In-built tension at novel’s heart
Charlotte Grimshaw uses an unreliable narrator to help create a layered character analysis, writes Nicholas Reid.
In a detailed interview she gave eight years ago, Charlotte Grimshaw said her novels are definitely not thrillers or crime stories, even if they sometimes deal with the law. She was right. Grimshaw’s focus is always on the psychology of her characters and the societies they inhabit. But sometimes the framework of her plots has much in common with mystery stories.
Her latest, Mazarine, is a case in point. In another author’s hands its central premise could be the cue for a thriller. A mother, Frances Sinclair, is desperately seeking her young adult daughter, Maya, who has gone missing in Europe.
In the background are hints of terrorism, the possible influence of radical Islam and other things often seen as threats. A layer of mystery is added by the character of Mazarine, a woman with whom Frances teams up in her quest and with whom she becomes intimate.
But Mazarine in not always what she claims to be. Action takes us from Auckland to London, Paris and Buenos Aires, and there is a conclusion which will satisfy those who want to know what happened to Maya. And yet, far from being the thriller this synopsis makes it sound, Mazarine is more centred on a detailed character analysis.
The novel is narrated in the first person by Frances Sinclair, who is almost the classic case of an ‘‘unreliable narrator’’. We know from the start that she has problems with her identity. Her two siblings are her parents’ biological children, but she herself has been adopted. She doesn’t know who her biological parents were, and doesn’t get on with her adoptive mother. She has had an acrimonious break-up with a male partner. Worse, she often lacks confidence, suffers from memory fades, says she has difficulty remembering faces and tells of the psychiatric help she has sought.
So there is an in-built tension in this novel. How much can we trust this flawed narrator? How much are her fears for her daughter paranoid delusions rather than reasonable worries? Indeed when, about twothirds of the way through the novel, she has a major change in her view of life – which she sees as ‘‘healing’’ herself – how much is she entertaining just another delusion?
Grimshaw goes much further than simply dissecting an unreliable narrator. By various cunning strategies, she raises the whole question of how well we can really know other people, and how much our perceptions of them are simply so many ‘‘fictions’’. Indeed, by making Frances Sinclair a writer who is planning a novel, she suggests that published fictions often grow from the same sort of fears and speculations Frances nurtures.
Some readers will recognise features familiar from Grimshaw’s earlier work. The motif of the adopted child was central to her novel The Night Book .A semi-autobiographical childhood memory of a dangerous walk in the Waitakeres was used in one of her short stories. The difference is that the questioning of the role of the author – as distinct from the narrator – is more insistent in Mazarine.