THE SALT LINE

Shimoni’s literary novel chronicles characters and events at the beginning and ending of the 20th century.

In 1904, Dr. Ed McKenzie, a veterinarian from Oxfordshire, England, winds up as a doctor for humans in the remote Indian city of Leh. How he got there is a long story, and an unhappy one. Some explorers and adventurers journey to the area to “make a name for themselves,” but McKenzie is there for a more forlorn reason: He has lost his wife, Kate, to the affections of an explorer from Italy. According to Kate, what the Italian lacks in muscle, he makes up for in charisma, a quality in which McKenzie is sorely deficient—but the doctor has a plan for vengeance. Meanwhile, a revolutionary from Russia named Poliakov is brought to the hospital in Leh in bad shape. Poliakov had been traveling with a caravan from the city of Kashgar, but what was he doing in Kashgar to begin with? The narrative skips forward 90 years to explore the repercussions from the events that transpired in the early part of the century. The text is extensive—at over 1,000 pages, there is much to get through (subplots include such wide-ranging fodder as the death of Alexander II of Russia and one character’s affair with a married woman in Israel), and the dense style of the prose can make for slow going (“a man could make a name for himself from diseases, not only from antiquities but from illnesses too, terrible as they might be”). Still the story spins so many distinctive elements—from the characters to the locations—that it coalesces into a unique look at the distant and not so distant past.

While grand in scale, the story creates specific individuals caught up in a richly detailed world.