Charlotte Randall: Within the kiss

By JENNY JONES*

Charlotte Randall's third novel isn't a straight story about a pact with the devil and its inevitable outcome.

Ostensibly, yes, a woman's husband is telling his current sex-kitten how his wife, in the throes of borderline despair over uncontrollable boredom, contracted with the devil to produce a bestseller about tennis while he made her daughter, Helena, a rich and famous tennis player.

Helena would play genuinely good tennis with a little help in placement of balls before her racquet, and the bestseller would stay within the "kiss" principle: Keep it simple, stupid.

To make things even simpler the narrator, John Smith, calls his wife Faust and the tennis coach Mephisto. We know where we are.

Except that we don't.

Smith fills in the parts he didn't witness: the conversations between Faust and Mephisto, and between Faust and the teenager she falls in lust with, so we don't know what was really said or thought and what is Smith's creation, reflecting his own thought processes and personal history.

Mephisto and Faust so constantly and convincingly discuss the progress of the book that it's hard to remember Smith is the narrator speaking to his "sugarplum", his "little mumchance" who is not allowed to say a word until Mephisto tells Faust to "bring the girl in".

What girl? The girl who spends the book with her knickers down (every bestseller must have one).

Suddenly the girl has a name, Candy, and Candy fumes at being made use of like this.

Reading Charlotte Randall is like being caught up in a lolly scramble. There's so much largesse bombarding you from her intellectual helicopter you haven't time to unwrap each individual sugarplum.

It doesn't matter, you grab what you can, enjoy the sweet tang of sherbet, liquorice, praline or Turkish delight - no soft centres here - and these satisfy.

You are immersed in a world of delight made exquisite by intellectual refraction.

To a lesser extent than with the prize-winning The Curative, Randall offers you words you have never heard of, uses such words nonchalantly as if they were in everyday use - "chthonic courts" comes to mind. She experiments with how a word's meaning may change as it moves from noun to adverb or adjective to verb.

Unfortunately the examples that come to mind feature words the Herald may not be keen to print - there are quite a few of those, though not as many as Mephisto would like, bearing in mind his edict that "a modern bestseller never pulls its punches that way. The sex has to be as real and raw as the tennis."

Apart from the individual juicy nuggets, there's the amazing sensation Randall creates of your lolly scramble taking place in a boat where the ground under you is anything but still.

Sometimes it's a gentle swaying, sometimes it's a tumultuous heavy swell.

You don't know who is writing this story, you don't know whether X really kissed Y, but the wonderful thing is you can enjoy the journey as a joyride, a bit like a T.S. Eliot poem.

But it was always going to be hard to sustain a book that demonstrates the essentials of a bestseller while refusing to allow the willing suspension of disbelief.

I reached a point in Within the Kiss where delight began to pall. Mephisto decides there must be a plot twist, Faust insists on bringing in two dead poets, more characters are brought in to service the plot and for about 70 pages while the poets pontificate and the menial characters perform their menial duties, the magic is reduced to the level of mechanics.

It takes a few deaths before the boat regains balance enough for delight to hover once more and the novel to steam towards its satisfying conclusion.

The characters of Mephisto and Faust, Smith and Candy are real and dynamic.

Along the way they consider how to live in this "greased eel of a thing" - the modern world.

Randall comments passionately and cumulatively on love, greed, the decay of reality and the awful pervasive influence of "the machine [that] sucks in our poetic variety and spits it out as one thought, one desire ... an Italian lounge suite [or] margarine on the beach instead of J. Alfred Prufrock".

The devil himself has a moral code, which makes him interesting.

As for Randall, she's an original and I'm glad she can't keep it simple.

Penguin Books

$27.95


* Jenny Jones is an Auckland writer.