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We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.   

                “THE BLACK MONK” by Charlotte Grimshaw  (Penguin, $NZ38:00)

 

The Black Monk is the first novel that Charlotte Grimshaw has produced since ten years ago. A prolific novelist, she has spent those ten years considering other matters, in particular the family she came from. In 2021 she produced The Mirror Book [reviewed in this blog] - non-fiction and giving a largely negative version of her parents, C.K.[Karl] Stead and his wife Kay. When I had read the first twenty pages or so of The Black Monk, I thought I was a very clever chap because I twigged that many of the main characters were really the Steads and their friends but given fictitious names. Before I crowed, however, my weekly copy of the N.Z. Listener arrived with a good review of The Black Monk by the very capable journalist Philip Matthews, and he hit most of the points that I was going to make.

So let me give you a simple synopsis of a part of The Black Monk.

Alice Lidell writes books for children. Alice is concerned that her brother Cedric [nicknamed “Ceddy” ] is becoming a hopeless addict and alcoholic. But when she tries to tell her parents about it, and pleads that they should do something about it, they say that Alice is being too concerned or even hysterical; and Cedric is fine. They deny the truth. But Cedric is getting worse.  Alice’s mother is Rula [as in “Ruler” – a domineering person], a would-be painter. Alice’s father Thom is an M.P. and is often away in Wellington. They are, in effect, in a state of denial.

Denial in the face of the obvious is what Charlotte Grimshaw said about her parents in The Mirror Book. Her mother Kay claimed that she wasn’t in the least upset by her husband Karl’s philandering… when in fact she was often desperately upset. She wanted to present her home as peaceful as befits a much admired academic and novelist and poet.

In The Black Monk, Alice Lidell tells us that her mother Rula often belittled her; and when Alice was a teenager Rula encouraged her to be a sort of teenage “rebel”, ridiculing teachers, consorting with deadbeats and getting into trouble. And Alice witnesses her gay friend Ezra being killed by a hit-and-run car. All this is almost the same in The Mirror Book.

So I could continue pointing out other characters who are important in The Black Monk, such as the psychotherapist Dr. Botherway [a deliberately amusing name] ; the German woman Javine who may be a friend of Alice but who is severe in tone and carries the guilt of having parents who had been Nazis; the cousin of Alice who is almost the same age as Alice and who can update her on doings in her family etc. But all this is not the core of the novel.

If Alice Lidell writes books for children, Charlotte Grimshaw writes for adults and much of The Black Monk is really her examination of her own mind, her attempt to understand what or who she is. Alice decides to write a book called The Black Monk and Charlotte Grimshaw is writing a book called The Black Monk. As I see it, this is a novel about a novelist who has sometimes lost reality and then has to look back and see if she has made a mistake. Did she really remember things accurately? Do novelists think they have heard  a conversation, made use of it in a novel, and then realise that it was merely something the author had made up? Then, of course, there is the matter of “the black monk” itself. Who or what is this? As used in this novel, it is a mysterious person who sometimes meets Alice especially when she is in distress and who then is no longer seen. Is this the man sometimes called Anton? Or is it simply another fantasy of the author? Sometimes also this novel refers to Jung’s idea of  “the shadow” within us – that is, the negative side of human beings, including our capacity to hurt other people, lie etc. but which we try to suppress.

I apologise in advance to Charlotte Grimshaw for my conclusion;  but I see this novel as largely an exercise in psychotherapy, gradually healing personal wounds. “Rula” [Kay], who blighted her young life, died in 2023. Charlotte’s older brother Oliver died in 2024. I do not know anything about how or why Oliver died so I am only guessing that he was the basis for  “Cedric”. But the healing comes towards the end when “Alice’s” mother “Rula” dies and “Alice” now sees her as somebody who had gone through hard times and who had some qualities to be admired.

Footnote: This thing about The Black Monk. The blurb reminded me that Charlotte Grimshaw had written a short story some years back called The Black Monk and now her novel of the same name. Both were inspired by a novella by Chekhov. The Black Monk was published in 1893. It concerns a young man called Kourin who has delusions of greatness. He tries to shake off his delusions by going to a rural area where he can cool down. But in the twilight he meets a black monk who questions his sanity. He believes he will save mankind… … but in the end his delusions kill him. Again, it’s up to Charlotte Grimshaw to interpret what the black monk means to her. But I think in this novel it signals how authors can also have grandiose ideas and mis-interpret what they had seen, just as “Alice” does.

 

Something New

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books. 

 

“THE MIRROR BOOK” by Charlotte Grimshaw (Vintage imprint / Penguin-Random House $NZ38)

 

            It’s a quiet night in your home, but next door the neighbours are quarrelling. Voices are raised. There is some shouting. It sounds as if something has just fallen over. Will you wait for the noise of breaking glass before you call the police? Or will you wait until you hear a gunshot? But then is it any of your business anyway? Why should you get mixed up in it? You can’t do anything to help. The main thing you feel is helplessness and a kind of irrational embarrassment.

            This is a very crude conceit, but it more-or-less conveys how I feel after reading Charlotte Grimshaw’s confessional memoir The Mirror Book. This is a book about another family’s quarrels and differences, sometimes quite intense. Do we learn from it? Do we learn something important about human nature? Or are we just onlookers to somebody else’s crises?

