mother, had escaped. Here she lives with her Aunt Julia, a woman who has decided to undo the damage inflicted by her forebears by allowing the forest to reclaim her property.
Julia's friend, Petal, lives in a caravan at the back of the block. The caravan was once towed in but the bush now has it surrounded. In a world where it seems never to stop raining, the bush is coming to find Allie. It brings her mother's story with it, full of tangled undergrowth that can rip at the flesh.
- Michael McGirr
~
Adelaide Advertiser7 August 2004
Lacrimae rerum ˆ the tears of things: an expression dating back to Virgil ˆ came to mind along with two compelling new novels in which the salt rain of tears is actually and symbolically subsumed into the weather pattern.
There are other similarities between the two very different works, Toccata and Rain (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, $24.95), by established poet Philip Salom, and Salt Rain (Allen & Unwin, $21.95) by first-time novelist Sarah Armstrong. One is beautiful, evocative writing; another is a central, long-submerged, childhood trauma.
Toccata and Rain is a self-conscious, literary, self-reflexive, seriously playful novel from the title which replaces the expected "fugue" with the quirky anticlimactic "rain" to the text which intersperses poetic prose with a rich variety of more strictly poetic forms.
Typically, it explains its own structure in the words of its main character tracing loss in his life: "Prose is the episodic 'and then' of narrative. It is physical and literal and makes sense of the daily world, the body and work ... Poetry is the apprehension, the intuition, the emotional sense of value and strangeness. Poetry is finding feeling and even the unsayable."
A wealth of reference and symbol plays entrancing games with language, particularly the language of music and erotic love, but just as enthralling is the plot which grows from the title's subverted "fugue". Musically a fugue is a polyphonic composition based on several themes and voices; psychologically it's "a period of loss of memory, when the individual disappears from his usual haunts".
Salom brings the two meanings brilliantly together in the person of Brian/Simon, a man with two lives, two distinct versions of himself that he lives sequentially, losing all memory of one when he is inhabiting the other.
The revelation of his situation and his attempts, with the help of psychiatrists, to unearth the reasons for it make a perceptive, poetic, often comic, mystery thriller that is impossible to put down.
Salt Rain is both a sadder and a far more straightforward novel than Salom's but it is equally hard to lay aside.
Rain and tears mingle more persistently in the rainforested ancestral valley to which 14-year-old Allie has been taken after the mysterious disappearance of her mother, Mae. Allie confidently, ardently awaits Mae's return, mourning the impulsive, free-spirited life they led alone in Sydney and haunting the places and people that have figured in a lifetime of her mother's stories and hence impinge on the history she has built for herself.
As discrepancies between the stories and reality become clear, even Allie is forced to question the truth of her mother's cherished tales, to face the secrets that have been hidden for so long and at such cost. Armstrong is adept at projecting double images ˆ at conveying the loneliness and fear that underlie Allie's brave defences of her mother and her Sydney lifestyle, the detachment beneath Mae's "First Love's" affectionate response to her teenage daughter.
Her viscerally realised characters and her enclosed, red-mud, rain-soaked valley landscape lodge in the reader's imagination, and become for a time ˆ as some books do ˆ part of a personal mindscape.
Needless to say, the rain that has fallen on Adelaide from the time I opened the first of these novels to the last word of this review has only served to intensify their elegiac ambience.
- Katharine England
~
Australian Book ReviewSeptember 2004
The Schedherazade figure is a familiar and celebrated presence in literature. The power of her stories can be healing, redemptive, enabling. But what if, as in Sarah Armstrong’s Salt Rain, the storyteller is your mother, and she’s damaged? What if the fantasies she tells you are, consciously or unconsciously, presented as fact, while truths are withheld? Would you revere the storyteller as a great creative force, or feel betrayed by her lies?
Allie’s mother, Mae has always told stories about both their pasts. The stories have become so familiar that Allie is able to imagine the scenes in vivid detail. She can picture the floodwaters inundating the hospital in which she was born. She has heard about Mae’s first love and all the secrets of their young intimacy, and about the Balloon Man, Allie’s mythical father. Allie’s trust in Mae, born of a sense that they are barely separate people, is absolute. But Mae disappears into the salty waters of Sydney Harbour, and Allie’s aunt Julia takes her back to her birthplace, a valley in northern New South Wales. Armstrong evokes the setting beautifully, giving it an almost bodily presence.
