Michael MorrisseySoon, by Charlotte Grimshaw, (Vintage, 2012), $37.99.
Charlotte Grimshaw’s star has never glowed brighter. Here she is with four novels under her belt, plus two critically acclaimed short story collections. And over the course of her fiction, Simon Lampton, a successful Remuera surgeon, has become her perennial standout character. He appeared in earlier short stories, bloomed as a major character in The Night Book, and is once more in full focus.
Charlotte Grimshaw’s star has never glowed brighter. Here she is with four novels under her belt, plus two critically acclaimed short story collections. And over the course of her fiction, Simon Lampton, a successful Remuera surgeon, has become her perennial standout character. He appeared in earlier short stories, bloomed as a major character in The Night Book, and is once more in full focus.
Simon Lampton is portrayed as a hollow man: someone outwardly successful, a close friend of our shrewd and calculating Prime Minister, David Hallwright, but actually inwardly tormented by self-doubt and guilt. To a degree, this new book is a novel about politics, but politics is forbidden to be mentioned while the PM, like any proper New Zealander, enjoys his summer holiday. So, while politics may hover and occasionally intrude, Soon is more about families, friendship and the budding romance of Roza and Simon — plus David’s ongoing secret affair with Mereana.
Whereas her previous novel, The Night Book, skillfully evoked a moody winter, Soon is set against a lazy pohutukawa-drenched summer, which seems rather too familiar, without actually feeling real. The idea that New Zealand is a part of Polynesia and therefore enjoys a tropical climate is a myth that regularly bewitches the national psyche. Travel brochures fail to mention that the appearance of the famous red blossom is short-lived. There is a hedonistic pagan relish to white-sanded beaches, curling waves, and so on, that has fooled more than one visitor into imagining that Aotearoa is in Tahitian latitudes. Depending on circumstance and personality, the New Zealand summer can be very lazy indeed, or full of a prim athletic vigour – tramping, surfing, spear fishing. Soon opts for the former, though it appears, alas, that the laidback summer mood has affected the author’s prose style, for this new fiction lacks the felicitously written delights of Grimshaw’s previous novel and collections of short stories. I find myself longing for some large political crisis that would rouse narrative or dramatic adrenalin, but there is only one relatively minor political incident. However, personal crises abound for the Lamptons, and these successfully sustain interest.
The emotional lynch pin of the novel turns on a clash of wills between Roza, the PM’s second and glamorous wife, and Karen, Simon Lampton’s wife, over who will have custody of Elke. The open scandal, so to speak, is that Roza gave birth to Elke when just sixteen and adopted her out to Karen. The women are in constant proximity because of the deep friendship between David Hallwright and Simon Lampton: another leitmotif in the novel. Prime Minister Hallwright confides to Simon: ‘What I like about you is that you’re not political. You’re like Roza, hopelessly apolitical. Your mind’s on other things. That’s so refreshing for me.’ Ironically, Hallwright believes he has what kings and presidents throughout history have wanted (apart, that is, from the necessary band of flatterers), namely a friend who is honest, someone who is not using the relationship for ulterior motives. But of course Simon’s friendship is not as pure as the PM believes.
The seemingly confident Lampton is in reality an Auckland idol with feet of clay: a privileged member of the professional class who lives in fear of public scandal. He is portrayed as being more worried about his friendship with the Prime Minister than about the emotional well being of his foster child.
Another crisis looms when an investigative journalist, one Arthur Weeks, pokes his nose into the doctor’s relationship with Mereana, the Greek-Maori beauty. Their passionate connection was fully recorded in Grimshaw’s previous novel The Night Book. Weeks is the kind of snapping-at-ankles journalist — an assiduous contributor to Metro and North and South — dreaded by the respectably rich or famous who have skeletons rattling in their closets. Plot spoiler looming ….When Lampton accidentally kills Weeks, he is technically innocent, but riven with guilt. In a deft twist, Weeks was writing a screenplay about the PM, a fact that Lampton is able to use to avert suspicion falling on him regarding Weeks’ investigation of his relationship with Mereana.
Two other strands of the plot await full resolution. There is a simmering attraction between Roza and Simon Lampton. They got as far as touching hands in The Night Book, and now it moves to a single kiss. With admirable Regency novel restraint, Grimshaw has kept this tease going for two novels, and one supposes that another novel will be required to fully explore what surely must eventuate: a full-on affair. Again, using cliffhanger techniques, Grimshaw has Mereana briefly resurface at the end of the novel. Hence, Soon casts some loose ends to be picked up in a future book.
