Stephanie Johnson on how to make merry mischief

Stephanie Johnson's latest work features mischievous satire. Photo / Random House

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.

Only a writer of Johnson's ability could keep so many narrative balls in the air with such deceptive ease. She once described the writing of fiction (when it is going well) as a form of legal hallucination, and her prose these days has that quality - the characters and reality she creates are completely believable despite the aura of farce flickering at the margins. She is just as generous to her peers in New Zealand letters here as she was in The Writing Class: James McNeish never kept such good company.

There are some hilarious episodes: Gareth's getting back to nature, Rae's suffering through a session of the kind of team-building bollocks that are the blight of modern corporate life. But there is also much poignancy. Adarsh, catapulted to celebrity by his precocious talent, finds little to love about it. The uneasy nexus of art and commerce is always there. And although Johnson lives and breathes books, she is no mere sentimentalist: the place and importance of writers and writing in the digital world and in the brutal world we inhabit provide the ballast to all that entertaining sail.

The Writers' Festival
by Stephanie Johnson
(Vintage $37.99)

- Canvas