Book of the Week: Catherine Chidgey's monsters

Newsroom

07-05-2025

What comes after the Holocaust? Where do you go? That was the dilemma Catherine Chidgey faced after Remote Sympathy, the second of her deep, thoroughly researched novels set in Nazi Germany. In a situation reminiscent of The Zone of Interest – the excellent Jonathan Glazer film, not the less-than-excellent Martin Amis novel – Chidgey placed the apex of European civilisation right next to an extermination camp and asked how these worlds could co-exist. How do we go on living when we know what is happening over the wall? There were other related moral questions in there too, to do with the ethics of medical experiments. There were medical miracles and there were medical nightmares.
So, what do you do after taking on humanity's darkest material? And not once, but twice (the other novel was The Wish Child). One superficial answer is that you go commercial. Chidgey's next two novels, The Axeman's Carnival and Pet, seemed more straight-forward, more popular, as though we were getting a necessary break from the hard stuff. They were set in New Zealand, in the 1980s and the present day, not Germany in the 1930s and 40s. The style seemed easier too. Rather than telling a story through a multiplicity of assembled sources, such as fictional diary entries, letters, interviews and so on, the narratives became more conventional. Both books moved rapidly to their conclusions, and Chidgey showed she had discovered the art of suspense. There was even humour, which was previously verboten. But it would be foolish to think of those two books as strictly entertainment: as in the German novels, both stories were also about families with missing pieces, and the problems that come when you try to plug the gaps.
And now, two years after Pet, we get The Book of Guilt. This arrives with even greater levels of hype and commercial hope than the last two. There has been talk of a bidding war for the UK rights and big marketing spends. All of which is good news for Chidgey and her publishers, and thoroughly deserved, but the bit that really interests us is what this novel is doing, and where it is going. The unexpected answer is that the novel loops back around and does both the old Chidgey thing and the new Chidgey thing in ways that are quite fascinating.
Firstly, it turns out Chidgey can and indeed has written a third Holocaust novel, albeit less directly than before. The Book of Guilt is set in Britain in an alternate 1979. In this version of history, the attempted assassination of Hitler in November 1943 was successful rather than thwarted, which quickly led to a peace treaty between Britain and Germany and the sharing of medical research gleaned during World War II. What kind of research? Let's just say Josef Mengele's name comes up. After the war, the British government started the Sycamore Scheme, a breeding programme for medical experimentation on children that was inspired by some of that shared research, although the exact origins of the blonde, identical triplets Lawrence, William and Vincent only become clear to us later in the novel. The three boys are impressive creations indeed. While visually identical, they have personalities that are distinct and clearly drawn.
But now the Sycamore Scheme is being wound up. Lawrence, William and Vincent are the last residents of the Captain Scott dormitory, 'a grand old house in the heart of the New Forest', where they are monitored in shifts by three caring women known only as Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night (is that a reference to one of Kurt Vonnegut's Nazi books?). The mothers feed the boys and keep them medicated. They record the boys' dreams in The Book of Dreams. They record the boys' transgressions in The Book of Guilt. A third book, The Book of Knowledge, is an out-of-date set of encyclopedias. The boys are otherwise sheltered from the world, including from a suspicious public, and when literature appears, it has the potential to be dangerously liberating or disruptive.
History's what-ifs are a popular game and Nazis are typically involved. Those scenarios tell us that if Germany had won World War II, subsequent history would be utterly different and the present would be unrecognisable. But it turns out that if World War II had ended in a draw, very little would have really changed. Lord Mountbatten is still assassinated in this version of Britain in 1979. There is an unnamed prime minister who is probably Margaret Thatcher. A Minister of Loneliness sounds like an Orwellian joke until you remember that such a position really was established in 2018. In all sorts of other ways, this is still recognisably the Britain of the 1970s. It is a Britain of crap television, crap food and crap decor. A miserable Britain of coastal towns they forgot to close down.
The crapness of 70s Britain disguised something more sinister, both in real history and in this version of it. Some of the decade's kitsch might be laid on just a bit too thick in places – there are Richard Clayderman records on the stereo, the Two Ronnies and Bruce Forsyth on television, bowls of wax fruit and plastic covers on the furniture – but it also sets up one of Chidgey's simultaneously macabre and tragic jokes. One of the novel's characters is a devoted viewer of a popular TV show that offers hope to children by making their wishes come true, and she turns to it at a crucial moment as a possible solution to a life-or-death situation.
