A couple of years ago, Stephanie Johnson wrote a highly entertaining novel about a writing class at an Auckland tertiary institution. It featured a wide cast of characters, some trenchant satire, a good deal of humanity and carried just a whiff of roman a clef.
Her latest, The Writers' Festival, is the sequel (although it stands alone perfectly well). It features many of the same characters, a few new ones, even more trenchant and mischievous satire and the same sense that the author - herself the long-serving (not to say suffering) director of the Auckland Writers' Festival - has created for herself the opportunity for some much-needed catharsis.
Rae McKay is the artistic director of the Auckland Writers' Festival. She has great credentials for the job - a background organising literary festivals in New York and a lifelong passion for books, which may have had something to do with her cousin, Merle, a novelist and (until recently) the teacher of a well-respected writing class. But there are plenty of obstacles in her path to pulling the event together: petty rivalries (with the Fringe Festival, with her co-director), politics (and plenty of it, shading from the mean and interpersonal to the global and downright scary), family matters (looming separation from her cheating husband, the gravitational pull of her maternal duty to her young children) and much more besides.
She's not the only one with problems. Gareth (Gareth Heap from The Writing Class) is the local judge of a major literary award that is to be announced at the festival. He discovers to his horror (and much too late) that one of the shortlisted novels was written by none other than Adarsh Z. Kar, whom he mentored. His conflict of interest is about as tricky to manage as the dissolution of his relationship with Jacinta (another former student), and the new relationship he blunders into.
And while dear old Merle (the main character from The Writing Class) has her hands quite full enough keeping Brendan, her husband, from the worst ramifications of his graceless ageing, she manages to get herself into a pickle by offering a novel to a publisher under a pseudonym: when it is enthusiastically accepted, she digs the hole ever deeper with the backstory she creates for her alter ego.