            Charlotte Grimshaw is the daughter of novelist, poet, critic and former academic C.K. (Karl) Stead and his wife Kay Stead. Given that she is an accomplished and well-known novelist and commentator in her own right, I’m sure she would hate being identified this way, but her daughter-ship is essential to this memoir.

            At a crisis point in her life, Grimshaw felt the need to examine her upbringing and to reassess how she had become the person she was. Her husband Paul Grimshaw was having an affair and had walked out on her and their three children. She hoped the break wasn’t permanent and their marriage could be saved. In her unhappiness she started thinking about how it was that, as a considerate mother and wife, she found herself relating better to men than to women. Why did she always feel that things had not been explained truthfully to her when she was younger? What was it that made it difficult for her to relate to women and why did she have so few women friends? She first, and significantly, sought the help of a male psychotherapist, but he directed her on to a woman psychotherapist who, after some initial hesitation, helped her to sort out what was making her feel so lost.

            Almost inevitably, it involved her parents. “I got preoccupied with the idea of a family living according to a repressive narrative that denies individuals their own truth”, she says (p.21) The “repressive narrative” was imposed by her parents. She tells us a number of times that when interviewers asked her what her childhood was like, she would say “Wonderful childhood – a house full of books”. But this wasn’t true. As Grimshaw presents it in The Mirror Book, both Karl and Kay never fully faced up to the truth of their relationship and the impact it had upon their children, especially Charlotte and her elder brother Oliver. (Her younger sister Margaret plays little part in this memoir.)

            When they were younger, she says, their parents failed to give them the type of oversight that parents should give. They were fed and housed and educated well. There was no real physical mistreatement. Like other fathers of his vintage, Karl did smack his children when they misbehaved and he was also capable of  “explosive rage” (see pp.110-112). But the real problems were an emotional distance and a failure to understand how the children felt about things. In detail Charlotte cites a memory – already recalled in two of her fictions – of the young, unsupervised, Stead children negotiating a dangerous track in the Waitakeres, where they came close to either falling over a cliff or drowning. Their parents weren’t with them and hadn’t noticed where they’d gone. She gives other examples of their negligence, including the way she was shuffled off to unpleasant holidays with a hippie-ish aunt whose daughter took her on potentially dangerous rambles.

            For a variety of reasons, things got worse when she was a young teenager. Young Charlotte bonded more with Karl than with Kay, because father and daughter were both story-tellers who shared jokes. Karl had many affairs with other women (p.112). Already galled by this, Kay began to see Charlotte as another barrier between herself and her husband. “All the language and behaviour changed; they stopped behaving like parents. He liked the idea I could write, and she, already stung, hurt and excluded by the disloyalty of his infidelities, grew so hostile towards me that daily life turned toxic.” (p.119) Kay gave Charlotte long periods of the “silent treatment”, refusing to speak to her and causing her to find it dificult to speak herself. When she was 13, she was sexually assaulted, but her mother apparently treated the matter as a joke.

            Her parents didn’t mind in the least if Charlotte stayed out far into the night and roamed freely around central Auckland. This meant a young girl “hanging out with drag queens, bouncers, DJs, street kids and prostitutes… many of whom were dully engaged in the business of self-destruction” (p.163) It also meant being involved in juvenile delinquency such as “petty crime, vandalism, setting fires and underage drinking” which led to numerous court appearances (p.162) As an adult, she wonders why her parents didn’t set stricter boundaries. They might have seen themselves as liberal, broad-minded people who weren’t going to restrain or inhibit their growing children; but to (wife and mother) Charlotte, this now appears to be a failure to observe a duty of care.

            As for her mother Kay, Charlotte basically sees her as the cause of her inability to relate to women. Kay (and please remember in all this that I am reporting Charlotte’s account) seemed to have a big chip on her shoulder. She was a librarian who was never  promoted to higher positions she could have filled, because she didn’t have a university degree. (Her daughter sometimes told her she should get one.) Ironically for a very literate woman and the wife of a professor, Kay often ridiculed higher education. She encouraged her daughter to see all her schoolteachers as oppressive, conformist fools against whom she should rebel… which, in an attempt to please her mother, the schoolgirl Charlotte did loudly and incorrigibly, risking expulsion.

            Even worse, she accuses her mother of not being true to herself and always playing a part for public consumption. At dinner parties and social gatherings Kay was a charming and witty woman, completely supportive of her husband and totally unfazed by his many affairs. But privately, says Charlotte, Kay raged and wept every time she learnt of another of Karl’s infidelities. She says that on one occasion, Kay phoned her to report that “she’d just spent three hours breaking into the padlocked trunk in Karl’s office. When she’d finally smashed the lock open with a hammer, she’d found letters that were evidence of love affairs she hadn’t known about.” (p.150)

            But Kay lied systematically both to herself and to her daughter. When Charlotte was upset about her own husband’s infidelity, Kay brushed it off as a triviality and “her new line was that she’d been cool with Karl’s infidelity all along… She was scornful of my ‘sensitivities’ about being cheated on (and temporarily left). She had ‘never’ suffered trauma and depression, been overwhelmed by Karl’s disengaged behaviour while she was struggling with young children, never been distraught over his continued lying…. She and I had not discussed the problem at length, over years. None of my memories were valid. Our shared experience, my memory of it was not real.” (pp.150-151) It is on this matter that Charlotte gets into talking about “gaslighting’ and being told to believe things she knew were not true. Her memories of her parents’ loud quarrels and her mother’s tears and anguish were dismissed as fantasies or works of fiction.

