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Newsroom
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Newsroom
For the love of Chidgey
There is something obviously and explicitly special going on with the reading public's adoration of Catherine Chidgey. It has been going on for some time now, first elevated when she wrote her first bestseller The Wish Child (2016), confirmed when she wrote Remote Sympathy (2020), blown up when she wrote The Axeman's Carnival (2022), and now coalesced into a kind of near-worship with her latest novel, The Book of Guilt – the biggest-selling book in New Zealand right now of any kind and by any author ie local or international, with a signing queue at the recent Auckland Writers Festival going out the door and into the rain. She inspires a feverish quality in readers, more so even than Eleanor Catton, not merely because the Booker winner lives remotely in Britain (Chidgey is a citizen of the republic of Waikato). Catton's work is neither as intimate or felt as Chidgey's fiction. The hype is real. The latest example was in the responses from readers in the latest ReadingRoom giveaway contest. A free book is offered each week. Some of them are very popular contests and some of them generate very entertaining replies to whatever question is posed. Nothing compares to the responses in the contest to win The Book of Guilt (as well as Delirious, by Damien Wilkins). Readers were asked to say something interesting about either author. One or two chose to make comments about Wilkins ('Damien once stayed in my house in Queenstown, but I was away on a film job up north. He might've put a book I didn't read signed and left in the bookshelf in the guest's bedroom'). Everyone else had something to say about Chidgey – and they were not always complimentary, not all of them from fans. There was a strange frisson going on within the 100 or so replies. A selection follows. Buddy Mikaere Last year I visited the States on a tour to retrace the American Civil War. Back here in Aotearoa I am involved in a project that will see the establishment of a NZ Wars Centre – Te Putake O Te Riri. As the NZ Wars of the 1860s were happening at the same time that the civil war was raging in America – I wanted to see how they had depicted that struggle at various battlefields and museums. At the departure airport, my partner Fi gave me a copy of The Axeman's Carnival to read on the plane. I loved it, finishing it at my Chicago hotel the day after I arrived. I flew to Washington and after a few days wandering about, went south to Fredericksburg in Virginia. On the outskirts of Fredericksburg I stayed with some Facebook friends who lived in the woodlands that surround the city. Over dinner that night – I think it was during a conversation about woodpeckers – I told the lady of the house about Tama the magpie, the central 'character' in Axeman and gave her the book to read. At breakfast the next morning, my red-eyed hostess told me she had stayed up all night reading the book which she couldn't put down. She said that despite the cultural differences she was completely captured by the power of the narrative and the fiery finale of the book in particular. I should explain that the couple made their living from their on-line consultancy and – just like Tama – they needed to have a 'presence' to attract and hold their prospective customers. The woodland setting of their house, the impatient subdued hammering of the woodpeckers in the trees – all combined to enliven the Chidgey narrative and bring it to a charged emotional level for my lovely hostess. As a result of that book I now have two great friends for life, and they look forward to visiting with me in the Coromandel. I might even introduce them to our local magpies. Madeleine Setchell I read recently in the Listener that Catherine and her husband had a long struggle with infertility. She may have spoken about this before, but it was not something I was aware of until recently. The article stated, 'For 13 years, she couldn't write. She and husband Alan Bekhuis, a mechanical engineer and daguerreotypist, wanted more than anything to have a child. Those 13 awful, long years were subsumed with IVF attempts and the debilitating side effects of the drugs used in the treatments. 'Alice was born in 2015. She was carried by a surrogate, who is now part of their family. The couple donated sperm to another woman desperate to have a child. That child is also now part of their family. She says, of Alice, 'She is the joy of my life'.' I thought she was so very brave to talk about this, despite infertility being very common there are still many reasons people don't speak about it publicly, or even to their families. I know Catherine's words will provide comfort to readers struggling with their own infertility challenges, and I hope, in some small way, they will know they are not alone. Full disclaimer, I am the Chairperson of Fertility NZ, a small but mighty charity that walks alongside all New Zealanders facing infertility. So perhaps I am on the lookout for these things. But it did