High noon

Romance through the generations

Maria Takolander

Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas Allen & Unwin $32.99 pb, 336 pp

While the terms ‘romance’ and ‘novel’ are entangled at their origins, romance novels have been traditionally disparaged as formulaic and frivolous, feminine and anti-feminist. Nevertheless, romance is the most popular genre in the world. Harlequin reportedly sells two books every second. In recent times, scholars have given the genre serious attention.

Of course, a romantic plot is hardly exclusive to genre writing. Some of the great works of world literature, from Jane Eyre (1847) to The English Patient (1992), rely for their power on romantic love – its frisson of desire and fear, its inevitable association with transgression and betrayal. Romance, in other words, is not merely fare for women readers reputedly keen to escape into hackneyed fantasies of love.

Madelaine Lucas has unashamedly described her début novel, Thirst for Salt, as a love story, though it is hardly marketed as genre fiction. There is no burly shirtless man on the cover for a start. Indeed, given that Lucas developed the novel from the story that won the 2018 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, the book invites high literary expectations. Unfortunately, those expectations, at least for this reader, were far from realised. Despite its lyrical language and its melancholy complication of the happy-ever-after plot of genre romance, Lucas’s novel – whose protagonist dreams of ‘having a baby with a man I loved and raising it together’ – is almost anachronistically conventional. It might even be called post-feminist.

It seems necessary at this stage to confess: I’m not much of a romantic. In fact, my husband – who must surely carry some authority when it comes to these matters – claims that I am the least romantic person he knows. Nevertheless, it is the case that I married him, and even I have found the Sturm und Drang of Jane Eyre and The English Patient irresistible. There are literal storms aplenty in Lucas’s novel, which is set in a holiday hamlet on the New South Wales coast, where even the environment is invested with romantic potential: the ‘sea and sky seem to merge, to kiss’, and black swans are described as having ‘dark hooked necks like one half of a love heart’. However, there is little in the way of pageturning drama.

The lovers’ initial meeting seems to portend suspense. When the first-person narrator, a young woman aged twenty-four, first sees her lover Jude, a man twenty years her senior, it is in the sea beyond the breakers, where she is narcissistically enjoying, perhaps owing to her youth, the ‘salt tangling my hair and making my eyes brighter like after sex or after crying’. When Jude later approaches her on the beach, he calls her ‘Sharkbait’ because of her habit of swimming alone out in the deep. Later in the novel, the narrator calls her lover a shark, and reflects on how she wants ‘to be devoured, pulled apart limb by limb, or swallowed whole’. This dialectic of menace and masochism reminded me of Kathryn Heyman’s superb novel Storm and Grace (2017), which self-consciously repeats the tropes of a romance narrative to critique the gender ideology at its core, which she relates to society’s epidemic of domestic violence.

Lucas, however, has no interest in exploring anything so provocative. Her young narrator is concerned with standard matters: ‘He looked at me … as if he could see through to the core of me, burning away all that was not essential, the way the high noon sun burns up all the water in the morning air. No man had ever looked at me that way before.’ In fact, when Lucas does touch on domestic violence, with the protagonist remembering an episode involving her single mother and a past boyfriend, it is explained as evidence of the violence of desire. It is a deeply problematic suggestion, to say the least, that required further thought.

The obligatory passionate encounter – discreetly portrayed –that soon takes place between our lovers is again associated with danger. The narrator is stung by a bluebottle before they have sex. However, any damage that our lovers go on to wreak upon each other can only be described as low-grade – so low-grade that I wonder if there was enough here to sustain a whole novel. The narrator may complain that Jude likes ‘love with a loose leash’, but this hardly makes him a monster. Likewise, while the narrator typically presents herself as lonely and vulnerable, she is also jealous and possessive, and unable to maturely articulate her fears and desires, including her fantasy of having a baby.

The generation gap could have given rise to some interesting material. While a potential power imbalance between the narrator and her much older lover is noted, nothing really noteworthy is unearthed. The novel also explores the relationship between the narrator and her mother, but their conversations about generational change mostly prove disconcerting. For example, when the narrator’s mother remembers how a man at the supermarket showed sexual interest in her then twelve-year-old daughter instead of her, she puts it down to ‘Nature’. The narrator privately reflects: ‘I did not wish to eclipse my mother, even if it was, as she said, only natural.’

Perhaps simultaneously the most interesting and the most boring aspect of this romance is how soon the couple settles into domesticity, complete with roaring fireplace and dog. Of course, there has to be some difficulty – this is aspiring to be a literary romance after all – but this is a novel without any real surprises, where everything is ultimately thoroughly accounted for. It is almost enough to take the romance out of romance. g