review: Nessa Collinge
on SaltWater
by Lane Ashfeldt
IN ‘GOD MODE’, ANNA, A GREEK ISLANDER, SUGGESTS THAT “WHEN SOMETHING REALLY bad happens it can’t be fixed. But you learn to live another kind of life, around the edges.” Indeed many of the characters that populate the thirteen stories that comprise Lane Ashfeldt’s debut collection SaltWater, find themselves living life around the edges of trauma. While Ashfeldt bears witness to many disasters—both personal and natural—the collection celebrates the human instinct towards preservation. SaltWater, as the title suggests, is inspired by the sea. While the sea is a central presence in stories such as ‘The Boat Trip’ or ‘Dancing on Canvey’, it figures tangentially in other stories such as ‘Airside’, where its absence is felt acutely by the Mauritian emigrants working at Gatwick airport: “People say here in Crawley we’re still close to the sea, is just one hour away. But England is big island: they mean one hour by car, not by foot.” In exploring the effect of the geographical environment on the individuals who inhabit coastal regions, SaltWater represents a kind of poetic psycho-geography. The characters’ lives are shaped by the sea which appears as both a benign and threatening force in the various locations spanning the globe, from Ireland to New Zealand. Aside from the unifying motif of saltwater, these stories have in common what Ian McEwan calls “the underlying pull of simple narrative”. Ashfeldt crafts a series of compelling plots out of a seemingly disparate cast of characters of varying class and socio-economic backgrounds. She draws the reader in through the assuredness of her storytelling and the painterly strokes with which she describes the world of her characters. Her style is particularly strong on visual description. There are ‘wind-stretched clouds’ in the sky and ‘a issue 3