Shipwrecks, snowstorms, and the Cold War: a review of The Salvage
Read The Salvage if you like wintery vibes, gothic fiction, queer female main characters, and a healthy dose of social commentary.
A shipwreck is towed from Arctic waters to the coast off a remote Scottish Island, and Marta Khoury is the diver tasked with recovering a celebrated explorer's remains and treasures. Some of his belongings go missing, which puts Marta's job at risk. Meanwhile the island seems to be haunted, the Cold War and the terrible winter are both making everyone strange and paranoid, and Marta has her own secret past that causes her to start blaming herself for basically everything that goes wrong. The book turns into a mystery, a treasure hunt, and a very messy romance, but it's also a critique of religion, a character study, and an exploration into the effects of isolation.
Everything about the book feels very gothic, but the tropes never get tired or derivative. Most gothic horror leans on mansions, castles, graveyards, churches, and mysterious manuscripts that need to be decoded in order to understand the past. All those things do appear in this story, but the shipwreck adds an excellent fresh layer to the aesthetic. The underwater scenes gave me such a sense of cosmic dread, and I wish Marta dove down there more than a handful of times, because the imagery is breathtaking. The rest of the imagery is also consistently strong, even in minor scenes. I'll never forget the Virgin Mary statue with a moldy blindfold, the burning lighthouse that crumbles into the sea, the icicles growing on the inside the hotel, or the skeleton of Captain Purdie. The dark aesthetic is exquisitely layered with critiques of wealth, religion, racism, and colonialism. Even if the themes don't reveal anything new, I found myself happy to revisit them in such an evocative setting.
Anbara Salam manages to capture this incredible atmosphere with extremely efficient prose. Her descriptions are so precise, so it takes only one detail to make me feel everything. Nearly every chapter ends with some eerie new detail: ghostly handprints appearing on the window, strange photographs that capture people who shouldn't be there, mysterious figures standing in the snow, and more. Though some of these cliffhangers turn out to be kind of cheap in how they get immediately resolved on the next page, they still contribute to the overall tension. Some readers may find it gimmicky, and parts of the book might be best read in small doses (even though it is a thriller meant to be paced quickly). For me, however, I cared more about how Marta would react to these literary jump scares than I did about whether the potentially supernatural events would be easily explained or turn out to bring us closer to solving the book's central questions. As long as Marta continued to respond in interesting ways, it didn't bother me that some tension gets resolved a little too easily.
If you like good character work, I promise you'll find Marta fascinating. She rails against the islanders' isolation and rigid Calvinist worldview -- their obsession with being "chosen" by God, their belief that wealth is a sign that you're going to heaven, their willingness to follow wealthy people into acts of cruelty, their deep fear of being perceived as condemned, and the shame they carry if they think they aren't going to reap eternal reward after death. There are a lot of social facades and niceties that Marta doesn't understand, and she shouldn't be forced to. At the same time, Marta shares in some of this problematic and contradictory worldview herself, carrying shame and guilt from her past, some of it imparted onto her by the social conditions that she finds normal. She thinks she deserves to be cursed and mistreated. She constantly isolates herself. She literally seems most at home underwater, where she is far removed from society. Even as she criticizes the way of life on the island, she doesn't realize it's just an overexaggeration of things she should actually find rather familiar. Cairnroch Island is isolated and frozen in time (and in snow), but Marta too is trapped in her own history.
The way the past and present weave together in the novel is quite compelling. The shipwreck is very well preserved, an artifact of another century, but Marta's excavation disturbs it, almost as though she's haunting the wreck just as much as it haunts her. The islanders believe the captain's spirit is roaming around, but Marta herself is also a bit like a ghost. She's a Catholic Syrian bisexual female diver in the sixties surrounded by Calvinists. They ignore her when they can, get rid of her when they can't, and generally feel a little unsettled by her lack of traditionalism. Social change is on the verge of occurring in the world, but it hasn't happened yet, so in a way, she's a ghost from the future, while the ship's captain is one from the past.
Other characters are compelling too. There's Elsie, whose competence serves as a good counterbalance to Marta's volatility. There's Sophie, who I honestly wish we saw more of, because her understanding of Marta is so sharp. There's Lord and Lady Purdie, whose mostly awful behavior to people they see as beneath them is kind of darkly hilarious. There's the island itself, which is such a strong setting that it feels like its own character. I was absolutely enamored with everyone and everything. Some threads remain loose at the end. Some problems are never fully confronted, but it's fine. I was just happy to be along for the ride for as long as it lasted. The novel has its flaws, but overall, it's enthralling, immersive, gripping, and clever.