Well, now, this is going to be a tricky book to review without ruining it for future readers!
Salt Picnic is third in Patrick Evans’ ‘Janet Frame’ trilogy, and IMO, it is definitely the best. I have previously read and reviewed Gifted and The Back of his Head and appreciated Evan’s witty and provocative sense of humour. But though Salt Picnic has mildly comic moments, it’s entirely different in tone and the narrative tension makes it a more compelling novel. It’s been shortlisted for the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Award for Fiction.
It’s not, as far as I can tell, even loosely based on Janet Frame’s time on the island of Ibiza on the fringes of Franco’s Spain. (Evans says it’s not in his afterword too). Rather, it is inspired by the naïveté of a young would-be New Zealand novelist, in this case called Iola Farmer, who is travelling the world for the first time in the 1950s and finding herself in a community still scarred by wars that she knows next-to-nothing about (i.e. the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and WW2). The novel is written entirely from her perspective, though the narrative is in third person. The persona that develops is shy, easily confused and easily panicked, unsophisticated but not stupid, and highly imaginative yet determined to make sense of events even though she has only phrasebook Spanish. It takes her a while to work out that there is also another entirely different local language called Ibicenco which is spoken by some of the characters rather than Castellano.
Two characters, neither of whom are quite what they appear to be, explain this rustic community to her. She meets an American called Daniel (and falls for him) and eventually, also the doctor who owns the house in which she boards after fleeing sexual assault in the town’s hotel. Though the doctor doesn’t turn up till Part III, it is these two who speak English who interpret puzzling aspects of life in the village. All the other characters have been impacted, one way or another by the Spanish Civil War which preceded the outbreak of WW2, but they do not talk about it because Franco is firmly in control and the horror of the island’s past is still too raw. So Iola’s understanding of this history comes to her in bits and pieces and always second-hand from the two English-speakers who weren’t even on the island at the time.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/04/17/salt-picnic-by-patrick-evans-bookreview/ ( )