Lit by Anna Woods, pictured, is an acutely observed relationship drama. Photos / Supplied
Anna Woods’ debut novel is a dark literary thriller about love, money laundering and architecture. Set in Auckland, it centres around narrator Virginia (Gin) Ishak and her two closest colleagues, Clary and Billy. The three met at university, where both Billy and Gin were obsessed with Clary from the beginning, drawn to her polished beauty. Clary is now Gin’s partner in both life and business. Clary’s privileged background makes her an object of both adulation and frustration. “Like an exotic bird in a museum, she’d lived in glass her whole life,” Gin thinks. “I wanted to protect her. Keep her safe. But sometimes I wanted to smash the bell jar she lived in. Show her the meat and blood and shit of the world. The things people did to give her the pretty life she took for granted.”
At university, “jumpy and fearful” Gin never thought she fitted in with the rest of her cohort, even if she managed to “pass, not for white exactly, but for some ethnically ambiguous other”. But it is money – and class – that truly separates her from her new friends. “Billy sailed, Clary played golf. Their fathers were rich, white and cultured. Mine was not.” Clary’s family make a “yearly pilgrimage to Europe”. Billy is “heir to a lineage”. He “charmed most people, but I found him odious”, Gin tells us early in the novel. “You would too, if you knew what I’d been through.”
The three friends start LIT Architects: the letters represent their last names. “Clean, simple,” Gin thinks. “Combustible, too.” Billy disappears and Gin and Clary become lovers. When the story opens, their business is failing, Gin in deep debt and Clary increasingly aloof. The prodigal Billy reappears but overprotective Gin tries to hide this from Clary – another secret, along with her debts and deteriorating mental health – and starts to hallucinate, “convinced of a malign presence” in their lives.
Clary seems relentlessly cruel and unlikeable, and Gin’s obsessive loyalty to her can seem perplexing. But Woods still presents an acutely observed relationship drama between the two characters, their disagreements not vicious or loud, but portrayed as “polar expeditions; frozen tundras, cracking ice sheets …”
The Auckland that Woods’ characters populate feels real and familiar. From the “green hump of Albert Park” to the “mirrored-glass window displays, with velvet ropes and security guards at the door, a few metres from buskers, broke students and rough sleepers”, the details of place solidify the setting and ground the reader in the story. Woods also demonstrates a discerning eye for very specifically Auckland class distinctions in her subtly scathing descriptions of Clary’s rich North Shore family – the father’s business is “ephemeral”, the mother “often half-drunk” – on grand cru, of course.
Gin dismisses this world as ridiculous but still longs to be part of it. Studying architecture, she was “dizzied by the belief they knew who they were” when “I knew nothing of the world”. She has to disguise herself to fit in – at university, at work, at social events. Gin wonders if she is “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” although this suggests no strength or cunning to her, just “an eviscerated sack of skin, hanging bloodied from the wolf’s back”.
The story moves between the main timeline and flashbacks to before Billy’s disappearance, suggesting Gin’s panic and paranoia. Some scenes take on a nightmarish quality, Gin experiencing a “sudden disturbing sense he was coming for her … To tear it all down. Everything I’d worked for. Everything I’d built.” Limited to Gin’s point of view, the narrative grows increasingly claustrophobic, and we don’t know how much we can trust her. “Perhaps it didn’t happen how I’ve said,” she admits, although “it sure felt the way I’ve described”. Gin insists she was right, then concedes, “at least, I thought so then, having not yet understood all the ways I was wrong”.
Woods demonstrates her affinity for the genre by giving us enough sinister hints of what is to come without spoiling the powerful finale. LIT is a compelling literary thriller, an artful and stylish debut.
Lit, by Anna Woods (Echo Publishing, $37.99), is out now. A longer version of this review will appear on the Aotearoa NZ Review of Books website.