Allie shares her mother’s belief that people leave traces of themselves in the world, so that when she tastes the rain that falls constantly in the valley, she is also tasting her mother, a salty taste of tears, of blood, of the sea. In her grief, she is desperate to connect with her mother again. But Allie gradually discovers that what she has taken from her mother’s stories as absolute reality is only partially true at best. In parallel processes, she uncovers a truer history and separates psychologically from her mother. As she turns fifteen, the blind egoism of adolescence, perfectly captured, must give way to a broader view of the world, one that includes a fallible and self-absorbed mother.
This is not a flawless first novel. The climax and resolution, for instance, are too close together, and rely on the too-convenient and overused narrative device of a feverish illness coinciding with emotional realisation. Julia inhabits a no man’s land in terms of weight given to her perspective, neither the equal protagonist with Allie that her own story demands nor a character wholly secondary to Allie.
Nevertheless, this is a well-shaped and well-written book. Armstrong mostly measures the tempo, gradually revealing the truth, depicting her character’s development without explicitly discussing it. She has a fine, readable style, one that doesn’t clamour for attention.
- Lorien Kaye
~
The AgeAllie’s mother has disappeared and Allie is taken by her aunt Julia to where her mother Mae grew up. Allie has heard so many stories about the valley and Mae’s "first love"; now she has to sort out fiction from fact and discover the dark secret at the heart of her mother’s life. Sarah Armstrong’s first novel is seamlessly structured and very readable. And awash with liquid — water, blood and milk.
- Jason Steger
Launceston ExaminerSaturday 31 July 2004
When a teen girl’s free-spirited mother drowns, she is taken to live on her aunt’s northern NSW rundown farm, which is gradually being consumed by rainforest.
The girl meets her mother’s first love and begins to spy on him. The onset of the wet season floods the creek and fells the trees. This elemental chaos is reflected in the emotional chaos of the principal characters.
Armstrong’s novel candidly written about a family and its secrets.
- Ros Sydes
~
Daily TelegraphSaturday 4 September 2004
Allie turns 15 not long after her mother Mae is found dead in Sydney Harbour. She reluctantly goes to live in Mae’s country hometown with Mae’s sister, Julia. This evocatively well-written debut novel depicts Allie’s search for her father (Mae was a teen mother), explores Julia’s demons and the pain of Mae’s first love Saul – against the backdrop of a relentless wet season. Worth sticking with for a clever twist in the tale.
- Shaunagh O’Connor
~
Herald Sun28 August 2004
Allie turns 15 not long after her mother Mae is found dead in Sydney Harbour. She reluctantly goes to live in Mae’s country home town with Mae’s sister, Julia. This evocative, well-written debut novel depicts Allie’s search for her father (Mae was a teen mother), explores Julia’s demons and the pain of Mae’s first love, Saul. All this against the backdrop of the relentless wet season on the family farm. Worth sticking with for a clever twist in the tale.
~
Byron Shire Echo20 July 2004
There is a new writer in our midst. Sarah Armstrong has just produced her debut novel Salt Rain and has delivered to readers a first class work. I first met Sarah when she won the Nicholas Shand Beach Hotel Short Story Competition with The Long Wet and again when she was a runner-up with The Shark Girl. The Long Wet was subsequently adapted as a short film directed by Tristan Bancks and produced by Lois Randall and was well received at film festivals in Sydney, Melbourne and San Francisco.
Sarah moved to this area after a career in journalism with the ABC. She worked on programs such as AM, PM and The World Today, winning the prestigious Walkley Award for her efforts.
Sarah's writing reveals a special affinity for the element of water and Salt Rain is set in a place reminiscent of Mullumbimby and its hinterland during a hot, sticky wet season. The floodwater assumes a character of its own in this intricate story, spreading its mantle over both the landscape and the main protagonists. The
ever present rain seeps into the plot, swirling down the creeks, dripping in the rainforest and forcing situations that allow truth to rise to the surface from a
muddy family history. The story revolves around a fourteen years old girl, Allie, who is taken north from Sydney by her Aunt Julia after the disappearance of her quirky, restless mother, Mae. Thus starts a tale of discovery for Allie over a few wet weeks as she steps over the threshold into womanhood.
