Review: SAL by Mick Kitson

[image error]I don’t often cry when reading but close to the end of SAL I couldn’t stop the tears. This a stand-out novel that I plucked on a whim from Netgalley (my thanks to the publisher, Canongate). Mick Kitson’s debut novel, (published in March in hardback) is literary fiction with an element of crime fiction – it’s also a coming of age novel narrated in the highly distinctive voice of 13-year-old Sal, who has fled from neglect and abuse to the wilderness of the Forest of Galloway, Scotland with her younger half-sister Peppa.

I admit that early in the first chapter, the precisely detailed, emotion-avoidant account by a girl who apparently has some form of autistic disorder had me going ‘What the heck?’ But by the end of the first chapter, when Sal casually slips in what she did to her alcoholic mother’s abusive drug-addict boyfriend – I was hooked. In this chapter we learn that Robert the boyfriend has been sexually abusing Sal since she was 10; Sal fears he will start abusing Peppa soon. After months of meticulously planning their escape (reading the SAS survival handbook, reading Wikipedia entries and watching Ray Mears videos on You Tube on how to start fires and make shelters out of trees) Sal sets off to the UK’s ‘last great wilderness’ with Peppa, a Bear Grylls knife and other essential provisions in a couple of rucksacks.

*POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT*

Oh yes, and before leaving the house she kills Robert, making sure that the police will know she was the one responsible. After talking about killing rabbits she says: “I wouldn’t mind killing one. I had never killed one. Or anything apart from Robert.” I was worried about giving too much away by referring to this, but have as it’s pretty important and comes early on, at the end of chapter one. (One of my few criticisms of the novel is that I didn’t feel that Sal’s motive for this was sufficiently strong, or sufficiently explained.)

*END OF ALERT*

The story begins a short period after the sisters arrived in the forest (visible from space as a dark patch, apparently, also a Dark Sky park for the astronomically minded). Sal has carefully chosen the exact spot in the forest and plans to survive there indefinitely. No one knows where they are, Sal hopes, especially the police who she thinks may well be after them. There’s copious detail about making ‘benders’ (out of larch and spruce I think) to sleep in and other survival stuff, which girly types may be tempted to skip. Not just women of course. However, I found some of the information quite interesting, and you never know when it might come in handy