Catherine Chidgey’s revealing, uncomfortable novels bridge worlds. Is she New Zealand’s latest global literary star?
- Written by Julian Novitz, Senior Lecturer, Writing, Department of Media and Communication, Swinburne University of Technology
Catherine Chidgey is one of New Zealand’s most accomplished and consistently surprising novelists. Since her debut in 1998, her works have also attracted international accolades and prizes, including the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for best first book (for In a Fishbone Church).
After a 13-year gap between her third novel in 2003 and her fourth in 2016, her career has seen a remarkable second act. The five novels Chidgey published between 2016 and 2023 have been met with critical acclaim both in New Zealand and abroad, and explore diverse subjects and styles.
Her most recent work, Pet (2023), has attracted glowing reviews in The Guardian and the New York Times and was my favourite book of last year. And her 2020 Holocaust novel, Remote Sympathy, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
The novel published between, The Axeman’s Carnival (2022), won New Zealand’s most prestigious prize for fiction, The Ockham Prize, and is now being published in Australia for the first time.
It explores the disintegrating relationship of a rural New Zealand couple from the perspective of their pet magpie, Tama.
Strange associations
People tell bad stories about magpies. That we hold the souls of gossips, That we carry a drop of the devil’s blood in our mouths. That to meet a single magpie brings bad luck, sorrow, or death. We refused to take shelter in the Ark, people say; instead we sat on its roof and laughed at the drowned world. We were the only bird not to sing at the crucifixion. Magpies bore into sheep and cattle and eat them from the inside out. Magpies steal anything that shines. Witches ride to their seething Sabbaths on magpie’s tails. To make a magpie talk, cut its tongue with a crooked sixpence.
This passage comes early in The Axeman’s Carnival and speaks to the strange associations sometimes attached to these birds. They are frequently perceived as an aggressive and invasive species. But they are also often attributed human qualities: greed, mischievousness, malice, humour.
Because of their intelligence and their capacity to mimic human voices and language, it becomes easy to anthropomorphise magpies. We project our own qualities onto them, reading their behaviour as a mirror of our own.
Tama (short for Tamagochi) is frequently subject to this kind of projection. Thanks to his owner, Marnie, he has become a rising internet star. Marnie films him dressed in a range of outfits, performing tricks and tasks, and spouting shareable one-liners.
They live with Marnie’s husband Rob, a farmer, deep in Central Otago in the South Island of New Zealand, on the aptly named “Wilderness Road”. In contrast to Tama’s growing international fame, Rob is a local celebrity.
He is a regular competitor in an annual competitive wood-chopping event: the “Axeman’s Carnival”, which gives the novel its title. Having previously won nine “golden axes”, he is hoping to bring home a tenth in this year’s contest.
While Rob and Marnie’s relationship seems idyllic to outsiders, Tama is witness to its unravelling. As the farm struggles and competition for the tenth golden axe stiffens, Rob becomes increasingly volatile and possessive towards Marnie. He also grows resentful of Tama’s presence in their house.
Rob is threatened by the attention his wife pays to the bird, whom he only grudgingly accepts because of the revenue generated from his social media presence.
Tama’s videos are a hit because of his seemingly “human like” attributes: his voice, intelligence and affection for Marnie. However, as the narrator, Tama also reinterprets human spaces from a bird’s perspective. He is acutely aware of Rob’s mounting frustrations, understanding them as the dangerous need to assert control and dominance over a diminishing and contested territory.
Tama’s translation of the magpie’s call – “We are here and this is our tree and we’re staying and it is ours and you need to leave and now” – is repeated throughout the novel. As the tension in Marnie and Rob’s relationship gradually builds, this refrain seems to express the sentiments of the human characters as well. Sooner or later, someone – whether Rob, Marnie or Tama himself – will be forced to “leave” by whatever means necessary.
As the narrator and protagonist of the Axeman’s Carnival, Tama straddles the divide between domestic and natural spaces. He was rescued by Marnie as a fledgling, after falling from his nest and then released as a young adult. After a brief period where he attempts to reintegrate with his magpie family, he abandons them to return to the farmhouse. He is drawn back by his love for Marnie and by the ease and safety of life as a pet. Within the house, he is treated as a surrogate child by Marnie and as a pest and interloper by Rob.