The three women, Allie, Mae and Julia, form a triangle of strong characters supported by a great team of secondary characters as Sarah embroiders for us, stitch by stitch, colourful thread by colourful thread, a rich circular tapestry. The strong emotional pitch and blending of intriguing personalities establish this young writer as a true 'storyteller'.
The layers of memories and flashbacks, dialogue and allegory eventually reveal to Allie the truth and lies concerning herself, her mother and, indeed, her whole family. Allie's missing mother Mae is a wonderful character whom the writer builds through her presences in the hearts and minds of others and their strong responses to her, both past and present. The aunt, Julia, enters the story as a slightly remote type but as events unfold, so do her strengths and warmth. The characters of Salt Rain drive the plot at a pace that is both even and brisk. It is a hard novel to put down and I read this book in two sittings, only because my everyday chores demanded that I should get off the couch. Apart from the central story, Sarah Armstrong presents the reader with issues that affect rural areas such as our own Shire: the farmers, the newcomers, land regeneration and wildlife. She imbues a great sense of place and subtly describes how the landscape affects people's lives and, conversely, how people affect the landscape. The tangle of rainforest, the cleared farms, swimming
holes, waterfalls and boulders, all speak to Allie in her grief around her mother's disappearance.
Salt Rain is full of surprises. Sarah Armstrong demonstrates her maturity in understanding the human condition, the big themes in apparently small lives. She shares with the reader her characters' experiences in rich evocative language without wasting a single word with her crisp style. The story left me, as a reader, satisfied, staying in my head and heart from some days. Salt Rain will earn Sarah Armstrong recognition in Australian literature as a new addition to the list of worthwhile writers. I would recommend this book to any reader, but especially to those who live on the North Coast of New South Wales and who have experienced for themselves 'the wet season'. It will definitely strike a chord with those who have their own 'flood' stories.
My childhood was filled with visits to my godmother's place in Teven where she ran a tiny one-roomed post office and telephone exchange. That community and landscape still helps me define who I am and has its own compartment in my heart. Salt Rain plucked strings for me, sounding some old, deep chord accompanied by rain on the roof.
Congratulations on a stunning debut, Sarah.
- Raylee Delaney
~
TravelScene InternationalJuly 2004
Salt Rain is Sarah Armstrong’s amazingly atmospheric novel set in northern NSW – rainforest country. The rainforest is the home of Julia, who is determined to wipe out all trace of her forbear’s impact on the bush by replanting the cleared land with native trees.
It is here that she brings her 14 year-old niece, Allie, after the girl’s mother disappears one night from a dinghy on Sydney Harbour.
Allie is resentful, and does not accept that this time her wayward single mother, Mae, is not coming back. She is also determined to track down her father, using as clues her mother’s fond reminisces of her First Love.
Allie soon discovers that her mother’s memories mask a different reality, and that the family, including her great grandmother, always considered Mae’s behaviour as shameful.
This is a remarkable tale of a girl becoming a young woman, of finding out the truth about her mother and of Julia, Mae’s younger sister, who has kept to herself the dark family secrets.
Salt Rain is full of the sounds of the Wet: rain and swollen creek; and the scents of the damp rainforest and red clay mud underfoot. It is also full of characters who will live on well beyond the final page.
- Kerry Hennigan
~
The BragMonday 6 September 2004
A winding, rainy holiday book, Salt Rain is a smoothly penned, touching debut by Sarah Armstrong. The story is of a teenage girl’s journey away from Sydney when her beloved mother goes missing from a dinghy in the harbour. Allie is taken to the rainy, small town valley of her mother’s family. Floods are literal and emotional when the answers about Allie’s mother’s First Love, the Balloon Man and the quiet sister are sought. Armstrong has created a strong story that is both meditative and compelling. Just as she really whets our appetite, though, it’s over; hopefully she’ll allow the flood waters to rise a little higher in her second novel.