            It is interesting that Karl and Kay were both scornful of second-wave feminism and the “Me Too” movement (pp.120-121), both of which challenged the idea that men had a right to chase and seduce women as they pleased. They were also scathing about the psychiatry to which Charlotte had turned, which might lead people to make unnecessary discoveries about themselves. Better to keep things under wraps.

            A number of times (see pp.33 and 83), Charlotte quotes her father’s words in his second volume of autobiography You Have a Lot to Lose, where he asserted “One wanted to control the world and make it more orderly and beautiful than it could ever be, so one created a world of one’s own, and controlled that.” While this might be a natural impulse for a novelist, whose business is, after all, to create things and people that do not exist, Charlotte suggests that it really shows the mindset of somebody who did not wish to face up to realities, especially domestic ones. She accuses him of idealising (again in You Have a Lot to Lose) what the Stead siblings experienced (pp196-197) noting “With autobiography, there must be a temptation to airbrush, to smooth over rough edges, to make yourself the good guy and right in every argument. The less able you were to tolerate the idea you’ve been a jerk, made mistakes, fucked up or failed, the less honest your account will be.” (p.198)

            Yet along with all the things that I have reported accurately, Charlotte does have many mitigating things to say about her parents. The book opens with a statement of her continuing love for her parents, her closeness to them, and the fact that all families have their quarrels. She spends most of a page (p.304) remembering all the good things about her father – his humour, the memories he shared of his own childhood and the many happy times the family had together. She also cites many of his novels and stories, often to criticise his assumptions, but also showing real admiration for his work. She thinks fondly of her parents as they now are, an old (in their late 80s) and mutually supportive couple. Perhaps most important, she is also aware of the unpleasant childhood her mother had, warping her formation. (“Man hands on misery to man. / It widens like the coastal shelf ” etc.). In a long passage (pp.259-267) she compares both herself and her mother to Sylvia Plath, who was belittled by an unloving mother and who loved her father but found him an overwhelming presence to the point of killing him symbolically in poetry (“Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through” etc.).

            This exploration of a family is the heart of The Mirror Book, but it is not all the memoir records. Charlotte  - always referencing the ongoing influence of her parents – discusses her life as a young adult, after she’d left home but before she met her husband. There was the trauma of witnessing, at close quarters, the death of a male friend (wilfully killed by drivers of a car who drove off at speed and were never tracked down). There were some years of living with an abusive partner who was considerably older than she was. She lived for a while in the unnerving environment of an apartment at the top of an abandoned high-rise building in central Auckland.

Fearful of making this review even longer and more laborious than it already is, I have not examined the way Charlotte Grimshaw connects the relevant parts of her life to the novels she was writing, especially Mazarine, which reflected mother-daughter relationships and allowed a woman to come to terms with herself and find healing in the company of other women. I hate to use a cliché, but this memoir is in large part a journey towards the healing of the author’s emotional trauma, built on the idea that life improves if you are allowed tell the truth about yourself and others, and if you allow space for feelings as well as ratiocination.

As a reader, however, I do come back to that feeling of helplessness and a kind of irrational embarrassment which I mentioned in the opening paragraph of this review. I do not for one moment question Charlotte Grimshaw’s truthfulness. (After all, on what grounds could  I, or any other readers, challenge her on what she says about her private life?) But we, as readers, are essentially being pushed into an intimate family argument. In this book Charlotte Grimshaw shakes off the carapace of irony that is found in so many of her fictions. Here her language is passionate, engaged, daring to use verbal clichés, be heart-on-sleeve and (it must be added) sometimes repetitive. She often makes the valid point that women who express strong feelings are accused by men of being “hysterical”. I would not make that accusation, but I do note that this is a wrenching and rather exhausting book to read.

Was it written in haste? The Mirror Book appears only nine months after the release of her father’s second volume of autobiography, with which she sometimes takes issue, and even fewer months since a radio interview she cites, when Kim Hill quizzed Karl Stead. Is it deliberate riposte, written in the spirit of hitting back at what she sees as a false narrative? Do we have in The Mirror Book just a game of “he-said / she-said” to the tune of Larkin’s “they fuck you up, your mum and dad”? I think not, but quite apart from Karl Stead already having had his say, I do wonder how Charlotte’s two siblings might have interpreted some of the family things she remembers.

At this point I could consider the hell of living your life with the aim of turning it into fiction. Do all your experiences, all your relationships with other people, become potential “copy”, so that you do not really interact with others? You may be always watching to see how you can put other people into words. Your relationships become a form of exploitation. Is this something that afflicts all novelists? I don't know.

I hope that Charlotte Grimshaw has found the writing of The Mirror Book to be cathartic and that her life is now less troubled by untruths. But even in saying this, I am butting in on somebody else’s life.