really strike me a few weeks ago how great it was she included this in her interview. I too have a much wanted, and much loved daughter named Alice. Veronica Harrod I've had two personal interactions with well known authors. Keri Hulme of The Bone People who wrote a letter back to me in response to the letter I sent her, and Catherine Chidgey who I communicated with on one of the many digital platforms that have made letter writing a dying art in its own right. Perhaps that was why things went pear shaped. I'd finished her book The Axeman's Carnival which, like all her books I've read, I enjoyed immensely. But after I finished reading it I wondered why all the publicity I'd seen rarely mentioned the violence against the main female character Marnie. Instead it was all about the magpie as if the violence against Marnie was something unpleasant to be ignored. A common story in this country unfortunately. Then I told her about the magpies I had known. About one who a former neighbour of mine gave the name Mr Wu. It used to visit a few houses in the vicinity for a feed and to make a nuisance of itself. The first time Mr Wu visited me the magpie stalked in the open front door squawking for a feed. After that when Mr Wu visited he would stalk around the computer desk, where I was sitting, chewing on wires with his beak, peering at me from the top of the desktop computer or falling asleep in my arms when tired and needing a nap. He would make himself comfortable in my arms, his beak would curl into his chest, his eyes would close and he would be out for the count until it was time to get busy again. I also told her about a magpie I had rescued from the side of the road as I was driving home from work one evening. It was flopping around with its wings outstretched so I pulled over and discovered it had almost had both its feet severed. I don't know what had caused the injury all I knew was the magpie would be vulnerable and in pain from the injury. So I grabbed a jumper from the front seat of my car, threw it over the magpie and bundled it in the car before turning around and driving to a local vet. A vet on duty took the magpie into another room. After a while he came out and said there wasn't much that could be done. I said I didn't own the magpie. I had found it on the side of the road flapping its wings and clearly distressed. He said it was unusual for the magpie to let me pick it up and transport in a moving vehicle. I agreed the best course of action was to put the magpie to sleep. Unfortunately the author found my story distressing – which it is in one way – but in another way the magpie was fortunate I responded to its distress. I was surprised by her reaction because The Axeman's Carnival is a book based on violence and a strong vein of violence runs through her novels often. I even said with some incredulity, 'But your book is about violence.' Perhaps though it's one thing to describe violence in a book but quite another to be in the thick of violence. Helen Nugteren I am definitely not a follower of fashion and hullabaloo does my head in. Give me Owen Marshall any day. I smile in recognition of his superb craftsmanship. Once the shouting about Catherine Chidgey has died down, I might get around to borrowing the new one from the mobile library in Arthur's Pass. Jan Pryor I love both authors for different reasons. Damien scares the bejesus out of me with his gentle terrifying depiction of ageing; I adore the Chidge because she recognised my genius and awarded my short story 1st prize in a competition a few years ago. Susan Gresson I waited in line at the book launch for Pet because I wanted to tell Catherine that after reading Remote Sympathy several times and contemplating the different perspectives I couldn't decide where my sympathy lay. The book places the reader in a position not to judge but to feel what it was like to live in a period where moral issues were not only dangerous but ambivalent. She replied, 'I couldn't make up my mind either.' It is this quality of her work that I love. she doesn't prescribe, she allows the reader to embrace the character's perspective. In a time where there are so many extreme and definite opinions, it is so refreshing to be treated like a competent reader to come to your own conclusion & struggle with the banality of evil. Patricia Fenton Back in the last millennium we were living in a charming little German village in the State of Hessen. My husband reckoned we might as well have had a flashing Kiwi sign above our apartment. Being in Central Europe, family, friends and acquaintances found their way to us, and they were always welcome. One day our daughter, Virginia, phoned and asked if her friend Cath, and Cath's mother, Pat, could come and stay with us. Cath was on a Goethe scholarship and her mother was visiting from New Zealand. 'You won't regret it,' Virginia said. 'They're good company, and Cath is destined for great things. She's going to be famous.' Our daughter was right – on all counts. The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) is available in bookstores nationwide.
