Book of the Week: Grimshaw, incoherently

2026-02-25 - 16:08

In 1893 Anton Chekhov wrote a short story titled ‘The Black Monk’. Andrey Vassilitch Kovrin is advised that his nerves require a stay in the country and goes to visit his former guardian Pesotsky and his daughter Tanya in their country estate, a grand house with a beautiful and renowned garden. There one evening they talk idly of legends and local traditions, in particular of an apparition of a monk said to have appeared in many countries over several centuries. And, of course, as Kovrin walks in the garden as the sun sets, the monk appears to him. Far from sinister, the monk flatters him, assures him that he is a person of immense importance, that he will achieve great things, and that eternal life awaits him. Kovrin is deliriously happy, reforms his previously unsatisfactory life, and proposes to Tanya. But his euphoria is not sustainable; gradually he tips into madness and eventually dies. In 2019 Charlotte Grimshaw wrote a short story with the same title. The narrator is a novelist, has a dysfunctional family that has previously featured in her work, and encounters on several occasions an annoying stranger whom she describes as the black monk. There is no euphoria, no narrative arc, and many details seem to anticipate Grimshaw’s 2021 memoir The Mirror Book. Fact and fiction seem to slide together. In her new novel, also called The Black Monk, Grimshaw develops her short story’s preoccupation with the dysfunction and damage of the family, and the way in which writing fiction—or fashioning events into stories—can be a resource and a defence. Like Kovrin and the narrator of her short story, the central character, Alice Liddell, sees a vision of a black monk. In Chekhov the apparition is a symptom of psychiatric disturbance; in Grimshaw’s short story he is an annoying and largely unexplained intruder. In the novel, Alice encounters her monk, Anton, fittingly, in the Karori cemetery. His nature and function are problematic—for Alice and for the reader. He is variously described as a shoe salesman, a secret friend, a/the Devil, motivator, Phantom, villain, spook, “seat of her creativity, centre of her guilt”. He speaks German but this may not be his true nationality. He may very well be an actual historical figure (no spoilers here). He is connected to her work as a writer: “When Alice saw the black monk, she could write, and when he disappeared she lost her story. She needed him.” She decides, “The black monk was there to signify: no matter what the experience, there would always be a story.” Alice’s rather chilly psychiatrist Dr Botherway tells her that trauma causes broken narrative: “When the story was allowed to be told, the brain would process the trauma, and healing would at last occur”. Anton aka the black monk both is and isn’t a tangible human figure. Is he a co-conspirator with her German friend Javine, and if so, what is the object of the conspiracy? He seems to be related to a cluster of questions around Javine’s past symbolised by the blue butterfly bracelet which appears, disappears, reappears, is smuggled and misappropriated throughout the novel. The novel suggests that such talismanic objects are significant as markers in time but not necessarily reliable. There is also a broken tooth in a freezer. But the novel’s main focus is on Alice’s family, her unpleasant and eventually cancer-stricken mother Rula, her politically important stepfather Sir Thom, her cousin, aunt and uncle, and especially her brother. Ceddy is an addict, and his narrative of addiction, recovery, relapse and descent is a thread that runs through the text as Alice attempts rescue, feuds with her mother over his status and needs, and experiences guilt and helplessness. Alice is an author of children’ literature; she is considering moving into adult fiction and in a sense the progression of the novel enacts her doing so—we are (at times) reading both an account of her writing her novel and the novel itself. The power of story-telling—and the inevitability of human story making—are stressed: “She was collaborating with the Fates”, the reader is told of her work. “She was shaping data received from the ether. She was making art out of all that was unsayable.” Although we do not see her complete the novel she contemplates writing, we are told, “There was a story in every experience she had.” Her friend Javine tells her, “All your writing is a confession”, although it’s unclear what she is confessing – guilt concerning Ceddy? The novel and the narration and Alice’s own writing are all overtly unstable. Despite the play with memento/momento, memory is unreliable, certainly not factual. She distrusts her brother’s memory of the past. Even her computer backup systems are suspect: “Was the story writing itself, or (as her wild imagination had it) was someone reading (hacking into) the material she was emailing to her Xtra account each day?”, she wonders at one point. In keeping with this artful self-consciousness, there are literary references—even little mini-lectures on writing and writers—throughout: Martin Amis, Catherine Chidgey, Eleanor Catton. ‘Alice Liddell’ is the name of the little girl Lewis Carroll based his Alice in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass on. Hence the references to mirrors and shadows. “You could play games, you could run, rabbit, down the hole,” Alice is told. Not as a character but as an aside, a citation, we encounter a “celebrated New Zealand writer JG Stein” (guess who), whose last sequence on the death of his wife is, Thom considers—the poet himself considers—too self-revealing: “Who was it said there is a splinter of ice on the heart of every writer?” One of the dangers of book reviews and reviewers is that they often feel impelled to interpret and make coherent what is perhaps not. There is danger that a review can explicate complexity or even muddle in simplistic and overly kind ways. The Black Monk is a perhaps deliberately incoherent text. Textual uncertainty is a key component. There are a number of not necessarily consistent or compatible narratives. Alice, it is stated, “saw connections everywhere, and when she was writing fiction she almost believed in some kind of collective consciousness, because otherwise how did she focus on the very thing that was going to be significant, how did she know?“ But the reader may feel that they are not necessarily invited to be part of that collective. There is a continual shift in time between Alice now and Alice in the past. There are a lot—a lot!—of characters (Ezra, Julian Nagel, Lin, Renee, Thom, Emma, Ted, Jon, Mitch, Rula, Dr Botherway, Krill, Angus, Anton, Ceddy, Javine, Inger, Sanjay and Uncle Bobby) who are sometimes crucial and sometimes appear fleetingly. (Uncle Bobby in particular, the abusive cult leader, I assumed would be significant but wasn’t particularly.) And the idea that Alice’s text is being written as we read it, that her drafts are being hacked, destabilises—but why, by whom, and to what purpose? At one point, Alice says to Ceddy: “In a dream, all the characters are invented by the dreamer. Perhaps they are all the dreamer [...] The shadow man is my unconscious mind. The I is the narrator. The shadow gave the narrator the memento/story, the narrator gave the story back to the woman, meaning ‘told the story’, and the result is ...” And he replies, “Integration.” Good for Ceddy following this but I’m lost here. The shadow man is Anton, the badly dressed show salesman or someone more akin to Chekhov’s black monk? Is he Alice’s creativity, her shadow? Alice herself? Grimshaw can write clearly and cogently. There is a wonderful description of the all too common experience of landing at Wellington Airport in a storm: “The pilot was inaudible over the crackle and roar. The plane felt like an old rust bucket, shabby, straining every rivet. The alarm went on pinging. As the plane banked again, the sky was so black it was like looking onto the centre of a migraine. Then they began to rally, to speed up, and they powered down into the Wellington gale, landing with a shriek, a sideways wrench and a double bounce. You could imagine the plane limping to the gate, complaining it had done its back in.” But there is not enough of this kind of focus and clarity. I would rather read the Chekhov story, with its descriptions of smoky fires lit at night to protect the flower gardens from frost; Tanya and her father making up after an argument, “walking side by side along the avenue as though nothing had happened, and both were eating rye bread with salt on it, as both were hungry”. The Black Monk by Charlotte Grimshaw (Penguin, $38) is available in bookstores nationwide.