An exhilarating sci-fi-ish novel takes K Rd back to the future
In the spirit of Christopher Nolan’s movies Memento and Tenet, Auckland writer Angelique Kasmara’s science fiction debut novel, Isobar Precinct, jettisons her protagonist (Lestari Aris) backwards and forwards in time, as mystery begets mystery. By the end of the novel, a crucial question is answered, but reality has suffered so many shakes of the kaleidoscope, it’s impossible to know for sure whether the final pages are the beginning of the end, or end of the end, or the end of the beginning, or something in between. The discombobulation is delicious, befitting of an action-packed speculative fiction romp.
Lestari is in her late twenties. She’s a tattooist, operating out of a studio in Auckland’s Karangahape Road with her business partner Frank. She’s up against it – burglars keep breaking into the business, waif Jasper has attached himself to her and is living under the studio stairs, and she’s nursing a love interest that’s going nowhere with a married cop, Tom. There’s no point in turning to her family for support – her ex-hippy father disappeared for good when she was at high school, and her mother is living a lost, self-medicated life in West Auckland.
The opening pages reveal the catalyst for Lestari’s quest. She, Frank and Jasper are installing a sculpture in Symonds Street Cemetery, when they witness a man stabbing another to death. Frank records the whole event on his phone. When the trio look at the actual scene again, just seconds later, there’s no one there. No blood, no bodies. Yet, the video on the phone remains. A few pages on, she returns to the scene alone. There, she finds a jacket in a nearby tree. What she discovers in it plunges her into a world of experimental drug-taking, bombings, whodunnits, and who’s who (literally – characters take on different identities as they leapfrog from era to era). As she falls deeper into the mystery, she risks serious mental harm in trying to undo the outcomes of her previous trips into the past.
Kasmara’s descriptions of Auckland’s inner city are spectacular. "I’m waiting at the intersection from Grafton Bridge to Karangahape Road... there’s a fairy princess in a cloud of pink upchucking into a bin next to me. Karangahape Road’s just shutting its eyes now. Drag queens, drunks, art students are all stumbling home... only a handful caught by the red-streaked sunrise, which licks us awake again for another burst at immortality." Fine writing in itself, but she’s equally adept at the fantasy action scenes. "And my heart hits my ribs. It’s the entire room which has left. I’m panicking now, flailing in this vast volume of nothing... Balls of swirling rainbows against deep dark heavens are suspended before me. What I see now stops my breath. Trapped within each ball of light is a transparent vision of myself, bodies breaking apart, reforming."
That any writer can write both so vividly, so seamlessly, is remarkable. That Kasmara is a first-time novelist makes it more so.
The overall rhythm of the novel reflects this dexterity. It opens firmly in the land of crime thriller, albeit with strong hints that science fiction is waiting impatiently in the wings, ready to maul the narrative. Kasmara cleverly tethers the story – and her readers – to the person she cultivates most strongly as an empathetic character, Lestari. She draws us back to Karangahape Road, to Henderson, to Arch Hill often enough to remind ourselves how much we care about her – the her we met on page one, in present day 2015. I found myself grateful for these realistic interludes; grateful too that Kasamara resisted the temptation to place too many pieces of the science fiction puzzle in place in the realistic scenes. Rather, she lets realism and science fiction feed off each other, pushing the action forward at a frenetic pace until the very end.
There are just a couple of moments where the tethering frayed for me; where the power of the speculative form overwhelmed the internal logic of realism and overstretched my willingness to ride the fantasy/crime thriller hybrid. That Lestari realises that a man she’s been spending a lot of time with is someone very close to her only when he takes his glasses off is one of those moments.
Another is Tom’s behaviour around Lestari – he knows a piece of information about her but fails to mention this to her until well into the story. Tom is not a time traveller – he’s your standard policeman, trying to make sense of the goings-on in his hood in a decidedly methodical, rational way. That he has never raised this impossibility with Lestari is a slip in his characterisation.
But these are minor moments in an otherwise dazzling display of temporal acrobatics. These are exhausting, exhilarating adventures. The brain aches after such a rigorous workout. Speculative fiction fans should be excited about the arrival of Angelique Kasmara on New Zealand’s writing scene.
Isobar Precinct by Angelique Kasmara (The Cuba Press, $37) is available in bookstores nationwide.
