The Black Monk by Charlotte Grimshaw

Knowing that Charlotte Grimshaw’s new novel draws inspiration from the short story of the same name written by Anton Chekhov in 1893, I thought I would read that first in case it provided any insights. Andrey Kovrin, a scholar, is forced to take a break from his studies and stay in the countryside. Here he encounters the ghostly figure of a hooded monk. On their second meeting, the monk sits next to him on a garden bench, and they have the following conversation:

‘You’re just a mirage,’ Kovrin murmured. ‘Why are you here, sitting still like that? It doesn’t tally with the legend.’

‘Never mind,’ the monk answered softly after a brief pause, turning his face towards him. ‘The legend, myself, the mirage are all products of your overheated imagination. I’m an apparition…’

‘That means you don’t exist?’ Kovrin asked.

‘Think what you like,’ the monk said with a weak smile. ‘I exist in your imagination, and your imagination is part of nature, so I exist in nature too.’

The back cover of Charlotte Grimshaw’s The Black Monk describes the novel as ‘part psychological thriller and part family saga.’ I think this is underselling what we have here. My first reaction is that this is ‘metafiction’, an invitation to look deeper into layers of meaning and context. The book operates on so many different levels. When the main character in the novel is also writing a book called The Black Monk then we are definitely talking meta fiction.

Sometimes metafiction will play with the timeline and with The Black Monk I paused after about forty pages to take stock of the way we were jumping about in time to see if I was missing something, or if we were just being disorientated. To begin with, Alice Lidell is a kid growing up in Auckland, perhaps in the ‘70s or 80s. Her brother Cedric is picked on by the other boys at school and gets into cannabis when he is 16. He ‘had calmed down since he was young, but he’d been an alcoholic and drug user for decades.’ Lately, he’d become obsessed with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Alice visits him in Wellington in 2022. All this information is in a handful of pages as we jump back and forth.

Picking your way across the timeline, there are some events and characters that are significant, and some that you come to realise are just passing names. Alice becomes a writer of children’s fiction, and lives in London with her husband, where she makes up stories for her daughter that she turns into books. Within the recent timespan of this novel, she starts to write her first adult fiction, also called The Black Monk, which seems to refer to some of the events within her own life. It is at this point that we start to see some events which are really from her life (not forgetting that this is all fiction) and some events which may just be fiction within the fiction.

The Black Monk within this story first appears to Alice in Karori Cemetery in Wellington:

‘A figure emerged from a clump of trees and came towards her through the graves: the shape of a man in black, cut out of the air.

His gait was awkward. He kept his right arm stiffly by his side and held his other hand to his face. Drawing nearer, he tripped but righted himself.

She saw blood running over the hand he held to his mouth. His shirt was stained with spots of red. He saw her and made as if to veer away, but when she stood up and asked if he was all right, he changed his mind. He reeled, closed his eyes. She could see he was dizzy, concussed maybe.

Alice could recall, as if she was writing a story, what they managed to convey to one another, even though she remembered it only broadly, and his spoken English was very limited.’

This is the first appearance of Anton, a German shoe salesman. It seems significant because Alice lends him a scarf to stop his bleeding, and when she later looks into the scrunched up bundle, it contains blood, flesh and a tooth. This proof that Anton was ‘real’ takes on greater importance, and Alice hides it in her freezer until many years later, she slips it into the coffin of her dead mother. At one point, as the millennium changes, she sees Anton again, this time on CNN, where he seems to have become the leader of the Russian nation and is delivering a New Year's message to the Russian people.

One quote may, or may not, hold the key to this character. Alice is thinking about Chekhov’s story:

‘In Chekov’s story, a man starts seeing a black figure in the air, a hallucination. When the monk appears, the man feels insane but happy. When he stops seeing the monk, he’s sane but miserable. What can this mean?

Perhaps it means he needs his madness. His madness is the only thing keeping him sane.

What if, for Alice, the black monk didn’t represent madness but fictionalising? Her black monk was a shapeshifter; he appeared and disappeared, he existed in a no man’s land between fiction and fact. As far as she knew, he never told the truth, he made his own reality. He was the shape of a man cut out of the universe, revealing the blackness beyond.’

Alice’s parents figure heavily within the narrative. Their relationship with Alice is at best uneasy. Her mother, Rula, is an artist, and her stepfather is a politician, Thom, later Sir Thom. For those familiar with other novels by Grimshaw, there are plenty of fictional politicians in there too. The Night Book sees David Hallwright as the leader of the National party and in Soon he has become Prime Minister. Starlight Peninsula also contains Hallwright and The Bad Seed is a volume that brings all these stories together and was adapted for TV. In these novels, Hallwright’s wife was named Rosa, only one letter different from Rula.

There are several references to other authors and their works, such as Joan Didion and Martin Amis. Catherine Chidgey gets a whole page of description about her ‘found’ novel, The Beat of the Pendulum. But towards the end of the book, there is a reference to ‘the celebrated New Zealand writer J.G. Stein’. This is obviously a thinly disguised reference to the author’s father, C.J. Stead. That brings us to the difficult subject of family in the story, and family for Grimshaw. I haven’t read her 2021 memoir, The Mirror Book, which was shortlisted for the Ockham Book Awards, but there was plenty of buzz about what was said about her parents. At one point, they even threatened to take her to court over the revelations. Grimshaw found her own parents indifferent or actively hostile to her own pain or problems. She describes ‘a deep-seated commitment to fiction over truth’, and claims that her parents ‘re-wrote their own history’ describing ‘the lovely childhood house full of books’ narrative when it fact the reality was a chaotic, frightening and lawless youth.

Grimshaw, like Alice in the book, also had an older brother. There are many parallels here too. Both the character Cedric and real brother Oliver lived in Wellington, they were music lovers, they both had multiple degrees, and both struggled with addiction and alcoholism. Beyond that, there are probably other similarities locked into the author’s private life and memory. Grimshaw describes long phone conversations with her brother, and in the novel, Cedric and Alice enjoy the same, both were full of laughter.

And finally, let’s not forget, Alice Liddell, with two d’s, not one, was the real young girl that Lewis Carroll used as the inspiration for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Just another level of the meta.

Reviewer: Marcus Hobson

Penguin