utor & bookmaker

Julie Gittus

author and bookmaker

Full review of Saltwater Moons by Ruth Starke, Australian Book Review, November 2008

Julie Gittus's impressive first novel, Saltwater Moons, brought to mind After January (1996), the debut novel of Nick Earls in which poetry-loving Alex falls for a feral surfer called Fortuna while waiting to see if he gets into his chosen university course. Saltwater Moons contains many similar plot elements of which sun, surf, sex, poetry and imaginatively named heroines are only the most obvious.

Sunday Langley, the narrator, is in the last month of Year Twelve when she meets and is instantly attracted to a twenty-year-old university student called Tycho (pronounced, if you please, TySho). Tycho's surfing mate, Mark, is five months into a sexual relationship with Sun's best friend, Nicky, when he abruptly dumps her - by mobile phone. Invited to beachhouse party by Tycho, Sun is hoping to deepen a relationship that has begun platonically with a sensitive exchange of poems, but opportunistic Mark plies her with alcohol and then takes her virginity in the sand dunes. Not only does this pair her with the wrong partner, but she also loses Nicky's friendship when all is revealed. Longing for Tycho but unable to resist Mark and his demands, Sun belatedly instructs herself about contraception and somewhat hesitantly embarks on a clandestine affair. Her internal conflict is compounded by the fact that she and Tycho continue to exchange poems, despite his supposed attachment to another girl and her own relationship with Mark.

The big surprise of this novel is how triumphantly it rises above cliches of plot and its romantic cover (After January was similarly burdened).Gittus writes with insight and sensitivity, and with an acute eye and ear for the social behaviour of these young adults and their interactions. Sun's voice is literate, authentic and realistic. She can quote Heraclitus as well as Czeslaw Milosz, and she observes with a poet's eye and ear: an 'oriental rug that looked like a bed of crushed flowers'; the leaves of the orange tree that 'clattered in bursts like distant applause'. Gittus effectively and movingly depicts the complexities of friendship and sex and the miseries of unrequited attraction and betrayal. In the inside-cover puff, Peter Bishop confesses he read the book 'with a constant pricking of tears'. I read it with similar engagement but also a profound sense of relief that all that adolescent angst was long behind me.