The Guardian
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey review – this dystopia could have been extraordinary
In 2016 Catherine Chidgey published her fourth novel, The Wish Child, a child's-eye view of Nazi Germany. Since then the much-garlanded New Zealander has contrived to be not only conspicuously prolific but also intriguingly unpredictable. Though she returned to wartime Germany in her Women's prize-longlisted Holocaust novel, Remote Sympathy, her work has ranged from the coming-of-age psychological thriller Pet to The Beat of the Pendulum, a 'found' novel that drew on everything from conversations and social media posts to news bulletins and even satnav instructions to create a picture of one woman's life over a year. The Axeman's Carnival, published in the UK last year, was partly narrated by a magpie. Like The Wish Child it won the Acorn prize for fiction, making Chidgey the only writer to win New Zealand's most prestigious prize twice. The Book of Guilt appears to mark another departure. Chidgey describes her ninth novel as her 'first foray into dystopian fiction' and, while the book purports to be set in England in 1979 with a female prime minister newly ensconced in Downing Street, it is not the country we know. In Chidgey's alternate universe, the second world war ended not in 1945 with allied victory, but in 1943 when the assassination of Hitler by German conspirators led to a swiftly negotiated peace treaty. Subsequent collaboration across Europe has ensured that progress in biological and medical science, already significantly advanced, has accelerated, fuelled by shared research that includes the grotesque experiments carried out on prisoners in Nazi death camps. The shadow of those atrocities lingers over 13-year-old identical triplets Vincent, William and Lawrence, the last three remaining occupants of a secluded New Forest children's home, part of the government's Sycamore Scheme. Supervised by three 'Mothers', each working an eight-hour daily shift, the boys do their lessons and their exercises and take their medicine, in constant battle with a sickness which, though its symptoms vary from boy to boy and month to month, is referred to only as the Bug. They long to get well so that they will finally be granted the wish of every Sycamore child before them and be sent to the Big House in Margate, an earthly seaside paradise with sun-soaked golden sands and unlimited access to the Dreamland amusement park. But though the boys pore over the dog-eared Margate brochure, 'we never dreamt of trying to escape', an older, wiser Vincent confesses as the novel opens. 'Those were happy days, before I knew what I was.' Since then the Scheme has been abandoned, the Sycamore homes sold off. People do not like to talk about it, Vincent admits. Nobody wants to feel guilty. If all this sounds reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro's most famous novel Never Let Me Go, that is because, in many ways, it absolutely is. The similarities go far beyond the late 1970s institutional setting. Like Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, Ishiguro's trio of students at Hailsham, the Sycamore boys know they are different, special even, and yet their lives share Hailsham's whiff of wartime make-do-and-mend, where the lessons are rudimentary and everything is secondhand. Like the Hailsham students, the triplets are sheltered not only from the truth of their circumstances but also from any meaningful contact with or grasp of the world that fears and exploits them. Like them, they will only gradually and painfully come to understand their real purpose. Vincent's first-person narration addresses the reader directly, recalling Kathy's conversational style. And yet, for all the inevitable comparisons, it becomes clear as Chidgey's novel unfolds that it is by no means a clone of Ishiguro's. While both novels take as their starting point the grave dangers posed by unfettered scientific advancement, Never Let Me Go is, at its heart, a meditation on mortality, an exploration of humankind's profound resistance to the idea that we must all eventually be parted from those whom we love. Ishiguro does not seek to rationalise or explain the world in which the book is set. His interest is personal, not political. The Book of Guilt, by contrast, unfolds an alternate political reality, intercutting Vincent's account with two other parallel narratives. Nancy is a girl held as a kind of prisoner by her adoring parents, while the harassed Minister of Loneliness is charged with winding up the Scheme. They combine to create a compulsively readable story that raises profound questions not only about the power of the state to dehumanise parts of our society but about our complicity in that power, the doublethink that permits us simultaneously to know a truth and not know it, to see and somehow contrive not to believe, dehumanising us in its turn. These questions run through all Chidgey's work: they are the connective tissue that binds her seemingly contrasting projects and, in 2025, as the US turns its back on the world, they are more urgent than ever. The Book of Guilt is written with insight and brio, deftly balancing darkness and light, depth and pace. Set in its own distinctive time and space, it could have been extraordinary. Instead the ghost of Ishiguro stalks its pages, dragging behind it the inevitable clanking comparisons and fatally undermining the integrity of the world Chidgey has so painstakingly created. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey is published by John Murray (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Newsroom
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Newsroom
Book of the Week: Catherine Chidgey's monsters
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.