 

For Your Information: Elsewhere on this blog, you will find a review of Karl Stead’s You Have a Lot to Lose. You will also find reviews of Charlotte Grimshaw’s Soon, Starlight Peninsula and Mazarine. I know she took exception to my review of Soon, which I found to be condescending in parts, but I don’t think she could object to the reviews of the other two novels, which I found more humane and forgiving.

ADDITIONAL NOTE ADDED on 1 JANUARY 2022:

Recently [in December 2021], in a speech that was printed by Newsroom, Charlotte Grimshaw began by remarking on a reviewer, whom she did not name, who reviewed "The Mirror Book" on his blog. She noted that he mentioned feeling "embarassed" in reading about another family's troubles. From this, she said that embarrassment is linked to shame, the implication being that the reviewer was attempting to shame her. There's an outside chance that she was referring to somebody else, but I'm pretty sure she was referring to the review you have just read. If she wishes, she is free to refute this suggestion. Anyway, my mention of embarrassment was in no way intended as an act of shaming and the review was mainly positive about "The Mirror Book". As you have just read the review, you can make up your own mind about this.

 

Something New

REMINDER - "REID"S READER" NOW APPEARS FORTNIGHTLY RATHER THAN WEEKLY.

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“MAZARINE” by Charlotte Grimshaw (Vintage, $NZ38); “A SISTER IN MY HOUSE” by Linda Olsson  (Penguin / Random House, $NZ22)

            As she has been at pains to point out, Charlotte Grimshaw has never set out to write a novel that is only a thriller or a mystery story. Sheer genre writing is not for her, and she is more interested in analysing characters, commenting (sometimes – but not always – satirically) on society at large and reflecting on the art of narration itself. And yet there is an element of mystery in some of her novels and short stories, in the sense that they often involve the process of trying to find out what has really happened, as opposed to what characters in the novel think has happened. Mysteries are presented and (sometimes) resolved. In her latest novel, Mazarine, there is even what could loosely be called a thriller element.

This novel is in a limited sense a break from Grimshaw’s earlier work. Her two collections of linked short stories Opportunity (2007) and Singularity (2009), and the novels The Night Book (2010), Soon (2012) and Starlight Peninsula (2015) - the latter two reviewed on this blog – all somehow connected the same large cast of recurring characters, especially a Dr Simon Lampton. Mazarine has an (almost) completely different cast, although one minor character, Nick Oppenheimer, did appear in Starlight Peninsula.

If it were summarised as a thriller, Mazarine would go thus: First widowed, and then having broken up acrimoniously with her boyfriend Nick Oppenheimer, the aspiring novelist Frances Sinclair is deeply upset that her young adult daughter Maya has apparently gone missing in Europe. She has received an odd text message purporting to be from her daughter, but which simply does not sound at all like the way Maya would put things. And there are no further messages. Europe is at this stage still reacting to the Charlie Hebdo attack, talk of radical Islam and terrorism is in the air, and a little research tells Frances that her daughter’s boyfriend Joe Libard comes from a Muslim family and has a brother who is a devout Muslim. Could Maya have been caught up in some Islamic terrorist activity? Frances joins force with Joe’s lesbian mother Mazarine Libard to find Maya and Joe. Using the excuse that she is researching a novel, she travels to London, trying to track her daughter down through Maya’s friends and associates. In the process, she bonds with Mazarine, who in some sense becomes her mentor but in another sense is a mysterious character in her own right. Imagery of Ariadne’s thread relates to the various clues Mazarine and Frances follow to find Maya, and it is significant that the name “Mazarine” itself refers to an elusive blue butterfly. The action continues through Paris and Buenos Aires and, for those seeking a neat resolution, it comes to a perfectly plausible conclusion about what has become of Maya. (My not-being-a-swine rule means I do not provide spoilers about this).

Apparently Frances Sinclair’s inherited world is one of bourgeois culture. Her  (adoptive) father is a judge; her (erratic) brother is an associate professor of law. Her late husband worked on the Guardian in England. As a writer, she herself is part of the literati and her daughter has connections with publishing. So there are occasional literary references, with mentions of Alice Munro and Christina Stead and E.M.Forster’s quotation about “only connecting” and somebody reading Henry James’ The Golden Bowl, not to mention Frances’ childhood memory of visiting Menton (hello Katherine Mansfield). There is also the fact that Frances is a little out of her comfort zone when it comes to the use of modern communications technology, i-phones and the like. Thinking of the people she doesn’t know about, but whom her daughter might know, she reflects her age when she says: “It made such a difference, the kids’ ability to interact with the whole world from their bedrooms.” (p.84)

So, misleadingly synopsised thus as a thriller, Mazarine is about a middle-class, middle-aged woman out of her depth as she searches for a missing daughter who might be in great danger.

All of which is a complete misrepresentation of this novel.

The fact is, Mazarine is more about the WHO than about the WHAT, and it pivots on the concept of the unreliable narrator.

