Stephanie Jones: Book Review - Starlight Peninsula by Charlotte Grimshaw

Earlier this year Charlotte Grimshaw confirmed that her latest novel, Starlight Peninsula, would bring to an end the story of several characters who have appeared in five of her novels over nearly a decade. A writer’s prerogative, if a bit saddening, because Starlight Peninsula, which traces the agonies and eventual quasi-ecstasy of TV producer Eloise Hay, revives, along with Eloise, some of the most lively and interesting people to emerge in recent New Zealand fiction: the Hallwrights, David and Roza, now savouring their wealth and lingering power in the aftermath of his Prime Ministership; Simon Lampton, a medical doctor and great friend of the Hallwrights’; the memory of Arthur, Eloise’s former boyfriend, whose death several years earlier was ruled accidental and attributed to intoxication.

There is also Kurt Hartmann, a character so ripped from the headlines as to befit a Law & Order episode. An obese, campy German with a “Bond-villain persona”, he is a champion video-gamer, an accused internet pirate and the subject of illegal GCSB surveillance. The media question of the day is whether Hallwright’s replacement Jack Dance will go down for the Hartmann fiasco or succeed in stitching up a colleague.

Back to the fiction, though. Starlight Peninsula, for quite some time, meanders with no evident direction, the narrative mirroring Eloise’s erratic wandering. After being abandoned by her husband Eloise dreads the weekends because the emptiness of the days can only be filled by movement. She sets out from her home on the Starlight Peninsula, a gentrifying suburb on the central Auckland fringes, and roams to Ponsonby, Newmarket, Remuera, Mt Eden.

The wandering, combined with Eloise’s visits to an opaque psychotherapist and pursuit of a story involving a Bain-Karam-esque duo, seems not to be leading anywhere – what does Eloise want? – until Grimshaw yanks her heroine out of her dream state and towards the answers it has finally occurred to her to demand.

It’s difficult to capture what exactly makes Grimshaw’s writing so distinctive and penetrating. It is spare yet sparkling, unshowy, surgically precise. She seems to dig, word by word, into the heart of what it means to be human, using language both lyrical and muscular: “there were diamonds of light on water shirred by the breeze that smacked down and spread like a hand pressed on the surface.”

Eloise picks compulsively at the facts of her own existence and eventually, as the plot surges forward, applies the same rigour to everything around her. Devoted to her popular colleague, current affairs frontman and people’s champion Scott Roysmith, she “had a sense of a small busy person inside him, pulling the levers for smile, blink, beam, bray.”

Grimshaw’s gift for satire is never more fully realized than in the form of a repellent weather presenter who makes an appearance at a major charity event: “The Sinister Doormat walked by in witchy red shoes, and winked.” But it is in the conversations between Eloise and Lampton that the novel’s essence rises and Grimshaw’s dexterity is fully evident. If these characters must be farewelled, the method could not be more lacerating or persuasive.

Eloise begins the novel adrift, rejected, clinging to her work and her notion of herself as a fine observer of the idiosyncrasies and unconscious betrayals other people make of their secret fears and desires. By the end, she is found, rooted in place and certain. An exquisitely calibrated examination of truth and consequence, Starlight Peninsula is the kind of novel that burrows under your skin and won’t come out.