Review: Polaroid Nights

Inner-city Auckland, mid-90s. Late nights, opaque tights, a serial rapist breaking into houses. Betty Moonshadow Asphalt is a hungover murder suspect hopelessly behind on her rent, but she’s lining up another round of shots. With a heroine both self-destructive and indestructible, Polaroid Nights is a novel to down in one go and get a little tipsy on.

Betty inhabits a constant vicious hangover, clutching porcelain at regular intervals. A high-end restaurant waitress, she’s a battler in a way only those who’ve experienced self-inflicted nausea in a food service job can appreciate. Froth happens, and bile, and if that doesn’t trigger a sympathetic bilious attack in the reader, the 90s drinks that caused her suffering will do it.

You remember – the ubiquitous fruity, chocolatey, curdled and ill-advisedly aflame shots of the 90s that took seconds to drink and years off your life, or at least hours off your evening as you cradled the bowl. Baileys and Vodka, Quick F*cks, and Snot Shots which, we regret to advise, is a Bloody Mary with an oyster. A bonus for those who enjoyed Auckland’s nightlife in the 90s will be spotting clubs and restaurants in disguise, as well as some that are too iconic for camouflage.

Polaroid Nights is a perfect title. Although actual polaroid photos are involved at one point, it’s their blurriness that represents Betty’s life. Constantly drowning the pain of a lost love affair in booze, she doesn’t realise she’s ceased medicating that loss and is now just trying to smother the daily after-effects. Like a polaroid, her memory is shadowy around the edges, slow to develop and inclined to be shaky. As often as not the pictures fail to emerge, leaving only blackness. Then she comes literally face-to-face with both her past and a brutal, confusing and somehow personal murder. She needs to think – and she needs a drink.

Polaroid Nights is hyperreal in a very 90s way. Blue Velvet and Pulp Fiction are both mentioned. There is a touch of the chaotic speed of Tarantino, the episodic shifts and sudden violence, as well as Lynchian stylishness in the dark clubs, sinister characters and unsettlingly normal conversations about rent. Some things will not be explained - and you’ll have to be okay with that. The book dances capriciously around your suspension of disbelief: why not be called Betty Moonshadow Asphalt, why should there be more than one taxi driver in town, aren’t arsons and nervous breakdowns and international crime rings just as likely as a free drink from a hot bartender? It’s the 90s!

And yet the shock-opera plotline is based in reality. Betty is a shortened form of Elizabeth, as of course is Lizzie, so autobiographical suspicions are aroused. Harwood’s own flat was burgled by the notorious serial rapist Malcolm Rewa in 1995, which is the kind of thing that would play on anyone’s mind – just how badly could things have gone, what monsters are out there and what if they actually had it in for you personally?

That creeping horror begins to pervade the novel to great effect but unexpectedly – triumphantly - Betty isn’t going to sit around and be afraid. Erratic, drunk, impulsive and a little fuzzy on whether she might have committed the murder herself she’s perhaps the least qualified of mystery-novel detectives, but that won’t stop her investigating. What ensues could be described as madcap, if madcap involved a lot of tequila. Polaroid Nights is a dizzying ride in a scary taxi through the backstreets of 90s Ponsonby, so pour another Kir Royale and get in.

Reviewed by Ruth Spencer