The extraordinary Catherine Chidgey is back, already, with a page-turning novel about a family with a piece missing
Between last year’s Catherine Chidgey novel The Axeman’s Carnival, which nabbed the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in May, and this year’s Catherine Chidgey novel, Pet, which is published this week, I finally read Remote Sympathy. Chidgey has become prolific so we need to be sure to get the sequence right: Remote Sympathy is her sixth novel in the 25 years since she began publishing, but is her third novel from a highly-productive second act that began only seven years ago, and we have to think about Chidgey’s career like that, as an intense burst of success and creativity followed by a long fallow period and then another, even more successful burst of creativity, in which she is writing to make up for lost time.
So, Remote Sympathy. Putting aside those ideas about phases and timing, Remote Sympathy feels to me like the end of something in Chidgey’s writing. It is an astonishing and important novel: dense, emotionally powerful, deeply researched, scrupulously moral. It is a Holocaust novel, her second after The Wish Child, which was her comeback book in 2017. We are probably right to be wary of a wave of opportunistic popular fiction about the Holocaust written by people with little or no connection to it, which Howard Jacobson has lambasted as the Auschwitz novel. “Auschwitz Lullaby, The Child of Auschwitz, The Librarian of Auschwitz, The Druggist of Auschwitz, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Chiropodist of Auschwitz,” he wrote. “Only one of those is made up by me, and who’s to say it isn’t being written this minute?” (As far as we know, there is still no Chiropodist of Auschwitz.) But that wasn’t Chidgey’s angle. Her novels have avoided that kind of borderline-exploitative pseudo-catharsis.
Remote Sympathy is about the way in which the heights of European civilisation could exist simultaneously with the inhuman horrors of the death camps. In fact, they did not just exist simultaneously – they were right next door to each other. Chidgey’s revelation, which apparently struck her on a visit to Germany as a student in the 1990s, is that the residents of Weimar, the centre of German enlightenment, lived more or less in the shadow of the Buchenwald camp, or maybe you could say it was the other way around. How did the people of Weimar live with the knowledge of what went on over there? How do you reconcile those opposites? Or do we all live in a state of enforced obliviousness?
When I say that Remote Sympathy felt like the end of something for Chidgey, it was not just that her long fascination with Germany and the German language seems to have concluded or that after you’ve been to Nazi Germany twice as a writer, there is nowhere further to go, nowhere as dark or serious or meaningful. It also seemed that a certain kind of highly-polished, impeccably-crafted, deeply literary and structurally ambitious novel had come to an end for her.
That was that type of book that made her name at the end of the 1990s. When In a Fishbone Church was published in 1998, and Golden Deeds followed in 2000, critics pointed out that these weren’t the sorts of novels young women were writing at that time. They seemed too mature. They didn’t have the rawness of apprenticeship novels. They lacked pop-cultural sass. Even her image seemed antiquarian, like an earlier idea of how a writer should look. She was compared to older writers – Kate Atkinson, Patricia Grace, Fiona Kidman – rather than her contemporaries. As early fan Linda Burgess put it in a review of Golden Deeds in the Dominion, “she has a breadth of understanding of human nature and the human condition that writers twice her age could envy. There is no Generation-X obsession with the solipsistic lives of her peers.” (Burgess also raved about In a Fishbone Church in the same newspaper two years earlier, in a review nicely headlined “Fishbone done to perfection”.) These novels played games with timeframes, locations and structures – you sensed there was an urge to produce something timeless and literary.
That meant the books could also seem very controlled and mapped-out. The author was in charge of her world. Chidgey has talked recently about changing her writing habits, which has not only helped to speed up her process, but has also given her books a new narrative urgency and straightforwardness. Rather than allowing herself to work on whichever bit of the story seems the most interesting to her on any particular day, she is now working “more efficiently”. Part of that newfound efficiency is to write the books more or less in order – that way she has less extraneous material to throw away at the end.
The change is obvious in The Axeman’s Carnival and Pet. The plots drive forward in more accessible ways, the number of voices is reduced, along with the range of sources (there is less use of invented letters, diaries, interviews, and so on) and the settings are more familiar – and also local. The other books had overseas settings – not just Germany, but also the UK and the US. But the settings of the two latest novels are as ordinary as it gets – a farm in the South Island and suburbia in Wellington.
The Axeman’s Carnival is the farming novel, or a black comic reinvention of the farming novel as a kind of subversive fairy tale about a non-human intelligence (a magpie, in fact) that insinuates its way into a family’s life. Unlike others, I never had a problem with an animal telling a story, and I appreciated the easy sense of humour that worked well with the story’s darker, agricultural-gothic underpinnings. Her magpie, Tama, was a snarky, funny character. Unless I missed something, I don’t think Chidgey’s writing had been as funny before, although there were moments of dark, offhand humour in her atypical “found” novel The Beat of the Pendulum.
