Singularly stunning sequel

Singularity by Charlotte Grimshaw. Photo / Supplied

You don't usually expect short story collections to have sequels but this is certainly a continuation of sorts to Opportunity, the collection that won Charlotte Grimshaw the Montana Prize for fiction last year.

Like its predecessor, Singularity is a collection of loosely interconnected stories. Here the characters and events overlap with each other and also with the first book, even if only in memory or passing reference.

Indeed, there is a direct continuation of Opportunity's excellent title story - it even has the same name. In the original, a young Christian woman, humiliated by her policeman flatmate in her student days, gets a sudden chance for revenge years later when she comes across him in his undercover work. It was such a perfectly structured piece, with a heart-stopping final twist, that you feared to take it further might only spoil it. But Grimshaw gives it new life with seemingly consummate ease, telling it this time from the cop's point of view and further interweaving the tale into the unfolding links in this latest book.

The collection revisits other characters from the first, such as Simon the doctor and his wife, Karen, and Simon's dissolute old dad, Aaron Harris. We are reacquainted with Viola, the loose cannon and novelist, struggling to find her voice and trapped in a stage of becoming, like the nymph - the adolescent stage of the dragonfly - of the title.

Other stories follow painter Per, his wife Beth and their children, journalist Emily and doomed movie producer Larry. They range across time and space, from Auckland to the south of France in the 70s, to contemporary Los Angeles and a media junket to Uluru.

Pararaha, a tale of a near-disastrous childhood disaster on a wild west coast beach, is one of the most evocative of the collection. This event appears, like a flickering shadow, in the last moments of one of the character's lives.

The collection's cosmic imagery - black holes, the big bang - could so easily be hackneyed but in Grimshaw's hands these images become powerful metaphors for the voids and vast distances and sudden flashes of illumination in our understanding of others and ourselves.

Stylistically, Singularity is stunning. Grimshaw's prose is crisp, elegant and richly descriptive. Landscapes are evoked with a photographer's eye for the play of light, from a squally spring sky over Auckland to the patterns of sunlight falling on the upholstery in a plane.

The Auckland writer has described her short story collections as novel-like and Singularity moves so close to this larger structure you almost wonder why she didn't commit herself to it. However, there is a clue in the title itself and its image of the ultimate solitariness and mystery that is at the heart of individual experience.

Most importantly, whether taken together, or in single serves, these stories are page-turning reads.

Singularity
By Charlotte Grimshaw (Random House $32.99)

* Frances Grant is an Auckland reviewer.