Book of the year: Lioness

The thing is for you to buy Lioness by Emily Perkins right now, in time for the holiday break, that special time of year with its special qualities of New Zealandness, which provides the setting for the important opening chapters of setting for Lioness. The characters are likely a lot richer than you. Their holiday house in the Marlborough Sounds, as well as their other holiday house in Martinborough, is likely more expensive than your own house. What better kind of people to read about right now as New Zealand settles into a new era of right-wing government made up of and for landlords, business owners, and other representatives of the ruling class as examined so closely in the pages of Lioness?

I already named Lioness as the best novel of the year in ReadingRoom last week. The South Island of New Zealand from the Road by Robin Morrison was named best book of illustrated nonfiction. Commune by Olive Jones was named best book of general nonfiction. But the very best book of any kind – the most artful, the most able to give sheer pleasure – is Lioness.

The great enduring theme of the fiction of Emily Perkins has always been money. Charlotte Grimshaw, in her imagined lives of National Party operators in her great book Opportunity, got up close and personal to the idea of political power, but Perkins skips past the ideology to get up close and personal to the most important kind of power: wealth. Lioness is a novel about company shares, trust funds, charitable donations. Social historian Stevan Eldred-Grigg once wrote of New Zealand literature’s biggest wretch, the poet and blackmailer D’Arcy Cresswell, that when he walked “pound notes whispered in the background”. Money – masses of it, more than you can sensibly know what to do with – roars in the foreground of Lioness, which tells the story of a dynastic family threatened by a Serious Fraud Office investigation. Eric Watson will want to read this book.

I have been severely critical of the Ngaio Marsh crime awards in recent years for dragging in novels that only loosely have anything to do with crime, eg it awarded the fiction prize in 2020 to Auē  by Becky Manawatu. No way was that a crime novel. But I would accept that Lioness qualifies as a crime novel. It’s a novel of white collar crime, and the tension of it, the whodunnitness of it, has the same kind of fear as a murder mystery. Murder is loss of life. In Lioness, the fear is that the SFO will take away something even more deeply felt: the loss of livelihood.

It’s told  by Therese Thorne, who owns a homeware brand. “We’d pinned our hopes on a stainless-steel straw, a clip to hide the camera lens on a laptop or phone, and a giant eraser that bore the legend ‘cancelled’.” You can picture these inessentials, these luxury items, these bits and pieces of total fucking crap; it put me in mind of poking my snoot the other day into Tessuti with the idea of buying my daughter a scented candle for her bedroom, and being told by the smug sonofabitch behind the counter that the tiny candle I held up cost $155. “Ridiculous!”, I screeched. “No it isn’t!” the sonofabitch screeched back. He will want to read this book.

Therese is married to Trevor, 23 years older than her, with his silver hair and his Viagra and his plans to build a hotel on the waterfront. (The setting is Wellington, but Lioness only bothers with geography when the settings are in the Sounds, or Martinborough). They have sex on page one. There is a fair amount of sex in Lioness, including a kind of orgy, a free for all, a satori, held by Therese’s neighbour Claire, who fascinates and baffles Therese with her lifestyle choice of letting go of all her possessions – the only thing in her apartment is a stage, there is no furniture, the only place to sit is on the floor. She calls it “the zone”. A kind of cult is attracted to the zone, where people dance for hours in a trance of cannabis oil, and the erotic energy is so elevated that it does away with restraint and reason. Therese gets sucked into it and her kiss with Claire provides maybe the hottest sex in Lioness.

In her Reading Room review, Anna Knox wrote, “Perkins has set herself a challenge with her narrator. It’s hard to feel sympathy for the midlife crisis of a woman who owns multiple multimillion-dollar homes.” Yeah maybe, but although I would probably loathe Therese in real life, I absolutely loved her in the book because she’s so funny, which is to say Perkins is so funny. I read the book as a PDF on my phone, and decided to copy passages I found particularly hilarious; by the end, I had copied 24 passages. 24! That’s a lot of LOLS. Therese goes on rants, and they read like stand-up comedy monologues.