The rest is history. The Axeman’s Carnival won the big prize everyone knew it would win, and it became a bestseller but it also did more than that – finally, after 25 years, I think the wider New Zealand public got a sense of who Chidgey was, beyond the book club people and the writers’ festival circuit. All of which positions her perfectly for the even more accessible Pet.
Like The Axeman’s Carnival, Pet is about a family with a piece missing. In the former, the missing piece was a much-longed-for child. In Pet, it is a deceased mother. The year is 1984 and the setting is suburbia – a school, the shops, home. Twelve-year-old Justine lives with her father, and both are still grieving (“The day we buried my mother, Lorraine Downes was crowned Miss Universe”). The middle-aged Justine narrates the story 30 years later, when her father is in a dementia unit, and she has a 12-year-old daughter herself. A trick of the memory produces unexpected flashbacks to 1984. Could her father’s new nurse, Sonia, actually be the mysterious and seductive Mrs Price, a teacher who mesmerised Justine all those years ago, along with almost everyone else she encountered?
“Walking and talking, large as life,” the older Justine observes. “My brain keeps telling me: this can’t be true. She can’t be real. When she squeezes past me to get a fresh shirt and trousers from the wardrobe, though, she brushes against my side – warm, solid. No phantom.”
The “is it her or isn’t it?” question unfolds as it would in a thriller, which comes with two highly suspenseful endings. The 80s period detail feels accurate, without being overdone: The Love Boat is on television, the girls at school listen to Duran Duran and Mrs Price is described as looking like a blend of Debbie Harry, Rebecca De Mornay in Risky Business (although as Justine says, the 12-year-olds are too young to have seen it), Agnetha from Abba and Olivia Newton-John. It was the time of the superblondes. She drives a white Corvette which has a steering wheel on the American side. Sometimes, she wears aqua-blue lycra and a headband, like a TV aerobics instructor (or Olivia Newton-John in the “Physical” video). Is Mrs Price – please, call her Angela – somehow too appealing to be real? What is she hiding?
As a teacher, Angela has pets or favourites. Chidgey reconstructs from memory the particular atmosphere of a Catholic education, along with all the heightened resentments and confusions of adolescence, the crushes, the sleepovers and the too-close friendships. On top of her grief, Justine is epileptic – her seizures cause her to miss important moments. She is therefore not the most reliable of narrators. Strange things start to happen at school and then at home – first they are small things and then they are bigger things. That is as close to spoilers as any responsible reviewer should go.
It is tempting to say that Pet is a page turner perfectly timed for Chidgey’s new, broader audience. And there would be no problem with that. Sometimes the walls that divide so-called literary fiction from commercial fiction should be knocked down. And while Pet is clearly less demanding on the reader than, say, Remote Sympathy, and while the surface of it feels thinner, Chidgey is still drilling into the same kinds of questions, or the same problems. The problems of memory are the most obvious, but there are the moral problems as well. There is a threatening, sickly atmosphere throughout – something else the book has in common with Remote Sympathy. At its heart, Pet is a story about the temptations of charismatic and attractive characters who can take advantage of weakness and vulnerability.
Like Tama, Angela Price is also an opportunity for the writer to have some fun. There is a good scene in Justine’s dad’s antiques shop involving Angela and a man “wearing a blue suit and a big showy wristwatch”. The man is an old-school sleazebag who is thinking about buying a mounted stag’s head – “Maybe you can help me get it up,” he smirks. Angela deftly makes him feel stupid and small, before he storms out of the store. “It’s bitches like you that give women a bad name,” he hisses.
Beyond the obvious 80s-era signifiers – what’s on TV, name checks for the Smurfs and Cabbage Patch Dolls – Chidgey gets something deeper about the ambiguity of the times, the less clear sense of what was appropriate and what was inappropriate. We all know the old sexist bloke with the wristwatch was on the way to becoming an antique himself, but what are we to make of a more problematic – not a word anyone used in the 80s – scene in which Angela has Justine and some other girls over to her house for pampering? They do her make-up and shave her legs, and they treat her as a kind of fetish object to be worshipped and adored. “In the end we chose a strapless gold gown with a choker of fake pearls – faux, she said, not fake – and a wide-brimmed black hat.” There is a way in which they are helping to create her, and are being groomed – another word not commonly heard in the 80s – in the process. Are they therefore complicit in what follows? Or are they, especially poor motherless Justine, too young to be implicated?
Chidgey explored the same terrain in a recent short story, "Babydoll", about a young girl’s encounter with a meth-addicted home decorator and her exposure to the complicated hypocrisies of the grown-up world. It can’t be coincidental – can it? – that Chidgey’s next novel, which the prolific author is already close to finishing according to a recent RNZ interview, is to be titled The Book of Guilt. These moral questions have become her preoccupations.
Pet by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $50 hardback, $38 paperback) is available in bookstores nationwide.
