Charlotte Grimshaw - Sargeson flat home for a powerhouse of talent

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

Charlotte Grimshaw's second novel, Guilt, about boozy young middle-class Auckland drifters, was launched here by Penguin Books Friday night, two months after hitting the shops in Britain where a Times reviewer said she "creates sharply drawn urban landscapes, whose noirish, unsettling atmosphere is powerfully caught."

Other UK reviews were also positive but it's no surprise Grimshaw has escaped the sharp critical disappointment that so often follows successful first books because she sees herself already as a professional novelist and she hard-grafts her writing day by day.

Grimshaw is one of a number of young women novelists who apply themselves to their craft with unremitting seriousness and who also have in common selection as Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellows. Last month, Catherine Chidgey's second novel, Golden Deeds, written in the Sargeson flat in Princes Street, near the University of Auckland, was published and both Kapka Kassabova and Tina Shaw will have fellowship-written novels released by Penguin over the next few months.

Grimshaw was herself named a Sargeson Fellow for 2000 yesterday (subs: Friday). The others are novelist Sue Reidy and poet James Brown. Each will be allocated a few months during which they can live and work in the flat. Reidy's The Visitation was short-listed for the Montana best first novel award in 1996 and her second, Four Ways to be a Woman, will be published by Black Swan in September. Brown's verse has been widely published in periodicals and his second collection, Lemon, has just been released.

While most New Zealand novelists are published here and only then possibly released overseas, Grimshaw's first book, Provocation, was picked up in Britain first by publishers Little Brown who also decided to go with Guilt.

The 33-year-old mother of two young children graduated from the University of Auckland with a law degree and practised briefly in Auckland before moving to Britain for four years.

"I've always felt I was a writer," she told me this week.

"I decided to do law because I thought I'd be good at it, even though I knew it wasn't going to be the thing I would do for the rest of my life."

Guilt is a neatly constructed story about a young female law graduate, Maria, her casual lover and aspiring writer Marcus, her best friend the asexual Leon, a mountainous and menacing nightclub bouncer, Wiremu Ihaka, and an assortment of other aimless drifters. I found the characters depressingly unattractive. Leon, for example, "would head out of the bar, stroll down the road and set fire to a phone booth, just as he was passing. Or blow up a car. Or do a little smash and grab, one brick through the window and there was a nice new stereo or TV." And: "They arrived at the cinema in a taxi just as the large crowd was threading its way through the doors. They jumped the queue by habit - Leon and Marcia never queued, saw a queue as a test of skill - and bought tickets."

Somehow it all seems at once boorish and nihilistic, rebellion without style or purpose and Leon's death seems as meaningless as his life.

"Leon? Unattractive?" Grimshaw said, staring hard at me with her lustrous, appraising brown eyes.

"Well, that's a sort of subjective thing isn't it, whether you are attracted to someone who is somewhat chaotic. If you're a sort of orderly person, you might be repelled by that. It's very much about young people who are aimless because they don't quite know where they're going yet, rather than being by nature aimless in their personalities... By the end, Maria and Marcus have found some direction but only after they've caused a certain amount of damage to others less fortunate than themselves."

Well, I find the self-obsession of characters in some modern fiction very depressing indeed. The shift has been noticeable from characters coping well or badly with forces pressing on them from the outside during war, poverty, imprisonment, political oppression or even just difficult relationships to characters whose problems all ooze up from inside themselves.

Another carp: Grimshaw too often has a character referring to another's amusingly ironic dialogue but doesn't present any. Sometimes she tells rather than shows. But the prose is very tidy and occasionally lyrical, and the story is full of edgy hints at impending calamity that kept me reading with attention.

Grimshaw is the daughter writer C K Stead who has no doubt convinced her by example that the best training for writing is writing.

"I work a lot," she says.

"All the time. I usually work all day Sunday and, with the children at school and kindergarten, I get from nine to three on weekdays," she says.

"This sort of life really suits me, actually. It's solitary. That's why having a family suits me because I can have them and be otherwise absolutely solitary."

How does she write? Well, she doesn't hang about waiting for the muse to sing.

"So far I've started at the beginning and written right through to the end without mucking about with it. With Guilt it was planned and set out in advance because it's a very structured novel, and it simply proceeded according to plan... I don't do poetry, which is not to say I'm insensitive to poetry, and the idea of doing anything like TV scripts doesn't appeal to me either. My passion is novels, how they work."

The third one, with the working title of You, is well on the way. By the time she takes up the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship later this year she expects to be in the editing process and ready to start novel number four.

Grimshaw has no doubts about her talent, and neither do I. The way she works and what she's done so far suggest she's a natural, and one with application and diligence.