Book review: The Night Book, by Charlotte Grimshaw

There's something buttoned up and restrained about Charlotte Grimshaw's writing, something as middle class as the characters whose stories she tells and, I imagine, as the people who tend to read them.

Don't get me wrong, it's good writing, taut and spare. There's no layering on of excess words, no meandering. Yet it's so tidy and put-away-in-its-proper-place that as you read you can't help wishing she'd just loosen things up a little bit.

The Night Book is an extension of Grimshaw's two highly praised volumes of linked short stories, the award-winning Opportunity and its follow-up Singularity.

There's a crossover of character and themes, a sameness of tone. The central figure, Dr Simon Lampton, is a wealthy obstetrician who becomes caught up in National Party politics on the eve of the election to please his sycophantic wife Karen.

A father of three, his most intense relationship is with his adopted daughter Elke whose insomnia means the two spend hours together in the dead of night. When he meets the National Party candidate at a function, Simon feels an immediate bond with the politician's flawed wife Roza Hallright. What he doesn't know is that she is a woman on the edge of crisis, hiding secrets, putting her husband's chances of getting the big job in jeopardy.

It all sounds rather serious but Grimshaw lightens things up by playing around with satire and a few in-jokes. The inarticulate future PM with a propensity for malapropisms is quite obviously John Key and she has fun being bitchy about Parnell matrons swathed expensively in flouncy Trelise Cooper clothes.

This is a well-heeled world Grimshaw clearly knows well and she writes about these characters - who have a lot to lose and are wobbling on the edge of losing it - with clarity and veracity. In comparison the working class characters are more shallow and stereotypical, and the interaction between the two social extremes not always credible.

The Night Book is a very New Zealand novel, thoughtful and contemporary. Grimshaw has a talent for reflecting our world back at us and there will be many Aucklanders who recognise versions of themselves here and may not feel too flattered.

Yet while I think she is to be lauded for such a strongly individual writing style, and while I think she is smart, funny and observant, I'm hoping that in her next work of fiction Grimshaw feels able to move on to something quite different.

* The Night Book, by Charlotte Grimshaw, Vintage, $36.99.