Salt by Jeremy Page

Granny Goose, Uncle Kipper, father, Shrimp. Even the characters' names are salty in this funny, flavoursome tale of three generations, set in the Norfolk Fens and the coastal salt marshes near Blakeney. By contrast, grandson Pip, our narrator, has come off lightly, being called after a rowing dinghy.

Teenaged Pip is mute, brought up almost unschooled in a remote Fens farmhouse, and his only pal is Elsie, six years his senior and a bit of a baggage. Following his mother's death, he seeks sanctuary from his grief-crazed father back in Granny's shack on Blakeney marsh. There he struggles to unravel his family's unhappy history, intent on discovering who he is, where and how he ought to live, and hoping it involves Elsie.

Pip's main frustration is ours also: how to extract truth from the snarl of stories, rumours and lies handed down to him from all sides, often in broad Norfolk dialect. Take, for instance, granny's account of meeting granddad. An enemy airman, he "fell out of the sky" one night near the end of the war. She dug him out of the mud and harboured him until the day Pip's mother was born, when, her story goes, he slipped off back to Germany in Pip (the boat) using a quilt he'd sewn for a sail. So what is Pip (the boy) to believe when he later finds the boat hidden in an outhouse? What really happened to granddad? Often we are led to believe events have taken place that turn out to be dreams or imaginings. This boundary between fact and fiction, like the viscous marsh between land and sea, is undoubtedly territory the author wishes to excavate, but there are moments when the reader is in danger of sinking.

Dysfunctional behaviour, in which this tale abounds, offers a ragbag of gaudy material to the modern novelist. In the wrong hands this can prove wearyingly superficial. Fortunately, Page delves deep, particularly in his moving portrayal of Pip's parents' doomed relationship. When very young, with a baby on the way, the couple fled Blakeney, Shrimp taking a job as gamekeeper near King's Lynn. The baby is mysteriously lost (of which more later), and Pip's mother, uprooted from the familiar "soft level of the marshes", becomes clinically depressed. Shrimp, being an ordinary bloke, can't deal with this, nor, when Pip comes along, with his son's disability. As Pip warns, "Every story heads towards tragedy, given the time."

This is Norfolk of the 1960s and 1970s, before 4x4s and holiday barn conversions colonise the landscape. Page brilliantly evokes its bleakness, the harsh round of the seasons. Storms, fire and floods, which Granny Goose predicts from cloud formation, sweep away lives and livelihood. The ripe beauty of harvest is followed by the terrible slaughter of game and stock, the scorching of fields. No punches are pulled in descriptions of the mass execution of turkeys, huge chicken farms, the smoking of fish and hams, the Cromer crab factory ("a region of hell... run by the cruellest man I'd ever met"). With Salt, the regional novel has recruited a powerful new voice.