The Salted Air – a story of love and grief

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

The Salted Air – a story of love and grief

The main protagonist in Dr Thom Conroy’s new work of fiction has been with him a while. She is 28-year-old Djuna in The Salted Air (Random House New Zealand), and in another place and time she featured in his first (unpublished) novel.

Since then, following a move from Ohio to teach creative writing in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey’s Manawatū campus and the publication of his 2014 novel The Naturalist, her character lingered with him. She evolved to the point where Dr Conroy felt ready to tell her story in a New Zealand setting and an innovative writing style.

Launched earlier this month and at number two on the Nielsen Weekly Bestsellers List for the week ending June 4, The Salted Air has been described by reviewers as “raw and intimate”, and “tense and absorbing.”

Djuna’s story is one of love, loss and grief surrounding the suicide of her partner. Her derailment and subsequent search for new meaning and joy propel her into a love affair with her late partner’s brother, with all of the emotional complications this involves.

He describes the work as “voice-driven” and led by the character, Djuna. “She calls all the shots,” he says. “Everything is filtered through her experiences and feelings.”

While the story is a road trip and about grief, it also captures the sensual beauty and character of the natural world – the beach, the bush and coast from East Cape to Wellington and including Palmerston North. The choice of the key location was inspired by his observations of the East Cape’s untouched beauty during a family road trip in 2011. Conversations with people he met and stories he heard along the way are also woven into the story.

Suicide is a complex and daunting topic to write about, and many people’s lives are touched by it, he says. In order to create a story that was not overwhelmed by the enormity of grief, the book opens at a point 18 months after the death of Djuna’s partner, Harvey. In earlier versions, he’d started the story closer to the time of the death, “but there was a sense that the grief at that point was just too raw and overwhelming. I had to tone it down,” he says.

“That stage of grief is plotless, relentless – but there is a point where you turn a corner and grief is no longer a huge ocean, without shape.”

Writing about the impact of a suicide and in the voice of a female character presented new challenges. And that’s what excited him as a writer and is the message he shares with aspiring writers in his classes. “If you’re not thinking ‘I don’t know if I can do this’, there’s no point. Otherwise, it’s just a writing exercise.”

But the book also offers hope, and highlights the meaning and purpose that surface out of grieving. “Otherwise who would read it? And there are lighter, humorous moments too, as in life.”

A contemporary novel, his new work is totally different from The Naturalist – a historical tale based on a true story set in 19th century New Zealand, Germany and London. Its central character is German naturalist, botanist and explorer Dr Ernst Dieffenbach, who championed equality between races and was known for his rebellious stand as a young student supporter of democracy in Germany.

The Naturalist grew out of research, whereas this one was more intuitive – “a completely different process and shape, being a series of diarised vignettes, sort of prose poems,” he says.

As well as a busy schedule teaching in Massey’s undergraduate and postgraduate creative writing programme, he has two new projects underway – a short story collection inspired by the classic emergency ‘what to do in case of fire/quake/flood’ signs, and an environment-themed political novel. The latter is based on a real world (he can’t say too much) dam project and his research to date revealing political machinations and possible corruption around the use of public money to fund private interests has him fired up.

The creative challenge, he says, is to translate complex and often boring details of environmental and political regulations into a great story. Like his previous books, it’s a challenge he’s ready for.

Chapter: Salt (an extract from The Salted Air)

I heard the knock, and I knew who it was. There was something in the knock that told me everything. When Harvey’s older brother Bruce opened the door and he was still wearing his white shirt and tie from the dinner we’d been to with his parents, I somehow knew he would still be wearing this shirt, this red tie. He came and sat on the end of the bed without asking, but I didn’t mind. He put his head in his hands and then, smelling of musk and cologne and wine, he began to cry right there in front of me the same as Harvey used to do. Just a full-on cry without the least modesty or reservation.

Sometimes I think there are no separate emotions. That there is only one emotion, one intensity of feeling, and it takes in everything: rage and joy and love and sorrow, all of it. It’s the fullness of it, the wholeness of it that matters. And Bruce’s grief there on the end of the bed in which I was lying was so whole it seemed to fill Harvey’s childhood bedroom. Before I knew it, I could feel it with me beneath the duvet, and so I told Bruce to join us, his grief and me. I folded back the sheet and guided his body into the warmth. I held his head on my shoulder and touched his hair and said nothing at all.

Both of us were still crying when I turned his face to mine. When I felt his shoulder blades above me. When I opened my palm on the top of his head. I remember tears on both our faces during all of this, and the taste of salt seems bound up in everything. The tang of it on my lips. The grittiness of it in his hair.

I often think of that knock. Of how much I knew when I told him to come in.

ENDS

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