The Swing Around by Barbara Anderson

Marianne Brace enjoys some foreign affairs

In The Swing Around, characters slap up against what Borges calls "the problem of goodness". Can you hate an altruistic person? Is it fair to feel annoyed with someone whose genuine kindness makes her indiscreet?

Acute social observation is what we have come to expect from this New Zealand writer who understands the compulsive emotions which motor our lives. We also expect Anderson's wry humour, and the sass and spring of her prose. In her books, characters fall achingly in love, have great sex, get stoned, cheat on their partners. They exclaim "Hell's fangs" or call each other "fuckwit". That Anderson is in her mid-seventies makes her work all the more remarkable. There's a freshness about her vision, and no sense of an author looking back.

In this new comic novel, the action is set in the Seventies. Pol Pot has been toppled. It's the age of terrorism: Baader Meinhof and Black September – at Munich – have made their mark. Meanwhile, Hamish Carew, former dairy farmer and New Zealand's minister of cultural links and trade, is on a friendly visit to Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur.

With him are his wife Molly (friend to all animals, especially ugly ones), Freddy Manders (made bitter by an estranged wife) and the vertiginously tall Violet Redpath. As the party sightsees and speechifies, lurking in the background is Lightning Storm, a terrorist organisation with a taste for high ransoms.

There are also private anxieties. Molly worries about her selfish, shopping-mad daughter, while Freddy must avoid his gorgeous ex-wife – also in Kuala Lumpur – while trying to win the lovely Violet with her multidirectional hair.

In Anderson's hands, the story skips along. Little escapes her observation. A sombre army band welcomes the ministerial guests with "the lilting strains of 'Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head'". A married couple share a moment of intimacy discussing their grown-up child, "snuffling and hooting in unison, enjoying the guilty pleasure of parental disloyalty". She has the ability to zoom in microscopically. A woman's smile is "sweet, welcoming, and slightly moist". While she teases out her main characters with snappy dialogue, she gives us minor ones with a few masterly details. Yet she is rarely unkind. Violet wears a "maidenly clanger of a dress". For Freddy, "She looked, he thought, tenderly, like a cross between a Jane Austen heroine and a guardsman in drag". The "tenderly" speaks volumes.

After Lightning Storm strikes, the novel comes to a rapid, not entirely convincing close. It doesn't have the scope of a work like Anderson's award-winning Portrait of the Artist's Wife. But, Hell's fangs, there's still plenty to enjoy.