- Ruby Boukabou
The Denver Post28 May 2006
It may well be that the Australian landscape lends itself to description more than our own. It may also be that there is something appealing about lush rain forests to those living in the concrete jungle. Or it may just be that I like the idea of floating around a harbor in a dinghy. In any case, Sarah Armstrong's "Salt Rain" is a beautiful first novel with a triumphant character in 14-year-old Allie.
Armstrong encapsulates in Allie the sense of false omnipotence and lost innocence - ideological and, unfortunately, sexual - of a teenage girl. In so doing, "Salt Rain" recognizes the seemingly reversed conflict resolution that can occur across generations.
We enter "Salt Rain" as Allie begrudgingly leaves her home in Sydney after her mother, Mae, mysteriously disappeared in the harbor. Convinced this type of disappearance is simply force of habit for Mae - she would apparently take off for days at a time, hopping on trains to nowhere - Allie refuses to believe her mother is truly gone. As her Aunt Julia, now in charge of Allie, takes her back to her home, we watch the conflict arise in a young girl with absolute adoration for an essentially absent mother.
Julia takes Allie back to the farm where the sisters were raised, a farm Julia has sworn to give back to the forest, replanting it tree by tree. It is against this backdrop of arrested life rejuvenated that Allie begins to relive all the stories she's heard of her mother's youth. This leads her back to Saul Phillips, Mae's first love and the man Allie assumes to be her true father. She enters unabashedly into Saul's humble existence, demanding attention and, ultimately, answers.
Reopening the doors of Mae's past, however, means forcing everyone to live again through that which caused her to leave Saul, and home, in the first place. In a quasi-karmic (and highly disturbing) twist, Allie ends up a bit too close for comfort to the realities of her vaunted mother.
Yet Allie is by far the most developed character, so much so that, while Armstrong rotates point of view from chapter to chapter, the other characters don't quite stand on their own, and they seem strongest only when seen through Allie's eyes. Aunt Julia's impulses don't seem quite clear, and her friend Petal doesn't have much of a place in the novel, except perhaps as a foil to Julia's stiffness, a role already inhabited by the missing Mae.
Furthermore, in a novel where sexual energy seems to be oozing from the bindings, some may be frustrated by the climax. Or should I say climaxes. Armstrong creates some truly intense scenes, the first two of which had me staring with that kind of wide-eyed gaze where you feel like the characters have harmed you and not just each other. But there were at least three scenes that would have sufficed as culminating points for the novel. By the time you arrive at the last, when Julia reveals the most horrific aspect of Mae's young life, the sense of climactic surprise is all but lost. It feels oddly appropriate given the frustrated and demented sexuality running through the story, but I don't get the feeling this was the intended effect.
It is with scenes like these, along with the imagery of rural Australia, where Armstrong allows for some lassitude when it comes to her writing. The images of water and the forest possess an almost palpable, cradling moisture, but then her language leaves story and reader behind: "This very drop may have once slid down Mae's cheek, the clouds trapped inside the valley walls year after year, the same drops of rain falling back into the valley."
The line, and others like it, lacks a certain subtlety, betraying the relative inexperience of the author. Yet her images of stunted youth, of a first love stopped in its tracks, of the piece of ourselves we leave in an unresolved place - these are the novel's treasures. The inherent strength is evident throughout, and with a little honing, we can look forward to Armstrong's next novel.
- Miriam Robinson
Book List (USA)1 March 2006
When 14-year-old Allie’s mother drowns herself in Sydney Harbor, Allie is taken to the family farm, located on the edge of a lush rain forest in northern Australia. Here Allie is possessed by the hunger to ferret out her mother’s first boyfriend, whom Allie believes is her father. She peppers her eccentric Aunt Julia with questions about their upbringing but finds the answers to be far from satisfying; in fact, they frequently contradict the family stories her mother told her over and over again. Julia is replanting her farm with trees, intending to repair the damage her family has done to the land, much to the consternation of her relatives, who believe she is slightly mad. Meanwhile, floodwaters continue to rise, washing out bridges and making the roads impassable. The foreboding natural world mirrors the nature of the family secrets Allie uncovers, which help her to better understand her mother. In this slow-moving but carefully observed family story, Armstrong is at her best when evoking the outsized landscape and extravagant weather of her Australian setting.
—Joanne Wilkinson
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