James McNaughton

The Man Who Would Not See by Rajorshi Chakraborti (Penguin, 2018), 335 pp., $38

Rajorshi Chakraborti is an essayist, novelist and short-story writer with an international reputation. He grew up in Calcutta and Mumbai and has lived, studied and worked in Canada, England and Scotland. He now lives in Wellington, where The Man Who Would Not See is mostly set. It’s his fifth novel.

Inside the book glow review snippets of Chakraborti’s previous fiction. The words metafiction, surrealism, Murakami (twice), noir-ish realism, cinematic, metaphysic and good storytelling all come up. This time he has opted for domestic realism. The prologue is set in India when the principle narrator, Abhay, was nine. Abhay tells the story of how he and his eleven-year-old half-brother, Ashim, got lost doing something they shouldn’t have and had to sleep out overnight. This nocturnal disappearance was the last straw as far as the adults were concerned. The elder half-brother was officially declared a bad influence and shipped off to his grandmother’s house to finish his schooling in another state, never to return. As the sole child in the bosom of his parents’ affection, Abhay flourished. He later travelled abroad to study and be a writer, while Ashim stayed in India and got a job. The once inseparable brothers fell out of contact. [Read more…]

Jennifer Lawn

Marlborough Man by Alan Carter (Fremantle Press, 2017), 304 pp., $37

This is a cracker of a novel, pacey and sharp. It opens with a scene from every parent’s nightmare: swimming lessons are over, children spill out from the pool, and as a little boy makes his way towards the bus stop a car door swings open and he accepts the invitation to hop in. The Pied Piper – as the local press has dubbed this paedophilic child murderer – has taken another victim.  [Read more…]

Chris Else

The Cage by Lloyd Jones (Penguin-Random House, 2018), 262 pp., $38

This year’s shortlist for the Acorn Prize includes an anomaly. Three of the titles show an attention to the values of ‘fine writing’ that have tended to dominate our recent new fiction. The New Animals by rising star Pip Adams plays fast and loose with narrative conventions in its exploration of Auckland’s fashion industry; Patrick Evans’s Salt Picnic offers a plot-light portrait of a young female novelist in 1950s Spain, in a style that seems to be a pastiche of Janet Frame; Baby, by Annaleese Jochems, is a beautifully written but simple tale of homoerotic obsession from the point of view of a twenty-something narcissist. The odd book out is Sodden Downstream, Brannavan Gnanalingam’s account of a middle-aged Sri Lankan refugee trying to get to her cleaning job in central Wellington during a violent rainstorm. This piece, which is moving and funny although a little rough around the edges, differs from the others in that it is driven by concern for matters beyond itself. It is unselfconsciously about something. We might call it a journalist novel. [Read more…]

Kiran Dass

Sodden Downstream by Brannavan Gnanalingam (Lawrence & Gibson, 2018), 180 pp., $28.99

Brannavan Gnanalingam’s fifth novel Sodden Downstream is an immensely affecting and at times quietly upsetting read. Set over a roughly twenty-hours period in Lower Hutt, it takes place as former tropical cyclone Evelyn hits Wellington and the Kapiti Coast, causing the region to shut down as public transport comes to a grinding halt. [Read more…]