On women: “Some women retrain, or take up volunteering, or fall in love with their best friend, or finally make partner or are squeezed out of the research lab they founded or become yoga instructors or raise surprise grandchildren or learn another language or dive into genealogy or run for local office or quit booze or drink too much or make other people’s problems their business or give up altogether on other people’s problems or cry themselves to sleep or can’t sleep or divorce or remortgage or develop a cackle or get shingles or go into real estate or animal shelters or floristry or online activism or have to look for a new place when the landlord raises the rent, or get fired or roboted out of a job or have menopausal psychosis or family addiction crises or parents with dementia or home subsidence or violent kids or terminal illness.”

On men: “I felt a heave of rage towards older men. The grandfather clock in the atrium chimed the first stroke of the hour as the man neared. I hated them at the gym, with their aftershave. I hated them on bush walks, panting. He wore a shirt and jumper over suit trousers and from the way he carried himself, had once been important. The clock struck again. I pressed back against the wall to give him passing space. I hated them in restaurants, with their voices, and in movie queues, talking, coats over their arms, and I hated them in cars and grocery shops, and I hated the ones who had been beautiful and were now floury in band T-shirts and the ones that stood in waiting areas and loudly discussed roads and travel routes and weather, confident in their right to be boring.”

And on the thing that matters most, on money: “You know how it is, you work so you have the money but you look tired from working so you spend the money on not looking tired so you can keep doing well at work so you can make the money. Basically, capitalism came on my face.”

I pulled another PDF tactic: I did a word search for “air”. Lioness is obsessed with air, the way it feels (“soft and damp”, “cool and musty”), and the way it takes on shape between bodies: “She exuded a kind of clarity, as though the air around her showed things in higher definition.” And: “The air sealed around us, as if we lived inside a snow globe, and a twitch ran through me, some huge finger giving our bubble a tap.” Also, on her way to the erogenous zones of Claire’s dance parties: “I felt myself unzip the air and walk through.”  Anyway, the word “air” occurs 71 times. 71! That’s a lot of air.

The book has minor failings. The biggish reveal of the identity of Trevor’s son’s girlfriend is a bit of a fizzer. One chapter in the centre of the book goes on a stream of consciousness-ish detour and doesn’t make a lick of sense – treat it like an intermission, take a break and come back when it’s over.  And when will a novelist ever learn to successfully imitate journalese? Trevor’s SFO investigation is followed by the newspapers, and Lioness quotes headlines, stand-firsts, intros, never very credibly. It can’t be that hard! Novelists make the mistake of dumbing down; they ought to imagine sub-editors who in real life are driven to come up with nimble, artful, striking linguistic miniaturisms.

The bigger picture, though, is entirely in focus. Lioness has the exact feel of New Zealand life as lived by the wealthy, accumulating their total fucking crap and generally having a really good time. Therese tells us, “A mix of people usually came to our parties: rogue politicians from left and right, philanthropists, architects, civil engineers, property developers, maybe a visiting ambassador. Old satirists and their new wives, gallerists with favourite artists, any non-weird city councillors, Wine merchants. Antique dealers. Actors. My hairdresser. A student we sponsored to study jazz performance at Julliard, who might be persuaded to sing. An old school friend of Trevor’s I privately called Flat Tax because he could talk of nothing else.” Old satirists and their new wives! I really should get around to proposing.

It reads like Succession, it reads like satire, it reads like a chronicle of the lifestyles of the rich and sometimes sexy (Lioness only rarely gazes at character’s bodies but it’s heavily implied that Therese is hot). Always, it gnaws away at the bone of money. The book is obsessed with the want of money and the need of money; more so, it’s obsessed with the possible absence of money, its loss and disappearance. If Lioness is indeed a crime novel, then money is the beautiful and disturbing villain. It’s the book for summer, for the new governing order of Flat Tax people and their wives. They – and the rest of us – will want to read this novel, the book of the year.

Lioness by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury, $36.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.