Grimshaw\u2019s memoir The Mirror Book<\/a>, it is fragmentary; it jumps around in time periods, doubling back on itself, reiterating and repeating dialogue, interrogating and revisiting scenes. When the narrator says \u201cNow, Alice sat at her desk,\u201d after a flashback, it\u2019s unclear when \u201cnow\u201d is, and anyone waiting for the story to \u201cstart\u201d will possibly read until the end.<\/p>\nThoreau said, \u201cKnow your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still\u201d, and it\u2019s safe to say that Grimshaw has a favourite bone. I haven\u2019t read all her books, but the latest three \u2013 two novels and a memoir, plus the short story also named The Black Monk \u2013 are all about a woman who is a writer grappling with truth and fiction within her family. All include a cold, gaslighting mother, a mysterious woman that the narrator becomes attracted to (in the case of the memoir, it is the absence of this woman that is noted: the lack of a close female friend), a psychotherapist, a shadowy figure, and an unhappy family (though they will deny it). If I think of Tolstoy\u2019s quote about all happy families being alike, this is turned on its head in Grimshaw\u2019s fictional worlds: all these families are remarkably similar.<\/p>\n
In this novel you\u2019ll find elements of The Mirror Book and all her other novels, including an acrobatic paragraph that tours through the author\u2019s whole back catalogue of titles. In a dream, Anton talks to her about \u201cprovocation and guilt and foreign cities, about opportunity and singularity \u2026 a starlit peninsula \u2026 and a woman whose name meant \u2018blue butterfly\u2019.\u201d But there are also elements to be found from Grimshaw\u2019s columns, and her past writing on auto-fiction, in which she invoked Karl Ove Knausg\u00e5rd and Catherine Chidgey, and her musings on Trump and Ukraine, which are other ever-present threads through her work.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In The Mirror Book, Grimshaw touched only briefly on her relationship with her brother, Oliver, who died in 2024, two years after the memoir was published. In it, she wrote that his \u201cbehaviour seemed to me not only strange but opaque. His past and present life was one of the mysteries I\u2019d tried to explore, but my questions were blocked and disapproved of by my literary family.\u201d<\/p>\n
In The Black Monk, Alice decides to tackle an adult novel (though she wonders if she has the confidence). She describes it as \u201ca story about herself and her brother, and that she had the idea of writing a character who was a shadow, one she had never named.\u201d Elsewhere she spells it out: \u201cShe\u2019d never written about Ceddy\u2019s addiction, nor described his wild, erratic personality.\u201d For Alice, it\u2019s time to finally write about her brother. \u201c\u2018I\u2019m writing a confession\u2019, she said and added, \u2018But it\u2019s fiction.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Recently in The Post, Grimshaw spoke about her brother, who was an alcoholic, but stated, \u201cThe characters in my book are completely fictional as are their experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Mirror Book again: \u201cFiction is an arrangement of the facts just as the writer wanted them. It\u2019s the world through the looking glass, strands of our own stories appearing in fiction although they\u2019re denied in real life.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Black](\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP\/\/\/yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7\")
Charlotte Grimshaw with her mother, Kay (Photo: Marti Friedlander, Courtesy of the Gerrard and Marti Friedlander Charitable Trust)<\/p>\n
Alice believes she is collaborating with the universe, with the Fates. Each night she emails what she has written and imagines the emails being intercepted, the data distorted, \u201cso Alice could legitimately say: this is not a true confession, this is fiction.\u201d And yet, she is also \u201cshaping the data received from the ether. She was making art out of all that was unsayable.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019m no expert but I\u2019m familiar enough with some key Jungian ideas, especially about storytelling, to see them everywhere. Grimshaw quotes Jung liberally, and Alice begins to suspect that the Black Monk, the shadow that haunts her, is an aspect of her self. The shadow will write the truth she is unable to say out loud. It will create order from the chaos of her family.<\/p>\n
Alice thinks she sees connection in everything, \u201cbecause storyteller\u201d. She believes in \u201csome kind of collective consciousness, because otherwise how did she focus on the very thing that was significant, that was going to be significant. How did she know?\u201d Like Jung \u2013 whose archetypes are found in everything from The Wizard of Earthsea to Star Wars \u2013 Alice believes that we\u2019re wired to look for connection and meaning in everything, but that she is walking \u201cthe border between paranoia and prescience\u201d. Synchronicity is all well and good, but when does it start to get worrisome? Alice\u2019s connections \u2013 her paranoia and her prescience \u2013 are one of the most interesting aspects of the book. They lend the novel an uncanny, mysterious air, verging on the supernatural (if it were a film, there would be liberal use of a Hitchcockian dolly zoom). The narrative repeats itself, making points over and over, almost word for word, which does start to feel delusional. Are these characters even real? Did that really happen the way Alice recounts it? Surely not everything is connected?\u00a0<\/p>\n