The novel is narrated in the first-person by Frances Sinclair herself and she is clearly a very troubled person. While her two siblings are her parents’ biological children, she herself was adopted. Not only does she have a running psychological battle with her abrasive adoptive mother Inez, but she does not know who her biological parents were and this has a big impact on her construction of her own identity. (Charlotte Grimshaw has dealt before in her fiction with a fraught situation involving an adopted child  – notably in the novel The Night Book). Frances fears getting migraines (p.42). She has had extensive psychiatric consultations with a therapist called Werner Bismarck (! – Grimshaw had a psychotherapist called Dvorak in Starlight Peninsula. Perhaps she likes giving psychotherapists famous names). Bismarck suggests that Frances has suffered an early lack of “attachment” to her prime caregiver. Frances has uncomfortable gaps in her memory. She claims she has difficulty with face recognition. She sometimes questions her own sanity. (Eloise Hay, Grimshaw’s protagonist in Starlight Peninsula, suffered from some of the same symptoms.) En route with Mazarine, she realises how little she really knows her daughter or anyone else and she frequently questions her own judgement.

With such a person as narrator, there is always a tension between what she states as fact and how reliable we think she is. Is her daughter really in danger, or are her fears possibly paranoid fantasies?

As Frances herself considers this, and especially under Mazarine’s influence, she advances one of the novel’s main ideas – that the way we perceive others is a form of fiction. In effect we “make up” other people from our limited observations of them, which we then weave into a narrative. And in the same way we “make up” our own identity.

Take, for example, the following passage where Frances reflects on her estranged partner:

“I’d never admitted to her that I’d split up with Nick because he’d started making me uneasy when he revealed, just a couple of times, that he wasn’t the man I’d thought he was. Now I took hold of Maya’s thesis, examined it. I’d ‘invented’ Nick Oppenheimer, created a character for him, that of the safe, knowable, wholesome guy, cheerfully masculine, tough, but with a heart of gold. The invention was made possible by the fact that he was enigmatic. He was a blank space into which I poured my hopes. And, because his true nature was hidden, the disparity between the real and the invented was only gradually and subtly revealed…. I’d made him into rather a cliché, I suppose, because ambiguity and complexity would have been less reassuring.. So, to give Maya’s theory full expression: Nick Oppenheimer was the creative product of my yearning and my loneliness. And then I found out he had a real self.” (pp.44-45)

Or again, when Frances is unable to interpret the message ostensibly from her daughter, she remarks:

“I couldn’t understand it, and worse, I didn’t entirely trust my own judgement. It was my old problem, being unable to read people, never having an overall certainty about a relationship, but always scanning for evidence with each new communication…” (p.58)

Considering how her daughter Maya might not be the person she thought she was, Frances asks:

“How had I failed her? Could it be that as well as ‘inventing’ Nick Oppenheimer, I’d invented my notion of myself? I’d thought I was a good parent, that we got on brilliantly, that our relationship, Maya’s and mine, was solid, successful, normal – admittedly it was a single triumph on my interpersonal record of fuck-ups, misunderstandings and solitude, but that was why I valued it so!” (p.111)

Given that Frances is so uncertain of herself, has such an unreliable memory and so often misjudges things, I am unsure whether Charlotte Grimshaw intends us to take it at face value when Frances, about two-thirds of the way through the novel, makes a complete reassessment of herself and embarks on a new beginning in her emotional life. (Again, I carefully provide no spoilers about this.) Is this meant to be seen as some sort of epiphany? Or, given her track record, could it be seen as one more of Frances’ delusions?

If the narrator of this novel is unreliable, it could be that no fiction can be trusted as a worthwhile reflection of the world anyway. Remember, Frances is not only a worried mother. She is herself a writer. To produce novels or short stories means always making use of other people as material. Even when she is setting out in panic to find her missing daughter, Frances is thinking what novelistic use she can make of the situation:

“When my girl and I were reunited I would revert to my officially stated aim, and carry out research for the idea I’d always had: a novel set in London and Paris, my own Tale of Two Cities. I had a name for it: Self State.” (p.84)

Later, she wonders how much her fiction-writing ambition compromises her role as loving mother:

“Who was the I who yearned to hold my daughter? Did that I cohabit with a different self, the writer, who watched and waited in order to requisition everything, every secret and injury and loss for one purpose: the first novel? A self so single-minded it would turn even the rawest, most private pain into fodder…” (p.137)

It would be incredibly offensive to suggest that Charlotte Grimshaw is drawing a self-portrait here, but she does drop hints that she, as novelist, shares at least some experience with her very flawed narrator. Like Grimshaw, the fictitous Frances has written fiction set on a west Auckland peninsula. One of Frances’ memories is of a dangerous childhood expedition in the Waitakeres, similar to a semi-autobiographical story Grimshaw once wrote. Perhaps this is only to say that a real novelist writing about a fictitious novelist will inevitably do some self-reflection.

