Ockham award-winning writer Catherine Chidgey. Photo / Mike Scott
Ockham award-winning writer Catherine Chidgey. Photo / Mike Scott
Pet by Catherine Chidgey
Reviewed by Linda Burgess
“That girl” – and I probably did say girl, because it was 25 years ago – “the girl who wrote about being at Bible class. That was fantastic,” I said. And Bill Manhire, teacher of the Creative Writing class whose students werethat day reading from their portfolios, said, “Catherine – yes. She’s the real deal, isn’t she?”
By chance, when In a Fishbone Church was published, snapped up by what was then VUP, I was asked to review it. No problem – I adored it. Her exquisite eye for detail, her evoking of a scene, her innate ability to choose the perfect image. Her wit. A glittering career followed, prizes won here and abroad, most recently for The Axeman’s Carnival – a top read of mine in the last year. And now there’s Pet.
“Pet” – unless one is referring to something with paws – is a creepy word. I’m taken back more than 40 years when a girl I was teaching stayed behind to tell me she was having trouble with her father. “Sometimes I’m his pet,” she said, “And then he gets really mad at me.” My flesh still does a worrying flinch when I remember it. “Pet” is often preceded by “teacher’s” and in this novel, that is what the narrator, 12-year-old Justine, longs to be. With her mother having recently died, and her lonely father, Justine is understandably needy. She’s also a convincing mixture of preternatural wisdom and heartrending guilelessness. She wants to be best girl, usurping Melissa, current holder of that position. She will give up pretty much anything to be the one asked to stay behind and bash Mrs Price’s blackboard dusters clean.
Catherine Chidgey at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, 2023. Photo / Marcel Tromp
The brilliantly named Mrs Price, both beautiful and sports car glamorous, with a hint of a tragic past, is immediately revealed to the reader to be on the duplicitous side. It’s said that there’s been a daughter and husband lost in a car accident, and who could better fill that void than Justine and her father? From the beginning, the reader is judge and jury, reading the words of someone who we know to be an unreliable narrator. Who’s being judged though, is the premise on which the book is based. Equivocation is at its heart and soul, as is memory. The story itself is told by Justine, now in her 40s, at the bedside of her father, deep in the cruel arms of Alzheimer’s. Both Justine, who suffers from epilepsy as a child, and her father, are in no position to rely on what they think they remember.
Pet, by Catherine Chidgey
Hmmm, Mrs Price. As an ex-teacher, I recognised her immediately. As I did the time in which the novel takes place. Wellington, in the 1980s. Its rugged coastline, its proven danger – the Wahine has sunk within recent memory. The Catholic primary school. The casual racism. Puberty. The children who say as an answer to any peer’s problem – “Kill yourself then.” Chidgey deftly chooses exactly the right images. Justine’s dad in demented old age querulously comments that there isn’t a teaspoon of sugar in those little packets that claim to hold that amount. (He’s right). Mrs Price, modern and non-sexist, calls her students “people”, that walk-shorts, teacherly word. Our own Lorraine Downes has won Miss Universe and Justine observes the embarrassment of hearing a New Zealand accent and how a year later Downes sounds different. The replaying of her moment of triumph is a brilliantly supporting thematic metaphor.
I admire Chidgey’s skill at building unease. She was at her finest with Tama and Marnie in her last novel. Perhaps this recent novel, which, like her first novel, draws on her memories of her own youth, is a harder one to guide along its precipitous path. Did they, didn’t they? I neither liked nor trusted Mrs Price from our first meeting. Although the portrayal of Justine is piercingly accurate, an unreliable narrator is always hard to fully empathise with. I couldn’t care quite as much as I did with her last book, but a masterpiece is always hard to top. Nevertheless, this is a skilfully written and chilling book: Chidgey is indeed the real deal.
