Books
A nose for a story
by Charlotte Grimshaw
Mark Chamberlain, an Auckland burglar, plays a game of pool with a cocky entrepreneur who boasts of building leaky houses and selling them to unsuspecting buyers. Absorbing the self-justifying spiel, Mark is merely biding his time. Soon he will be standing outside the developer’s apartment, preparing to rob him blind. So begins Chad Taylor’s Departure Lounge, a tale of burglary, loss and urban dislocation, in which a chance discovery leads Mark to memories of his childhood in the suburbs around North Head, and the disappearance of a local girl, Caroline May.
Mark is a creature of the night: solipsistic, hardboiled. He has his memories. He has scars. “You’ve had no real therapy after your loss: no acknowledgement of grief,” he’s told at one point. He was scared to sleep after Caroline May disappeared.
He spends his time looking at traces of other people’s lives. He lives by avoiding people. Taylor makes much of his sense of smell – some might say too much. He burgles rooms smelling of “patchouli”, “air freshener and cigarettes”, “old flowers”. He noses his way through “hops and sweat and cleaning fluid”, “dried flowers and milk”, “beans and burned oil”, “perfume”, “woollen blankets and paper”, “oil and dirt”, “smoke”, “flowers that had been standing too long in a vase”, “wet coats and sweat”, “cigarettes and vinyl”, “rotting leather”, “fresh grass”. A deodorant smells “faintly like her”. A urinal smells of “those brickettes that are meant to disguise the smell but only make it worse”. At an indoor pool there is a stink of “chlorine and sweat”, at an outdoor one “chlorine and wet grass”. Some of this is desultory and redundant – unsurprisingly, a pool smells like chlorine, a urinal smells like a urinal – and some of it is odd: “The apple on the desk smelled like a raincoat”, “the wet odour of barbecue was blowing”, “the morning dew smelled of asphalt and salt”. Mark’s trite observations stand in for subtler detail. Served a drink by his friend, Lennox, he flatly notes, “The rum and coke tasted sticky” – and tells us very little about Lennox.
Taylor knows how to maintain the tension. The action never flags. There is a police investigation, a fence, a drunken cop. Mysterious women cross Mark’s path. He engages in terse dialogue, spying, pursuit. He cases a joint. He sees a woman in a “beige pants suit”. One wonders what that looked like, having never encountered one outside of an American novel. There is safe-cracking, and a cathartic denouement when tough people shake, and dissolve in tears.
Always there is the mystery of Caroline May. Taylor presents her in graceful flashback, “turning her back to them all”. Around the time she disappeared, Flight 901 crashed into Mt Erebus. Taylor blends the national tragedy, the departure of so many travellers on their flight to white-out, to nothingness, with the local loss of his fictional Caroline. Rumours have grown up: passports were not required for the flight; bodies were unidentified. When people disappear, the worst thing is not knowing. Could Caroline have found her way on to the flight?
It’s an engaging and original idea, to use the Erebus flight as an imaginative vehicle for the characters’ yearnings – although in this plot-driven novel the idea is shaped to serve the action and suffers somewhat from being literally and mechanically played out.
Taylor spins out the story with admir-able restraint, keeping his revelations back. His invention of the layout of an exhibition of Erebus photos is ingenious. His descriptions of Antarctica are economical and striking. And it’s no small skill to keep the reader going with a plot that becomes so thoroughly implausible.
DEPARTURE LOUNGE, by Chad Taylor (Jonathan Cape, $34.99)