And yet here is the reader, this reader at any rate, scanning the text for connections to the author\u2019s other work, fiction and non-fiction, trying not to be interviewer Baron. It starts to feel like living inside a reality TV show where you\u2019re not sure who is real and who is an actor.<\/p>\n
More connections: another thing that links all the books I\u2019ve mentioned is the strange activity of writing fiction. How as novelists our unconscious builds connections between things; how we use the people around us and the events in our own lives, sometimes disguised, sometimes in plain view, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not. Similar mantras come up here as the ones that emerged in The Mirror Book: go and make a story out of it; life gives you material, so use it; telling your story is existentially important. Here, the psychotherapist says, \u2018Telling your story is important\u2026 But if you are to heal, your narrative has to be true.\u201d This is echoed by Cedric, the brother: \u201cIf you can\u2019t tell your story\u2026 there is no order, only anarchy, and you are alone.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, here we have a novel about a woman writing a novel that will be a confession, but also a eulogy, and it will be about her brother, and her mother, and it will be true, but it will be distorted enough that it will be fiction. The novel will try to make sense of all the connections Alice finds around her, because she is an artist \u201cmaking meaning and beauty in a chaotic, disorderly world\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Connections. Grimshaw\u2019s memoir, The Mirror Book; and the novel, The Black Monk.<\/p>\n
Perhaps The Black Monk is a necessary step to close the loop, now that the author\u2019s mother and brother are no longer alive. There is such a poignancy to Alice\u2019s efforts to connect with them both \u2013 to help Cedric out of the mire of his addiction, and to find any kindness from her mother, Rula, who is a facsimile of the mother in Grimshaw\u2019s novel Mazarine, in The Mirror Book, and in the Black Monk short story. She leans away from her daughter in photographs, a familiar image. She finds \u201cendless jokes\u201d in life but denies family problems, offering her daughter no warmth.<\/p>\n
Alice\u2019s childhood and adolescence mirror the author\u2019s on multiple points, and with a memoir existing that uses the same material, there is no longer plausible deniability, and perhaps that is the whole point of it. An author denies that her book is anything other than fiction; the reader knows the truth. There is the evidence, right there.<\/p>\n
The Black Monk feels like another piece in the Grimshaw \u201cuber book\u201d, which is how David Mitchell\u2019s novels are often described. They fight with the truth, with fiction; they take us on a journey through one of the most original minds in New Zealand literature. And in among the repeated recycling of questions and attempted answers there are arresting descriptions of the streets outside the window, or the weather, which this review hasn\u2019t even touched on. There are side characters who appear and disappear with their own mysterious intentions that may or may not be imaginary or repurposed by Alice\u2019s mind hungry for synchronicity.\u00a0<\/p>\n
You don\u2019t read this book for the plot. You read it for the mind-bending, impressionistic wordiness of it all, for the tour through a character\u2019s splintered psyche, through the \u201cI and the I and the I\u201d of it all. You also don\u2019t read a Charlotte Grimshaw novel passively. You\u2019re constantly on your toes, looking for meaning and connection. You are part of the experiment. You are accepting that this is fiction, you are complicit, and therein lies its genius, and the genius of its author.<\/p>\n
The Black Monk by Charlotte Grimshaw ($38, Penguin NZ) is available to purchase from Unity Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rachael King reviews Charlotte Grimshaw\u2019s latest novel. There\u2019s a video currently going around the internet where a guy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":441328,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9904,489,225303,156,111,139,69,225304],"class_list":["post-441327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-book-review","tag-books","tag-charlotte-grimshaw","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-rachael-king"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=441327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441327\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/441328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=441327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=441327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=441327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}