Fiction Review: Starlight Peninsula by Charlotte Grimshaw

Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand

Charlotte Grimshaw is one of our darkest and most keenly observant novelists with her fixation on the dead, their manners of death and the missing; political intrigue; voyeurism; speculation; and the gritty melding of public and private lives. With her background as a criminal lawyer, Grimshaw in Starlight Peninsula again mixes characters who are curious and ingratiating, down-and-outs or high-flying politicians, and whose lonely or scandalous stories are unrolled through densely-crafted prose and cutting political satire.

This is the author's sixth novel, and it features characters from some of her previous novels and short story collections, particularly from her novel, Soon. Eloise Hay is a young, newly-single woman who works in the media, attends psychotherapy, and spends weekends pacing the urban scapes of Auckland, filling up on microwaved curry meals and endless glasses of wine. She is obsessed with the death of her earlier love, Arthur, and through her work connections delves into the seeming violence of his demise, in the process becoming spooked and paranoid.

Grimshaw is a complete master at turning the innocent and natural into something sinister, and in this novel, perhaps more so than any of hers before, the natural landscape is given such prominence that it constantly interrupts into and looms over the characters' exploits. What simply is becomes seen through Eloise's eyes: water, almost bursting, like the skin of a blister; sea glittering, chemical blue; the sun making a burning cross; light "seething"; and "seams of evil pulsing behind the sky".

Grimshaw's work is distinct from other writers’ works in that her novels and short stories interrelate to such a tightly-organised degree. Landscapes are comfortingly familiar yet originally rendered: the urban and rural (predominantly New Zealand), natural and artificial intertwine; characters reappear and strike up new relationships; and the focus is on the desperate and mystifying sides of human existence. As in Soon Grimshaw walks a fine line with her extremely provocative portrayals of politicians, minor celebrities and criminal celebrities, and this commentary delights. We have an internet mogul living in a mansion who is a "giant gaseous character" with a "giant head and tiny little teeth", and of course a continued focus on the ex-National Party leader, with his "sunny goofiness".

Starlight Peninsula features, over the spine and covers, a spectacular dragonfly, after a minor character (perhaps real, perhaps imagined...?) with a dragonfly tattoo. Like the cover this book shimmers, but it does so with a darkness, and a play of human shadows and light.