Book review: The Snow Kimono, by Mark Henshaw

Mark Henshaw published his first novel, Out of the Line of Fire, 26 years ago. He has published since, writing detective novels as half of J.M.Calder (one published in 1996, another in 2007), but anticipating another fully-fledged, fully serious novel was a terribly long wait. As my father would have said: "26 years, you don't get that for murder."

Out of the Line of Fire was exceptional: disconcertingly smart, sharply alert, quite distinctive, often rather beautifully lyrical. The Snow Kimono is written, logically enough, in a similarly edgy, off-beat but not off-key manner. Henshaw decides to roll in together stories about a retired police inspector, and two Japanese, one a footless, former professor of law and the other a drinking, womanising writer.

All have something to teach, as well as something to learn, about how friends can betray each other, then about how lies and life can lie in wait for us. Henshaw begins in Paris, 1989 with an unwanted, uninvited and unwelcome visitor, who just turns up, in the way that much that happens to us tends to do. That interloper, the Japanese professor, knocks on the door of Inspector Jovert, a policeman not as wicked as Hugo's Inspector Javert but nonetheless dogged and tough-minded, with lots of secrets to hide.

Recently pensioned off, Jovert feels lost, only to lose his way entirely in a disabling accident, through a chance encounter, then down the memory hole into echoes of his service during the war in Algeria. Jovert's world might seem a little clogged by adjectives; here, stillness can appear "vitreous", sky "churlish" and light "cataracted". Those adornments help impart a slightly surreal, fantastical quality to the narrative.  Jovert remarks of a statue at the Bastille that it is "improbable, ludicrous perhaps, but magical nonetheless". Henshaw's writing is never ludicrous, but the other two adjectives do apply. Even if his plots are sometimes improbable, Henshaw's effects are consistently magical.

One idiosyncratic index of our Asia literacy may be that two Australian writers have this year published intimate, knowing accounts of Japanese, this one and Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Henshaw has perfected a particular technique for the scenes set in Japan, one we might call leisurely lyricism. Incidents unroll slowly, lives unravel in a still more mannered way, scenes are prepared by bouts of foreboding or premonitions on the part of the characters. Overlapping, interlocking memories gradually expose the drift in a story; the narrative is bound together as Henshaw's figures are bound to each other.

I would argue that the Algiers segment of this novel is more engrossing again.  Jovert struggles to clarify the maze of Algiers' alleys and basements, while trying at the same time to make sense of the moral maze into which he plunged in Algeria. In Japan, as in Algeria, Henshaw's approach is to probe and to prompt memories, then feelings, then often remorse and at least a gesture at repentance. His characters spend a good deal of time fretting about actual sins of commission in the past and potential  sins of omission in the future.

One of Henshaw's creations notes that: "Memory is a savage editor. It cuts time's throat."  That, however, is not quite the practice adopted in this novel. Here, memory stimulates, time becomes more fluid, the past and the present scrape against each other, and emotions (as well as, occasionally, the truth) are refined and distilled.