Despite its mystery story structure, Mazarine is more a character study, a commentary on the way identity is constructed and a critique of the art of writing fiction itself. It is, however, the thread of the mystery story that will probably keep most readers turning the pages.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *  

I am reviewing Linda Olsson’s A Sister in My House in the same posting as Charlotte Grimshaw’s Mazarine out of sheer chance. I happen to have both novels before me to review in the same week and (apart from the fact that they are both written by women resident in New Zealand) the two novels have little in common. Chalk and cheese. True – both deal in part with fraught family relationships and both have a first-person narrator. But, despite a few little hints that her narrator may occasionally be in error, Linda Olsson’s first-person narrator does not confront us with all those complex and weighty issues of narrator (un-)reliablility that Charlotte Grimshaw’s narrator presents. Instead we have the more naïve phenomenon of a narrator whose words we are implicitly meant to trust throughout.

A Sister in My House is narrated by Maria, a Swede living in a desirable sea-front residence in Catalonia. In her late forties, childless and apparently single, Maria has been estranged from her younger sister Emma for a number of years. Emma is married with children. When they meet again at their mother’s funeral in Sweden, Maria impulsively invites Emma to come and stay with her for a few days. As the time comes for Emma’s sojourn, Maria has misgivings. She does not get on with her little sister and, as soon as Emma arrives, Maria feels “that creeping shameful irritation at my sister invading my private territory.” (p.40)

What has caused the bad blood between these sisters? That is the question that A Sister in My House unravels across the six days that Maria and Emma are together.

Apparently Linda Olsson has written four previous novels, but this is the first of her works that I have read. A Swede who has become a New Zealander, Olsson seems to write her novels first in Swedish and then to translate them into English. A Sister in My House was first published in Swedish in Stockholm in 2016, and nobody is credited as translator - so presumably the author translated it herself. Maybe because of this Swedish connection, a reviewer of an earlier Olsson novel compared it with an Ingmar Bergman movie. I can see why. In its set-up, A Sister in My House is like one of those “chamber” movies Bergman often made, where a few characters (usually women; always middle class) tore at the psychological truth of one another in a few limited settings. Cries and Whispers (sisters slug it out), Autumn Sonata (mother and daughter slug it out) and their ilk, many of which I watched patiently in my years as a film reviewer.

But if it is Bergmanesque, it is only superficially so.

The hard fact is that this novel does not really develop its characters. True, as long conversations between Emma and Maria go on, and as we hear the narrator Maria’s commentary on them, we bit by bit learn more about the family background of these two women and the events that separated them – sibling rivalries; how they vied for the attention of their sister Amanda; the defects of their mother and father as parents; how they were both attached to the same guy at different times; the lesbian affair one of them had (how chic; how daring written in a novel now…); an unexpected death; and a horrible accident that left one of them feeling guilty and the other resentful. But this is simply to drip-feed us events rather than real insights. I feel that too often these events (about which, as is my wont, I scrupulously do not provide spoilers) have been with-held from us at the beginning simply to create a spurious sense of gradual discovery.

More difficult, however, is the stilted nature of the dialogue, which is often self-expository to a painful degree. Here is a specimen of such dialogue as Maria enlightens Emma about her past:

“Then I got pregnant. And my whole world fell apart. Olof was my only confidant. But this I could never share with him. Not with anybody. I knew I would never be able to make Olof understand. I had reached a point where I had to leave. So I had an abortion. And then I went to London. But you know that.” (p.100)

This is not credible dialogue – it is exposition. And when I reach the line “But you know that”, I feel like saying “So why the hell are you telling her?”

On the same level of obviousness, when past events are revealed to us, Maria makes comments upon them which are, I suppose, meant to sound like profound reflections on her life, but which are more akin to self-help manual platitudes. Thus:

“I know it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t mine either. But as with much of what we experience in life, we are not just shaped by the incidents themselves. How we react to them is at least as important. How we deal with them afterwards. There was nothing either of us could have done about the accident. But afterwards, there were choices. And there have been choices ever since….” (pp.167-168)

I am a little intimidated in reviewing this book, because its end-pages include not only a six-page (anonymous) interview with the author, in which she explains her inspiration and motives; but also fully eight pages of extracts from laudatory reviews of Olsson’s earlier novels, written by reviewers both estimable and not-so-estimable. We are also reminded that Olsson’s novels have been big best-sellers and some of them have been translated into nearly 20 foreign languages. So who am I to disagree with all this?

But with the deepest regret, I closed A Sister in My House with the distinct impression that I had been reading soap-opera striving to be psychological revelation. 

FOOTNOTE: Subsequent to this review's appearing, the author contacted me and said the novel was written simultaneously in Swedish and English, so neither version is a translation.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

 

“STARLIGHT PENINSULA” by Charlotte Grimshaw ($38, Penguin-Random House)

Back in October 2012, when I reviewed Charlotte Grimshaw’s novel Soon on this blog, I ended my detailed critique by hoping fervently that Grimshaw would move on from dealing with the self-deceiving and self-justifying Dr Simon Lampton, whom I found a tiresome character in many ways.

Oh dear!

I clearly spoke too soon and in a manner that would doubtless have irritated the author. For in her latest novel Starlight Peninsula, Grimshaw is still in the world of Lampton and his social circle, although they are now seen from a very different perspective.