Several other prominent figures in search of eminence populate the novel’s pages. There is booze baron Peter Gibson, vulgar, overweight, lecherous: a little too easy to dislike — a caricature, one feels, and unworthy of the book’s deeper intentions, or higher purpose. And two other dislikeable gents make notable appearances. There is The Cock, in reality the PM’s hatchet man, the go-to guy who fixes things that are politically loaded. Cahane is a formidable and unflappable fellow, with degrees from Harvard and Auckland University, who is described as having ‘extraordinary financial prescience’; he’s someone who sells unpopular policies through ‘hypnotic blandness’, which sounds like a number of our current politicians. His special gift is an ability to create ‘a mood for change’, that is ‘manipulating the public into the very measures he and David had planned to foist on them all along.’ So, he is cut from the cloth of a demagogue, abusing the democracy which allows him the freedom to operate and hence encouraging sideline analysts to view the business of politics with a cynical eye. However, his modus operandi are disappointingly not fully visible in Soon. We are told about his skills, not shown them in action.
In the background is Ed Miles, the mildly sinister Minister of Police, along with the bitterly left-wing Ford, brother of Simon, who is the only dissident voice offering criticism of the PM’s social engineering. His raging diatribes against the ‘lazy little shit’ (Simon) and Hallwright’s mean-minded policies have a more than familiar sound. There is a tired shrillness to his attacks that may be a flirtation with the parodic on Grimshaw’s part, or alternatively, he is the author’s flat-out mouthpiece — take your pick. In fact, Simon is more right wing that he would like to admit. What is presumably an authorial assessment of his character is none-too-flattering: ‘Simon’s lack of politics was really politics of a basic kind. I am one of those who want poverty to exist so we can affirm our own sense of well-being.’ When the PM speaks of the success that flow from aspiration, he has in mind people like Simon, who has an over-entitled, almost narcissistic, sense of his own success which Grimshaw is at pains to underpin with his moral lapses, the full consequences of which are yet to be explored.
Grimshaw’s skill with dialogue varies. At times, it has a kind of dogged realism that is dangerously close to banality, as when a character is described as ‘amazing’ with the adjective occurring four times in as many lines. Lifelike though this may be, it’s humdrum: it doesn’t advance revelation of a character to any degree, which dialogue should do. Like many New Zealand writers, Grimshaw uses short bursts of dialogue much of the time — the neo-Sargesonian assumption being that New Zealanders don’t overly extend themselves in speech. There is a selective truth to this; it tends not to be the case for the more educated city-dweller. In contrast to a truncated mode of conversation, here is Simon working on Karen to swing her around to accepting Elke’s shifting to the Hallwright household:
‘Elke’s eighteen. She’ll be wanting novelty, experience, travel, all that. The next thing she’ll do is find a flat with five thousand of her closest friends. On the other hand, if she moves in with the Hallwrights, we”ll keep her close. All we have to do is maintain our friendship with them. And you don’t really want to give that up, do you? There’s a lot to look forward to. That ball you and Roza are working on, the fundraising thing with Trish Ellison. The other thing, for the children’s hospital. All that work’ll go to waste if you cut Roza off, the effort’ll be for nothing…’
This smooth, manipulative patter shows how far Simon has fallen morally. Perhaps he even believes his own emotional rhetoric. What’s really at stake for him is maintaining his friendship with the PM. Here Grimshaw shows off her talent for revealing a character’s hidden agenda. It would have been a welcome expansion of the novel to see more of this type of extended dialogue in dramatic interaction. One yearns for a bigger, broader canvas, a more ambitiously complex plot that shifts the point of view to more characters, that darts between more characters. Arguably, she is over-confident with her material and lets it drift all too easily. But Simon’s confession to his brother Ford lifts the adrenalin near the book’s conclusion. Soon is a thriller manqué that doesn’t quite become a thriller.
I’ve left a tasty morsel till last. Improbably and therefore delightfully, Roza turns out to have a vivid imagination which she uses to invent an ongoing fantasy story for her young boy. The extracts which appear at regular intervals involve a number of fantastic and colourfully named characters like Starfish, Green Lady, Red Herring and the Oort Cloud’s Wife. Ingenious, lively, provocative and teasingly fragmentary, they sound a new note in Grimshaw’s writing. Right now the reader doesn’t know what it portends for future work, but to use her keynote motif, I’m sure we will find out: Soon.
MICHAEL MORRISSEY is an Auckland novelist, short-story writer, poet and anthologist. His recent books include the memoir Taming the Tiger, the poetry collection Memory Gene Pool (Cold Hub Press), and the novel Tropic of Skorpeo (Steam Press).
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