Complex thriller worth the journey
Charlotte Grimshaw is covering a lot of ground here. The location of Mazarine moves from Auckland via Waikato to London, Paris and Buenos Aires as novelist and social misfit Frances Sinclair searches for her missing daughter, Maya. The plot supposedly revolves around the fate of Maya and her boyfriend, Joe, who has also disappeared in Europe and whose father and brother may be connected to the 2015 terrorist attacks on Paris. However, most of the book’s focus is on the developing relationship between Frances and Joe’s mother, Mazarine, as they end up looking for their children together.
If that sounds like a love story disguised as a thriller, Grimshaw drops a big hint via her narrator Frances that she doesn’t do genre fiction. The real story is even more complicated and takes place in Frances’ head.
At every turn in the search for Maya and her confused feelings for Mazarine, Frances dives back into her past, examining her unhappy childhood and reliving her conversations with her psychotherapist, Dr Werner Bismarck. It becomes clear that Frances has a sometimes tenuous grip on reality. She struggles to remember people and events in her life and keeps seeing her mysterious ex, Nick Oppenheimer, who remains invisible to everyone else.
As a writer (or perhaps as a patient) she is constantly reworking the narrative of her life into fiction and questioning the nature of truth and reality. While this can be playful — there are knowing asides about unreliable narrators and “you could not make this stuff up” anecdotes — more often it comes across as genuine anguish.
Much of the book is taken up with Frances’ search for her true self, her toxic relationship with her passive-aggressive mother, Inez, and musings on how a lack of love in the early years of childhood can leave you feeling empty for the rest of your life. As Grimshaw deliberately mixes up her author’s identity with Frances’ character, readers can only guess how much of this is autobiographical.
The psychoanalytical load does tend to slow the story down and fans of crime thrillers should look elsewhere for a satisfying ending, but there are plenty of compensations along the way. Grimshaw’s dialogue expertly captures the hidden patterns of everyday conversation and she evokes mood and place brilliantly, from a rain-lashed, wintry Auckland to stifling heat in central London.
The overwhelming sensation of the book is disorientation — when Frances is not dreaming, daydreaming or jet-lagged, she remains physically or emotionally lost. Following her can be a confusing journey but the high quality of Grimshaw’s writing makes it worth the effort.