Charlotte Grimshaw: Foreign City

In the first part of Grimshaw's Foreign City a New Zealander painter, Anna Devine, is living in London, painting, raising her young family, living with her nice husband. Anna is not so nice, although she tries. She paints paintings full of "menacing carnival-like figures and these had become my trademark ... my paintings and their goblin figures had become instantly recognisable."

And you are instantly reminded of the paintings of strange circuses of Jenny Dolezel who, like Devine, "had success in Auckland and had won prizes".

This is slightly disconcerting, like the described paintings: "I had dreams of colours fighting. In my paintings there were no straight lines; surfaces were tilted and structures swayed."

This is as good a description of any as Grimshaw's writing. She is terrifically good at building cities out of words and creating places of unease. Her London reminded me of Ian McEwan's London: a structure in which people live their lives — Grimshaw is also very good at the domestic life — while around corners there is grime and fear and the unpredictable.

In part two, there is another place, on the other side of the world, in New Zealand: as foreign a city as London. Justine Devantier lives here. She is the daughter of a New Zealand painter, Aniela Devantier, who left London and her first two children. Justine loves and fears her mother. She also hates her. Her mother paints and rages and binges and slumps. There are blazing hot days, the smell of asphalt and rubbish bins and, again, as in the first book, the domestic scene became chaotic.

Justine's childhood is like the paintings of Anna Devine: there are no straight lines, and no straight story. She fears her mother will abandon her, the way she abandoned her first family. She has been told that her father is an English novelist, Richard Black. This may or may not be true.

There is a tying up of ends, of a sort, of a very peculiar sort: you are left holding a series of strands, attempting to follow the leads for yourself. This is not very satisfying.

Yet there is much that is satisfying about this, Grimshaw's third novel. The writing, for example. She is particularly accomplished at scratching back the layers to reveal the strangeness of families which are, as everyone who comes from one knows, full of those carnival-like figures.

Yet you are left with the feeling that the writer has out-tricked herself, or us. This is an immensely readable book, which almost, but not quite, pulls off its interior acrobatics.

* Vintage, $36.95