Let’s explain this in more detail. Grimshaw’s collections of linked short stories Opportunity (2007) and Singularity (2009) introduced some of the characters who appear in her novels The Night Book (2010) and Soon (2012). To simplify brutally, Simon Lampton is an affluent gynaecologist, financial supporter of the National Party and personal friend of the sometime prime minister David Hallwright. Lampton and his wife have adopted a girl, Elke, who turns out to be the biological daughter of Hallwright’s wife Roza – a daughter whom Roza had by an earlier liaison. Much of the narrative tension of The Night Book came from the uneasy position of the adoptive daughter in Lampton’s family. Much of the narrative tension of Soon came from the psychological conflict between Roza and Lampton’s wife Karen over the formation of Elke. Both these personal dramas were given a vivid social setting. In interviews, Grimshaw has denied that Prime Minister David Hallwright is based on John Key, but similarities between the two are unmistakable in Soon, and much of that novel amounted to a scathing satire on the neo-liberal monetarist ethos that currently controls this country’s ruling party.

In the storylines of both the earlier novels, there was a sense of moral corruption rotting the social fabric. There were also plot elements concerning dark secrets that influential people would prefer to keep hidden. Roza was worried about the possibility that earlier indiscretions in her life might be exposed. Dr Lampton was spooked by the thought of an affair he had had becoming known to his wife. A left-wing investigative journalist, Arthur Weeks, was circling too close to some of the dirty secrets of Lampton and his friends. In Soon, Lampton may (or may not) have accidentally (or accidentally-on-purpose) killed the nosy Arthur Weeks, but had friends powerful enough to have the matter covered up.

This is all back-story to Starlight Peninsula. But only back-story. I emphasise that to read any episode of Grimshaw’s Lampton-iad is to read a novel which is complete in itself. We are not dealing here with a series of “sequels” to The Night Book. As is now clearer to me, we are dealing with something more like a roman fleuve (like Balzac? like Zola?). The novels interconnect, but each is its own singular literary achievement.

And in Starlight Peninsula, the narrative perspective is very different. Soon was written in the third-person, but largely seen from the perspective of Simon Lampton. Starlight Peninsula, also third-person, is largely seen from the perspective of a character we haven’t met before, Eloise Hay. She lives by herself in a desirable piece of Auckland real estate, the Starlight Peninsula of the title, which was long ago working class but is now gentrified. She is extremely unhappy. For her chronic depression, she regularly sees a German psychotherapist, Dr Klaudia Dvorak. She drinks too much. She sometimes has migraine headaches and sometimes what amount to fugues. Much has gone wrong with her recent life, notably the fact that her husband Sean has deserted her for a flashy actress. Eloise regrets that she has no children. Sean, we discover, is the scion of a wealthy family (his mother being one Lady Cheryl Rudd); but even more significantly, Sean is a lawyer who works for the National Party politician David Hallwright, so we are now on the very fringes of the social set we saw in the earlier novels. Although a middle-class woman with a career, Eloise Hay is outside the magic circle of the very wealthy.

Alone and emotionally vulnerable and disoriented, Eloise Hay is reduced to borrowing a friend’s pet dog for companionship. She is also in some sense attracted to a new neighbour, the solid Nick Oppenheimer, who may or may not be the supportive character he seems. Eloise keeps thinking back to the death of the man she lived with before her marriage – Arthur Weeks, the left-wing journalist who died in Soon. The circumstances of Arthur’s death nag at her subconscious and emerge in the intuitive conviction that Arthur’s death was not an accident. This, in turn, leads to her stalking and on some occasions confronting Dr Simon Lampton and the police who dealt with the case. Dr Lampton makes his appearance some way into the novel. I understand that when I reviewed Soon, my characterisation of Lampton as a “creep” offended the novelist. I apologise for any offence given, but I find it hard to alter that characterisation on this outing. To say the least, Lampton still strikes me as a man whose moral compass is defective, rendered more sinister by the smooth suavity with which he responds to Eloise.

Eloise Hay’s doubts, guesses, intuitions, unease, disquiet and fears about the death of Arthur Weeks are the main narrative thread of Starlight Peninsula. Eloise is a flawed person who suspects certain unpleasant truths, but feels both threatened and fairly helpless to do anything about them.

It has to be said clearly that this is a novel which has all Grimshaw’s literary strengths on display. The dialogue is sharp and pungent (save in some opening sequences where it’s a little too self-expository as Eloise Hay’s background is filled in). The story does not plod along in strictly linear fashion, but is “layered” so that  we find events interlocking and overlapping in unexpected ways. And there is great play made with some sort of objective correlative or (if the term isn’t too simplistic) symbolism. As Eloise Hay has her migraines and doubts and fears; as the country labours under moral rot; there is a drought going on and fear of fire. The country burns. The country is sick. When Eloise sets fire to a pile of rubbish, she causes a major blaze, which brings the fire brigade in. At her place of work, people suffer shocks from static electricity when they touch furnishings and door handles. The unease and disorientation of the main characters are reflected in the physical conditions of a sick country. Literary allusions are deployed discreetly. There are references to the Russian film masterpiece Stalker, to Yeats, to Balzac, and (relevant to Eloise’s uncertainties about reality) especially to Chekhov’s story about the black monk who may or may not be a figment of the imagination. (Given that Eloise is a mentally-disturbed, possibly neurotic, person who nevertheless intuits the truth, I’m surprised Dostoievsky didn’t get a mention.)