That show is Jim'll Fix It, which is more likely to ring a bell with British readers than New Zealand ones. It was hosted by Jimmy Savile, a beloved broadcaster, national treasure and incorrigible paedophile protected for decades by the establishment. He abused children in care homes and hostels that are not a million miles away from the Captain Scott house in The Book of Guilt. As a monster who wore a disguise, Savile was a symbol of the era's danger and depravity and the ugly side of light entertainment. In an excoriating essay in the London Review of Books, writer Andrew O'Hagan described the light entertainment division at the BBC during the Savile years as 'a big, double-entendre-filled department, of interest to brilliant deviants'. Elsewhere in The Book of Guilt there is a child-killer closely modelled on real-life Moors murderer Ian Brady, another deviant from the same era.
The suggestion is that we don't have to invent very much if we want to imagine 60s and 70s Britain as a culture that was horrifically unsafe for children, and therefore susceptible to the darker version Chidgey imagines. One of the disturbing elements for New Zealand readers of a certain age is that so much of this culture made its way unfiltered onto our television screens too, although from memory we never got Jim'll Fix It. There is a blend of nostalgia and creepiness as that world reappears for us, and perhaps implicates us. But it was also a last gasp. It seems telling that by the time we reached the early 1980s of Pet, the touchstones were American, brighter and less seedy. Think The Love Boat, Debbie Harry, and Rebecca De Mornay in Risky Business.
If Chidgey has looped back to an earlier subject, she has also returned to the multiple perspectives of her earlier novels after the single narrators of The Axeman's Carnival and Pet. There are three of them this time: two children and one adult. The latter is the least vital as this is essentially a novel about children and their dawning knowledge, their self-awareness, their understanding that the world is a much darker and more complicated place than they thought. Children test their power. Like Pet, it is a story about adolescence, told in hindsight from a rueful distance. Chidgey is good at writing from within the naive fastidiousness of intelligent children who have been turned into introverts by isolation and illness, or family circumstances. You might even say her Tama, the smart-aleck magpie of The Axeman's Carnival, was another of those too-curious, too-intelligent children.
Just as The Book of Guilt gives us a Britain of dead children and mother-in-law jokes on television, it also gives us a Britain of sand castles, sunshine and pony rides. The boys dream of Margate, a real but also imaginary seaside resort. When the kids graduate from the experimental scheme, they are told the Big House at Margate is their reward. The novel's cover and marketing draws on 1950s promotional material for the real Margate. In this post-war vision of health and leisure, a boy and his mother frolic on the sand. The sky is blue and the sand is soft and golden. Of course imagery such as this can easily be given an ironic or darker twist, and it is not too much of a stretch to say it resembles Nazi propaganda scenes of ideal Aryan families enjoying the great outdoors.
After the real World War II, a number of prominent Nazis were tried and sentenced for their crimes. The way Mengele is talked about in The Book of Guilt suggests that the Nazis would have avoided such an outcome if the war had ended in a draw. That means questions of where evil came from and how it is transmitted from one generation to the next, along with related questions about guilt and how long it endures, would not have been dwelt on as they really were in post-war Germany. Explaining this might have required more backstory or world building than Chidgey was willing to provide, and while more background might have deepened the experience of the book, it would also have slowed down the plot. Yet even as the story moves through a series of too-rushed expositions towards an impressively melancholy and thoughtful end, it becomes clear that the moral questions posed in earlier novels still preoccupy Chidgey.
Of course those questions never go away. How do we live with the knowledge of institutional cruelty done in our name and for the greater good? Should we try to forget traumatic history or confront it? Are we complicit if we turn away? How much of history is our fault? To steal an image from Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, what do we do about the screams that are coming from the other side of the wall? This is a Holocaust-inflected novel, only with a jolly seaside-postcard cover and a lighter touch.
The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) is available in bookstores. Philip Matthews' review concludes ReadingRoom week-long coverage of the book and its author. Monday: Chapter 1 of the new novel. Tuesday: her cohort enrolled in Bill Manhire's writing class in 1995 remember Chidgey as destined for greatness. Wednesday: Steve Braunias interview the author on the craft of fiction.