When Frances's daughter Maya fails to make contact with her mother for several weeks. Frances becomes worried, but then Frances is a worrier.
Maya was living and working in London with her boyfriend Joe, when communication ceases. Frances is unable to make contact and after discovering her ex, Nick in her home she flees. She seeks out Joe's mother and then impulsively heads to London. Frances is a writer and uses the cover of researching her new novel. She is soon joined by Mazarine, Joe's mother. The women's search takes them to Paris and then South America. Their are political implications which adds to the mounting tensions.The two women develop a romantic relationship. The author creates many doubts in the readers mind as to the stability of Frances's mental health and I felt much was unresolved at the close of this novel. Was Nick following her across continents or was this a reflection of her own paranoia? The search is resolved but the unreliable first person narrator was hard to like. ( )

Charlotte Grimshaw (b.1968) is one of the most high profile authors in New Zealand. While she has yet to win a major award outside New Zealand, her books are reviewed internationally and she has been nominated for and won numerous awards at home. I disliked the widely acclaimed Opportunity (2007) and didn't finish it (though you should read the comments below my review to see the opinion of someone who really liked it), but I really admired Starlight Peninsula (2015) because of the interesting issues it raised. So I didn't hesitate when I saw Grimshaw's latest title, Mazarine, at the library...

Mazarine was longlisted for the 2019 Ockhams and my explorations at Wikipedia tell me that her intention with her last five books has been to create her own version of a Human Comedy, after Balzac - a series of linked novels and short story collections about life in New Zealand. Well, what Mazarine gives us is a view of New Zealanders who are multicultural, cosmopolitan and widely travelled. This is the blurb:

When her daughter vanishes during a heatwave in Europe, writer Frances Sinclair embarks on a hunt that takes her across continents and into her own past. What clues can Frances find in her own history, and who is the mysterious Mazarine? Following the narrative thread left by her daughter, she travels through cities touched by terrorism and surveillance, where ways of relating are subtly changed, and a startling new fiction seems to be constructing itself.

There is a moment mid-way through the book when the text specifically addresses this issue of a new kind of fiction. Frances, the central character, who has a kind of face blindness affecting her ability to recognise faces, is an author. She's had some short stories published, and she's toying with ideas for her first novel:

Absurd that I'd told her [Angela Lang, a journalist] about my supposed novel, a project I couldn't even begin until I'd found Maya. A woman who couldn't read women: how could you hang a plot on that? A woman wanting answers to her strange, isolating illiteracy, searching for answers to a lost mother while at the same time seeking — in a sense, seeking blind — her beloved daughter, who was missing in the ether, the futureworld. Could you construct a narrative out of blank spaces, out of disconnection? (p.172)

If Grimshaw's intent was to explore these kinds of limits on fiction, then I would say that she has succeeded. But the novel does more than that, it touches on some significant issues, not least the impact that surveillance has had on ordinary people. When Maya goes missing and Frances makes contact with the mother of Joe, (the boyfriend travelling with Maya), Mazarine cautions against asking the police for help. It's not just that an email that doesn't seem quite right in tone isn't likely to be taken seriously because police would say that in a digital world the missing person had been in contact. It's also that while Mazarine's son Joe is an atheist, her other son Mikail is Muslim like his father Emin (who's from Chechnya, though living in Paris). Mikail is 'political' and has been living in Molenbeek, a part of Brussels which has a reputation for being a hotbed of terrorist activity. Mazarine understands why he's angry:

'In my opinion it's quite rational for Mikail to be political and angry. I'm occasionally quite political and angry myself. But I don't get put on lists, stopped at airports*, hassled in the street. According to my ex-husband, Mikail was angry about the way he'd been treated by authorities since he moved to Brussels, there were some incidents where he was stopped by police, and then since the terror attacks in Paris it was getting worse, a sort of vicious cycle, distrust and resentment on all sides. Mikail isn't easy-going like Joe, he broods, he gets upset. I'm just saying, don't go to the police yet; let's think about it first.' (p.76)

*Entirely by coincidence, I've just started reading Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie, and her first chapter features a Muslim woman who misses her flight because of a lengthy airport interrogation.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/04/20/mazarine-by-charlotte-grimshaw/ ( )