There is an element of topicality to this novel. (I wonder how it will read in ten or twenty years time?) Libel laws mean that novelists do not loudly proclaim whom they chose to depict in fictional form. In Starlight Peninsula the Key-esque David Hallwright has been replaced as prime minister by a certain Jack Dance, so that a subplot concerning intrigue within the ruling National Party can be introduced. (Hallwright is plotting to roll the prime minister in a caucus coup aided by the aggressive Minister of Justice Ed Miles). Anyway, it can’t be said that the prime minister in Starlight Peninsula resembles John Key. Other minor characters seem recognisable from real life. There’s brief mention of a mayor who’s had an affair with an employee. Eloise Hay works as researcher and producer for a TV show, Roysmith, “a weekly show of supposedly hard-hitting current affairs, although they were forced by the network to cover a lot of human interest and fluff” (p.24). According to one character, its host, Scott Roysmith, “doesn’t smile, he beams” (p.21). He is ironically described as having a reputation for being “a deep thinker” (p.171). Now I wonder who this can possibly be based on? There is a crusading nuisance called Terry Carston who champions a convicted murderer, Andrew Newgate, who was acquitted after a second trial. But the Minister of Justice is dithering about paying compensation. Could this have any possible connection with a real-life situation? Of course one minor character in Starlight Peninsula is so outrageous that he can only have been produced by Charlotte Grimshaw’s unaided imagination. This is the “obese and six foot six” (p.92) German media pirate Kurt Hartmann who is described by another character as “operating a big electronic warehouse and it wasn’t his business if people were storing material in it that breached copyright.” (p.41) Both comic and sinister, Hartmann has been illegally spied on by New Zealand’s security services as the government wants an excuse to extradite him to the USA where he will face prosecution. Hartmann has an ostentatious mansion decorated in the worst possible taste. At one point he is interviewed by Eloise Hay, and he plays a role in the novel’s denouement, inasmuch as a fairly open-ended story has a denouement. Preposterous to imagine that such a person could exist in real life…

Starlight Peninsula has a strong element of social satire, some of it both waspish and funny. I relished (dammit, I almost fell off my chair laughing at) Grimshaw’s dead accurate account of media personalities showing themselves off at the charity-performance of an opera, hoping to be seen as patrons of High Culture, and then at the end of the performance, rushing to the bar as “reward for having sat through that boring shit for so long, in a good cause.” (p.170)

Starlight Peninsula also has a strong element of social commentary. As in Soon, Grimshaw is concerned with the stratification of New Zealand society as neo-liberalism has taken hold, the proliferation of gated communities and privileged groups, the ostentatious displays of wealth by those who have long since lost any sense of egalitarianism. Her protagonist Eloise Hay has sort-of left-wing convictions but comes from an affluent background in the novel’s equivalent of Epsom or Remuera. Returning at one point to her childhood neighbourhood, she reflects on:

“The drone of lawnmowers, the roar of leaf blowers. The svelte blondes in their tanklike SUVs. Sporty, burnished lycra-clad couples, bedizened widows with stiffened stacks of dyed hair. This was Jack Dance’s constituency: true blue. This was where the affluent lived and rejoiced in the gap – the gap between rich and poor. Because what would be the point of being rich, if everyone else was rich too? Look how far away the poor were! The further away they got, the more enjoyable everything was. And the clearer it was that you’d arrived. Obv. Eloise knew all this: she grew up here. She knew the hilarity, the tolerant mirth that ideas like ‘wealth distribution’ and ‘fairness’ were met with around these parts. Left-wing candidates were laughed off doorsteps at election time: they just didn’t get it…” (p.206)

Yet I think I agree with Philip Matthews when he said, in a review of Soon, that what Grimshaw writes is not “simply political satire” – or for that matter simply social commentary, important though these things are in Grimshaw’s work. Given that Eloise Hay works in journalism, and given that she is trying to unravel a mystery basically using her imagination and intuition, there is much discussion in the novel about what truth is, what the difference is between bias and reporting, whether we don’t all edit what we understand to be the truth, and other weighty epistemological matters. In effect, Starlight Peninsula is as much concerned with perception as with politics. The main character is often tempted to draw conclusions from things she has intuited or seen from the corner of her eye. Given that such insights are neither fully conscious nor fully rational, this touches on another question that Grimshaw has broached in her earlier fiction. How much are human beings compelled and predetermined creatures rather than reasoning and choosing creatures? (There is some reference in Starlight Peninsula to dogs and whether we are not simply instinctive creatures as they are).

A part of me wants this novel to be more the social satire. A part of me wonders if asking questions about the nature of truth isn’t a timorous way of backing off from harder social commentary. I’m a little miffed that the conclusion comes close to the cynicism that says everyone has his / her price. I’ll suppress such misgivings. To make a big thing of them would be to violate one of the chief rules of good reviewing, which is to review the book the author has actually written rather than the one the reviewer wishes had been written.

Starlight Peninsula works on a whole lot of levels. And this time I will not end on a dismissive comment about the awfulness of Dr Simon Lampton. Chances are, when she next puts him in a novel, Charlotte Grimshaw will surprise me.