Chris Else
Books
Key witness
by John McCrystal
A murder mystery straight out of our collective conscience.
The mystery at the heart of Chris Else’s sixth novel, Gith, has elements in common with many of the real-life mysteries that so haunt the collective conscience of New Zealanders. Like Mona Blades, -Jennifer Baird and, most recently and relevantly, Birgit Brauer, Anneke Hesse is hitchhiking alone when she meets her fate. Like Olivia Hope and Ben Smart, she is seen with a man who was likely to have been her killer, but confusion reigns over his description and that of the vehicle he was driving. It all rings dismal bells of familiarity.
The difference in Else’s world, however, is that much of the confusion over these key identifying features arises from difficulties with the sole witness. She is Anna, the twenty-something niece and ward of small-town garage owner Ken McUrran. Anna is better known as Gith, which also happens to be the way she has pronounced the word “yes” since brain damage sustained in a car accident left her incapable of using language.
Gith was the last person besides the killer to see Hesse, and she got a good look at the white Mitsubishi van the hitchhiker got into on the forecourt of McUrran’s service station, its registration number and the scary-looking man driving it. But she is unable to communicate more than the barest fragments of this to Ken and the police investigation team.
Ken knows Gith’s intellect has survived the accident unscathed, and has no doubt about the accuracy of her recall. But other witnesses describe a white station wagon on the forecourt, and the police promptly lose interest in white vans and in Gith.
Ken can’t give it all away quite that easily, however, and he begins snooping on his own. If the dubious sexual practices and drug abuse he begins to uncover in and around the sleepy little town of Te Kohuna are anything to go by, he’s getting close to those responsible. Of course, being hot on the trail of murderous rapists, in literature as in life, is a risky place to be, ensuring a bumpy ride in prospect for the latter pages.
There’s no shortage of suspects, without straying outside the immediate vicinity. Police curiosity is fixed pretty early in the piece on a creepy little bloke with previous; for the rape and mutilation of a prostitute, no less. This particular degenerate’s moist brown eyes loosely fit Gith’s description. Or there’s local yokel Moss Vield, with his thousand-yard stare and poor social skills. Or there are the bogans from Ramp Rd, notably Wayne Wyett, who’s rumoured to be no stranger to the recreational use of pharmaceuticals.
As the plot thickens, Ken lets slip material information he’s previously withheld, and we can’t help wondering what else he’s concealing from us. Even poor old Gith looks a bit sinister and deranged from some angles.
Else is a thoughtful, precise writer, and Gith is a competent thriller. The flow of information from author to reader is cleverly managed, and a useful level of tension is created before the violent denouement arrives.
But no matter how tarnished the competence of the police has become of late, it’s hard to believe that even the sloppiest investigation could resist pointing Gith at a few identikit sketches. The central characters are nuanced, textured and pleasingly rounded out, but others – including the murderer and his associates – are disappointingly two-dimensional, with Else’s portrayal of that modern bogeyman, the rampaging P-addict, bordering on caricature.
Most crucially, while the novel promises at first to probe some raw spots on our national psyche – the way police investigations seem to pursue -particular theories to the exclusion of other possibilities, and, most disturbing of all, the way apparently ordinary members of ordinary communities can perform extraordinarily horrific crimes and then simply merge back into the mainstream – these mysteries remain, once all the demands of the genre are -satisfied, precisely that: intractable mysteries.
GITH, by Chris Else (Vintage, $27.99).
