Beware ghosts looking for a home
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| Cover art: Sam Gretton |
The Salt Oracle is the second of Wilson’s books set in a world where the internet turned into ghosts. If you’ve not read her first (and stand alone) book in this setting, We Are All Ghosts In The Forest then I highly recommend you get out there and correct your error.
This setting has it that something happened within living memory that effectively ended our online world with the consequence that all the digital data we created floats out there in the real world like electronic ghosts looking for people to haunt and places to dwell. Starkly, getting haunted is often terminal for the poor afflicted victim. I don’t think I’m doing it justice because this can sound like just another twist on a post-apocalyptic wasteland kind of story. However, Wilson comes at this with very different concerns on her mind. In some ways her themes are similar to Emily St John Mandel’s Station 11 which is more interested in a world that is very much not based on the grim toxic horror of Lord of the Flies (and so beloved of men writing in this space).
The Salt Oracle is about an old rig in the North Sea (so think the Scottish coastline) that, in the wake of the big crash, has been repurposed as a research facility that largely survives by providing weather forecasts to the surrounding communities. The crash has left the currents unpredictable, the sea full of ghosts and spirits who are capricious and with satellites and computers non-functional in this new world it’s effectively impossible for shipping to function otherwise.
At the heart of the facility’s weather program is a young girl called the Salt Oracle for she appears to be uniquely connected to the ghosts of the sea and, as a result, able to predict the weather with enough accuracy that it saves lives and makes some small amount of trade and shipping possible.
The rig is peopled with a host of characters, all of whom have histories, trauma and relationships both on and off the facility that inform their world. However, what fights to the top of every character’s priorities is their status on the rig – because it’s an open secret that the Salt Oracle is the cause for their success and many people would like to be in control of this young woman for their own benefit. The facility must satisfy or at least play these different factions off against one another if it wants to maintain its independence and its precarious existence where it is free to do what everyone on board wants to do – which is to eek out a bit of stability to think and research and explore.
Wilson’s prose is superb – evocative, poetic and frequently beautiful. She evokes the sense of the sea and the wildness of sparsely inhabited places with an eye to their unpredictability, their untamed nature. If her prose is reckless it is in service to the places she is describing, the lives she is portraying and it’s that choice to zoom into people’s lives with the techniques of describing nature and big open skies that helps her stand out from the crowd (unique setting aside).
Ostensibly a murder mystery set in a single location this too is simply a trapping for Wilson to explore what’s really interesting to her – building back after disaster. It’s not simply the apocalypse out there in the big wide world that’s examined here, but the traumas of everyday life, the trauma of surviving that are in focus. Wilson’s characters aren’t all fully abled. They aren’t brilliant heroes overcoming. Her people are those who would have struggled no matter the shape of the world. This lens is revelatory because it allows Wilson to suggest to us that we spend too much time trying to build worlds where trauma is absent and it is only the unlucky (or unworthy depending on your ideology) who have to wrestle with difficulty. That we spend too much time seeing struggle as aberration.
In the main character, Auli, a researcher who suddenly becomes head of her department when her beloved long-time mentor is found dead, we have a central character who is full of worn-down edges, difficult decisions and hard choices. She is a mess not in terms of bad decisions, but in terms of someone who’s tried to just live their life despite the vicissitudes of the world around her. Auli is competent (and if competency porn is your thing, the Salt Oracle has another thread to recommend it), but she is not a genius, she is good but not a saint, she is a hero but not on a hero’s journey.
Wilson gives us a world in which the people here are of age – they don’t need to discover themselves or the world – they need to face themselves because if they don’t they may just perish from that lack of emotional and practical flexibility. This can be hard for people who’ve only ever lived their lives in peace to understand or empathise with because Auli and her colleagues are people who’ve exercised their agency to survive.
That might sound grand, and it is, sometimes survival is agency. Yet it’s the very least of things because wouldn’t we all rather be comfortable enough to say that we exercise our choices to choose the clothes we want to wear or the job we want to work or the place we want to go on holiday? The agency of the lucky stands in contrast to the agency of everyone else.
And that would be enough – exploring interesting people’s lives in interesting times. What takes The Salt Oracle from well executed story with beautiful prose into the realms of the special is that Wilson also wants to ask us what healing looks like, what community looks like and how we build those things in the face of existential pressure and continuous challenge.
Her answers are both interesting and, to me, convincing. She suggests through her characters that we focus on people sized problems that we can reach out and touch. I confess that I’ve spent much of my life trying to tackle big problems – unwilling as I have been to address symptoms (as I wrongly saw them) when the root problems remained unreformed. I have mellowed as I’ve grown older and the pattern in the Salt Oracle is one I recognise in myself. It’s not a shying away from the system and the problems built into its structure but a recognition that substance, significance, is built at the human level, not the level of grand gesture and sweeping policy.
She’s also clear that healing occurs even when we’re taking on new injuries, that it doesn’t wait for stability or the right time – our hearts, our bodies, our minds are looking to right themselves regardless of what new things arrive. This too is often forgotten when we think about building, about community. We assume there are clean lines between now and then, between good times and bad. Wilson’s rig and Auli’s investigation and subsequent decisions are specifically about making choices when times remain tough but we have to keep on living.
There was a gentle sense in We Are All Ghosts In The Forest of learning to live with what was lost, with the ghosts of what might have been if our lives hadn’t been upended, our trajectories trashed. The Salt Oracle runs along a different but parallel track. What does it look like to rebuild when nothing is certain, when life might fall apart all over again without warning? What is a world where the values you bring with you might be what break you again and again upon the rocks?
I appreciate the emotional heft of this question – it’s very personal to me as I enter my third year of suffering from ME brought on by Long Covid. Solvej Balle’s, On the Calculation of Volume, can be read as what it means to live inside chronic illness and in this The Salt Oracle is a companion work. Apocalypse as chronic illness, as persistent disadvantage. Not the end of the world but not one in which we can hope for grand success. You can see how for many people this is an intersection where the words chronic illness could for example be replaced by structural racism or sexism or classism or queer-phobia.
The apocalypse here functions very specifically to hem in our characters, to limit their possible successes because it is still unfolding, still finding its path through the world. More than that, Wilson’s apocalypse is still finding itself and its meaning. For so many renderings of the apocalypse it’s a pretext to something else or an end in itself. Wilson gives us apocalypse as agent seeking meaning and that overlay weaves itself into the choices the characters have before them.
If all this sounds ponderous then Wilson’s tender regard for her characters in tough times ensures it’s anything but. We have a story about hope and as with all good stories about hope, hope means something when the outcome could and perhaps should, render hopefulness as wanton naivety.
The Salt Oracle is beautiful, kind, hopeful and tenderly fragile.
I’m also delighted to discover that it’s been shortlisted for the 2025 BSFA award for best novel. It is well deserved.
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Highlights:
- Ghost whales
- Mysteries and science
- Hopefulness and community
References: Wilson, Lorraine, The Salt Oracle, [Solaris 2025].