Outside the property, his magpie sister views him as an amusing curiosity, questioning whether he is “bird or not”, and his human-hating father denounces him as a traitor, dismissing him as “not even a memory. Not even a ghost”.
Tama’s relationships with these characters are sometimes dangerous and constantly shifting. He is often rebuked, threatened and blamed, but also confided in and admired.
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Kiwi Gothic?
The Axeman’s Carnival has been received in some reviews as an example of the “Kiwi Gothic”, due to its secluded rural setting and its undercurrent of mounting dread. Narrated from Tama’s idiosyncratic perspective, the novel has the tone of a dark fairytale. The nine golden axes that hang above Marnie and Rob’s bed and the empty space left for the tenth seem to signal some inevitable disaster to come.
Rob’s increasingly brutal domestic outbursts are subtly mirrored in the quiet menace of his daily routines, as observed by Tama. His efficient skinning and butchery of dead lambs. The furious precision of his axe-work. The crime shows he watches, all “about dead naked beautiful women, strangled in secluded forests”.
Beyond the farm, Tama’s father lurks in the pines, repeating his warnings and calling for violence.
You must swoop. Go for the hair, the scalp, the face. Pierce their eyes, drink their blood, clean their bones … Things do not go well for birds who go to humans of their own free will.
However, Tama’s growing online popularity works to puncture the grim isolation of Wilderness Road in surprising and hilarious ways. To Rob’s consternation, their previously remote farm becomes a locus for tourists and backpackers who come to see “the bird who thinks he’s a person”, as one German visitor puts it.
Tama becomes the focus of attention for media workers, marketeers, merchandisers and animal-rights activists. He picks up on this growing medley of voices, mimicking and adapting them as the novel progress.
Chidgey’s previous works have frequently focused on both the contractions and the new forms of meaning that emerge by drawing seemingly distant experiences, voices and perspectives together.
Her first two novels, the intergenerational family narrative In a Fishbone Church (1998) and the correspondence-driven mystery Golden Deeds (2000) both use their premises to explore unexpected connections between disparate locations and lives.
Her foray into Gothic horror, The Transformation (2003), presents 19th-century Tampa, Florida as an occasionally nightmarish meeting point between the old world and the new.
More recently, Chidgey’s 2017 “found” novel, The Beat of the Pendulum, records a year in the author’s own life through a collage of recorded and remembered conversations, email chains, social media posts, news articles and other media fragments.
Remote Sympathy (2020), one of two novels where Chidgey explores Nazi Germany as its subject, is constructed from intersecting accounts from both former Nazis and Holocaust survivors.
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Waiting for the axe
In the Axeman’s Carnival, Tama’s hybrid nature also bridges previously discrete and separable worlds, in ways both revealing and uncomfortable. Human and animal. Online and physical. As a natural mimic, he copies and reenacts language and behaviour from all these spaces, to the delight and annoyance of his various audiences.
However, this mimicry is not empty or superficial. Rather, he uses it to connect different discourses. He steals, magpie-like, from the sources around him. The television, radio and social media feeds. His sister and his father. Marnie and Rob. This gradually affords him new ways of acting, and new forms of understanding.
In one sequence, he assembles a horde of objects stolen from Rob as “evidence”, attempting to form a deduction in the manner of the crime shows he has seen on TV. In others, he uses his learned snippets of language – particularly his increasingly ominous, viral catchphrase “don’t you dare!” – to rile and confound his rival.
Ironically, the attention generated by Tama’s increasingly shrewd and sophisticated performances traps Rob in a performance of his own. To maximise their revenue from Tama, he and Marnie open their house up to 24-hour online scrutiny. This temporarily arrests his violence, as he is forced to act as a good husband to Marnie and a loving “dad” to Tama.
Perhaps the most fascinating and suspenseful section of the novel comes in its final third, which sees Tama and Rob trapped in this curious détente. They are both performing for the cameras. Only the occasional lapse – an outburst, or a messily consumed mouse – might alert a viewer to what lies beneath the surface.
In this sequence, they almost reflect one another. Two uncanny creatures, not quite wild and not quite tame, circling one another in an increasingly claustrophobic house. Both waiting for the axe to drop.
Authors: Julian Novitz, Senior Lecturer, Writing, Department of Media and Communication, Swinburne University of Technology
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