The Black Monk
by Charlotte Grimshaw

Names always matter. The narrator in Charlotte Grimshaw’s new and sometimes perplexing novel, The Black Monk, is named Alice Lidell – very close to Alice Liddell, the girl who inspired Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. If names matter, this means we should expect trickery and unreality, characters who are doubles and characters who are imagined. Only with a black monk instead of a white rabbit.

The black monk originated in a Chekhov story in which a ghostly monk appears to a man as a symptom of his growing madness. Grimshaw has used the idea, even the title, before. Her 2019 short story ‘The Black Monk’ set the scene for her explosive 2021 memoir The Mirror Book, which famously depicted the Stead family as a kind of emotional dictatorship run by her parents, writer C.K. (Karl) Stead and his wife Kay, for the benefit of Stead’s literary legend. Other perspectives on the family were forbidden. By airing her own narrative, Grimshaw said she was written off as both chaotic and crazy. She was the family dissident, exiled for speaking the truth. In the ‘Black Monk’ story she wrote that ‘if I stopped describing what I perceived to be real, I would no longer be the black sheep’.

The Mirror Book arguably made a greater impact than any of her novels and award-winning story collections, not least because it was so topical. The relationship between Stead and Grimshaw could be read as an analogy of the relationship between Donald Trump and his critics, or between the royal family and Meghan Markle. You could now add the Beckhams and their rogue son, Brooklyn. This is not to be glib: the Beckham story is also about a questioning of the official family narrative by someone who has woken up to reality, only told with less literary finesse.

Now, five years later, here is Grimshaw’s next book. There have been two important losses in the Stead family since: Kay died in 2023 and Grimshaw’s brother, Oliver Stead, died in 2024. They are both as central to The Black Monk as Karl Stead was to The Mirror Book, although they are more obviously fictionalised. Alice’s brother is named Cedric – Ceddy –and her mother is Rula, aptly a homophone for ruler. ‘There was something meta in all this,’ Alice says at one point in the story. That is the understatement of the year.

There are flashbacks to an Auckland childhood in which poor Cedric was violently bullied. He becomes an addict and an alcoholic who is ruining his life, although Rula insists everything is fine. As in The Mirror Book, families are divided between those who confront a problem and those who continue living inside a consoling fiction. Again there is ‘the inability to acknowledge they were human, to show care, to provide emotional support. The epic family capacity for denial.’

It is Cedric who first sees the black monk. When Alice sees it, she recognises a metaphysical dimension, a terrifying nihilism:

Alice began to think of life as a colourful mesh or screen that hid the blackness of the universe beyond. In her mind, the black figure was a visitor whose appearance reminded you that life was beautiful and bright, but insubstantial. He was a warning, a sign, a connection to the dark backing of the mirror.

Go ask Alice what the black monk said. She encounters him in a Wellington cemetery, and again in Auckland on the night of a tragedy that closely resembles a real one Grimshaw related so devastatingly in The Mirror Book. There are other ways in which Alice’s story mirrors that of Grimshaw as a teenager and young adult wanting order. Order is what domineering, dictatorial men offer: the Trumps, the Putins, the Orbans. These are the strongmen who make sense of chaos. But order is also what she is rebelling against. While there is no father in this book, there is a stepfather who is a retired, well-connected politician, another familiar establishment figure.

As a writer of children’s books, Alice wonders about the links between creativity and madness, the shaping of patterns, the meaning of symbols. She thinks about Jung’s idea of the shadow. What has she invented or imagined in her own life story? There are some shattering experiences and strange encounters. A German documentary maker named Javine makes an appearance but she proves hard to pin down. Her presence lets Grimshaw bring the Nazis and Baader Meinhof into it, just to mark the picture of generational guilt even darker.

The character of Ceddy is more solid, more real. Alice’s feelings towards him are tender and sympathetic expressions of real love:

Ceddy was excruciatingly sensitive, as if he’d been born lacking an outer layer of skin. He had wary, apprehensive eyes. Alice could see why he wouldn’t give up drugs and drinking, leaving himself raw. Without that barrier, he would feel as if someone were attacking him with a blow torch.

And again, later in the novel:

Alice thought of Ceddy aged twelve, setting off for school. His thin shoulders, bowed under the weight of the big school pack. His shyness, his enthusiasm. When he started at high school, he was excited, full of hope that it would go well, that he would keep on learning in the way he loved. That he could share his obsessive interests, his science projects. That he would make friends.

 

In his recent wild calls from Wellington, when the city was in lockdown because of the pandemic and he was working from home, he told her, ‘I’m lonely. I’m so lonely.’ He said, ‘No one touches me.’

The novel is haunted and not just by these memories and the figure of the black monk, whatever or whoever he is or represents, but by The Mirror Book. Grimshaw has some fun with the expectations of readers who come looking for gossip. There is a distinguished elder poet named JG Stein who calls himself ‘Romulus or Remus, some name like that’ (Karl Stead uses Catullus as a persona). The cover image of a woman whose face is mostly obscured is by the same artist, Henrietta Harris, used by Stead on his 2016 book The Name on the Door is Not Mine. That time, a man’s face was obscured. As the Jung-quoting Alice says, there are coincidences and there are synchronicities. When I looked back on my review of that Stead book, I saw that he also had a character named Javine. Is that meaningful? Who knows? This stuff makes you paranoid.

The Black Monk is more introverted and insular than the expansive visions of Auckland that made the likes of Grimshaw’s story collections Opportunity and Singularity so fresh and exciting. This is a book soaked in therapeutic language, the language of damage and shame, the language of recovery. Grimshaw is careful with diagnostic labels. Alice is not just paranoid, she is hyper-vigilant.

She had been reading about personality disorders, narcissism, gaslighting. Also, trauma, therapy, psychopaths, borderline-personality disorder, dissociative-identity disorder. She’d got fascinated by material about dysfunctional families.

It is a hall of mirrors, or even a hall of mirror books. Alice goes down rabbit holes. It feels utterly contemporary. The mazes Grimshaw creates for us to get lost in are like our experiences of the internet and social media in the third decade of the 21st century. There is the sense of stories without beginnings and endings, of time distorting, of invented people appearing as real and false stories impersonating facts, all the weird slippage between truth and fiction. What is the internet but a tool to make us all paranoid? There is an apocalyptic feeling, a sense of catastrophe and unravelling. Can your experiences and memories even be trusted? Do the people you are communicating with really exist? The black monk is flexible enough to become a symbol of all of this and more:

If these seemed like End Times, the black monk would have no fear. He was time, memory, violence, war; he was the last century bleeding into the next; he was the death of the novel; he was Alice’s past and the future of her young readers. You could look through him and see what lay beyond the bright mesh of the world …

Perhaps you could call The Black Monk an exercise in literary doom-scrolling. The book is psychologically unsparing, both a rant and a confession. There is a moment of white-hot rage about the men Alice encountered as a teenager – ‘you bullies, you fucking misogynists, how could you have treated your children in the shallow, cavalier way you did, merely because they were girls? Was it really just “the time”?’

In passages like those, and in the heartbreaking memories of Ceddy and the fraught conversations with Rula, you sense the writer breaking through the mesh of fiction and revealing something raw and true about herself. Grimshaw’s long and complex project, to create a series of social novels that mirror contemporary New Zealand life, has reached a kind of event horizon with The Black Monk. Will her readers follow her into the black hole and come out the other side? Some will resist. It gets dark in there. But you can see that something urgent and important has been processed. It is a disordered book for a disordered time.