The sea, the sea
I read three novels with S’s in the titles: A Mouth Full of Salt, The Surf House, and Secrets of the Starlit Sea. In all three, large bodies of water are present. The first is the more literary book, the other two are undiluted suspense.
A Mouth Full of Salt is set in northern Sudan, on the banks of the Nile, near the village of Karima. The people are poor and live hand to mouth. The Nile is their lifeline, and the Nile claims their children: at the beginning of the book, a little boy, Mohammed Alseed, has drowned in the river, and the whole community is on the lookout for and diving in search of his body. It is an unforgiving landscape: scorching hot, and women’s lives end when they marry, have children, and become enslaved to their homes. If they do not marry, they have no status in the community, like young Fatima, who must perform chores left and right.
Part Two begins in Karima in 1943. We meet Hassan Alseed and his wife Nayamakeem. Hassan brings his wife and baby son to the village near Karima to meet his family, but they are furious, because she is South Sudanese and not Arab. They cannot tolerate this, and the couple and their baby are cast out. They go to live in Khartoum. But then Hassan’s father and uncle die, and he inherits a considerable fortune. Hassan leaves his wife and son behind in Khartoum, visiting them from time to time. Until he stops coming and sending money. When his wife goes to look for him, she discovers that he has taken a second wife in his village, had another son, and has since died.
Kheir, the son of Hassan and Nayamakeem, also goes to search for his father when he is grown up, with tragic consequences.
A Mouth Full of Salt by Reem Gaafar is published by Saqi Books and costs R305 at Exclusive Books.
Secrets of the Starlit Sea is the second novel I’ve read about Pixie Tate. She is an eccentric detective with psychic abilities. She is a seer who can travel through time. Her sidekick is the dangerously attractive Ullyses. They are British, but she is contacted about a raging spirit in a hotel in New York: the stately Aldershoff Hotel. It was originally a residence, and Alma Aldershoff-Blanchett-Carrington, now in her late nineties, grew up there. She consults a Ouija board in one of the sitting rooms: she wants to speak with her father’s spirit to find out where the famous pink diamond is that he hid somewhere on the property—her fortune has since dried up. She makes contact instead with an enraged spirit named Lester who vandalizes the room. He also appears elsewhere in the hotel and causes chaos. The manager calls in Pixie to calm him down and persuade him to cross over.
Pixie realizes she will have to travel a hundred years into the past to speak with the living Lester and discover why he became so angry and malevolent. She finds herself on the Titanic, two days before it is set to sink. Now the author has my full attention: the descriptions of the opulent ship, the velvet-smooth sea, the stars, wind, and icebergs capture my imagination. Pixie must also make sense of her own identity: she finds herself in the body of an American woman, Lester’s aunt. He is also aboard the ship, as is a timeless lover of Pixie’s whom she has encountered before on her time-travel journeys.
It is utterly thrilling because the reader, like Pixie, knows that the supposedly unsinkable ship will soon go down. She may not alter the past; she must only uncover what happened. The characterization is excellent, and it is a delightful journey. One suspends disbelief most willingly, because Montefiore is a wonderful storyteller. And I was right about where the diamond was hidden.
Secrets of the Starlit Sea is pubished by Orion Publishing Co and costs R440 at Exclusive Books.
I started reading The Surf House reluctantly: hippies and surfers creating a refuge in Morocco for hanging out and riding waves. But it’s extremely suspenseful, believe me. From the very first page.
Bea is a model who one day walks away from a shoot in Marrakesh. She’s had enough of the uncertainty, the hunger, the gruelling photo sessions, and the deprivation. In an alley, two men corner her. One grabs her backpack with her passport and everything she owns in it, and the other is about to rape her when an enraged young woman charges at them with a knife. The one with Bea’s backpack bolts. The other slaps the knife from the woman’s hand and starts strangling her against a wall. Bea picks up the knife and sinks it into the man’s neck. There’s a lot of blood. The woman, Marnie, scoops up the knife in her scarf and says they need to get out fast. No one wants to land in a Moroccan prison. Marnie and her boyfriend Ped have started a guesthouse for surfers, and she takes Bea there. Bea becomes a kitchen worker. She discovers the joy of eating and learns to surf.
Naturally, they get pulled over at a roadblock with the murder weapon in the car. Now a policeman begins to blackmail them—money in exchange for his silence.
The descriptions of waves and that perfect moment when you jump to your feet and ride the wave all the way gripped me. Marnie’s boyfriend Ped is a dark character with a nasty temper. The guesthouse is struggling financially. There’s another guesthouse nearby, owned by Marnie and Ped’s former friend, Aiden. Between Aiden and Bea, sparks fly, but he is a mysterious, withdrawn figure.
Someone else shows up at the guesthouse: Seth, the brother of a girl who stayed there a year ago, Savannah. She disappeared, and he enlists Bea’s help to search for her.
There are also flashbacks to the rebellious trust-fund kid Savannah and her interactions with Marnie, Ped, and Aiden. Suddenly, the idyllic surfer lifestyle seems sinister and inhospitable. Something terrible happened there.
It is highly suspenseful, and almost no one will see the ending coming. I didn’t, although I had certain suspicions about minor intrigues, which turned out to be true. It’s perfect holiday entertainment for a dry September.
The Surf House by Lucy Clarke is published by HarperCollins and costs R410 at Amazon SA.
News flash:
Mercia S. Burger was spot-on: Flesh by David Szalay made the Booker Shortlist!
