The Salt Office by Rosalind Petrie review – a Victorian customs house, a missing ledger and a quietly devastating novel

Rosalind Petrie writes about bureaucracy the way other novelists write about war. Her first two books, set respectively in a Victorian lunatic asylum’s records office and a 1920s insurance firm, found in the filing cabinet a stage for moral drama most writers would consider beneath their notice. The Salt Office, her third and best, takes the method to the Suffolk coast in 1863 and produces something close to a masterpiece of the small scale.

Edmund Tyrell is a junior clerk in the customs house of a fictional port called Orwell Haven, a place of mud, herring and petty jurisdiction. His job is to copy ledgers. When one ledger goes missing, and the collector of customs, a decent and exhausted man named Hallam, asks Edmund to reconstruct it from memory, the clerk realises he is being asked to decide what the truth was. The novel is the story of how he decides, and what it costs him.

That bare summary does no justice to the richness of what Petrie does with it. The customs house is drawn with an almost forensic exactness; you learn more about the taxation of salt in mid-Victorian England than you ever expected to want to know, and are gripped throughout, because Petrie understands that every tax is a story about who is allowed to have what. Around the central mystery she builds a town: the fishing families who regard the customs men as an occupying army, the dissenting minister who may or may not be running contraband, Edmund’s landlady, Mrs Cobbold, whose kindness is the book’s moral anchor.

The prose is spare and exact, with none of the velvet-and-gaslight pastiche that disfigures so much historical fiction. Petrie has a gift for the detail that does three jobs at once: a scene in which Edmund warms his inkwell over a candle because the office is too cold for it to flow tells you about the weather, the Treasury’s parsimony and the clerk’s desperate conscientiousness in a single sentence.

If the book has a flaw, it is that the final act tips slightly into melodrama, with a confrontation on a sea wall in a storm that feels like a concession to readers who wanted something to happen. Petrie’s genius is for the drama that occurs when nothing happens, when a man sits at a desk and chooses which column to write a figure in. She does not need the storm.

But this is a small complaint about a novel that does something very difficult very well. The Salt Office is about the way institutions ask ordinary people to lie on their behalf, and about the handful who refuse, and about why the refusal almost never matters and is still worth making. It will be read, I suspect, for a long time.

The Salt Office by Rosalind Petrie is published by Harrow & Vane (£18.99).