“Before I knew what I was, I lived with my brothers in a grand old house in the heart of the New Forest. It had blue velvet curtains full of dust, and fire surrounds painted like marble to fool the eye, and a panelled entrance hall with old dark mirrors.”
Right from these opening lines, Catherine Chidgey lightly traces several abiding themes of her tense, compelling, genre-fusing book. There is the hint of submerged identity; of aspiration and prosperity, rubbing skins with disappointment and neglect; a preoccupation with what is authentic and what is fraudulent, the self and truth only dimly visible. Several themes, but certainly not all – this gripping novel is folded through with many preoccupations.
Calling on the deeply rooted psychological power of the storytelling rule of three, the novel is divided into The Book of Dreams, The Book of Knowledge and The Book of Guilt. Three women, Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night, care for a set of triplets in an all-boy’s orphanage. There are three main narrative perspectives: Vincent, one of the 13-year-old triplets; the Minister of Loneliness, a government minister in charge of national care institutions known as the Sycamore Homes; and Nancy, a young girl kept in seclusion by fastidious older parents. This attention to pattern also cooly embodies the quest for order and control, the troubling obsession at the core of the fictional investigation.
Billed as Chidgey’s first dystopian novel, it is set in a version of the 1970s vividly rendered in its domestic and often creepy period detail (orange squash, yellow polo necks, Jim’ll Fix It, and a serial killer disturbingly like a hybrid of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley and Fred and Rosemary West). A sense that it’s on a parallel timeline to ours comes primarily from a brief history lesson, where the triplets learn that Hitler didn’t die by suicide but was killed by German officer Axel von dem Bussche in a successful assassination. Is this a false version of the past, taught to the children for some over-protective or untoward reason (many genuine facts are withheld from them), or is this their reality? Several similar elements of unease trickle down the main narrative spine of the book.
The novel is absolutely dystopian in the sense it exposes suffering and injustice inflicted on children in the name of a perceived greater good. It also calls on aspects of science fiction (hinted at in the very first line of the book) and fantasy (chiefly, the idea of highly specific dreams and nightmares being genetic memories).
On another level, it is also a fable-like exploration of good and evil. Often, this fairytale aspect suggests a crossover young adult to adult audience. This is reinforced by the direct simplicity of Vincent’s voice, which preserves so much of the trusting, hopeful innocence of childhood. The syntax in his sections, as he recounts his lessons, village errands, the symptoms and treatment of a mysterious “bug” common to children in the Sycamore Homes, is declarative, straightforward. It is far less haunted, knowing and jaded than, say, the wistfully bereft adult voice of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, one potential literary progenitor of this book.
Yet listing these aspects of Chidgey’s style leaves out other equally pervasive qualities. There is the lucid poetry. Imagery is picked out with an exacting eye, certain objects – a philodendron plant, a cameo brooch – returning like musical motifs, evoking emotional and atmospheric shifts in the story. The novel also moves like a psychological thriller, easily read just to satisfy a hunger for plot. If you guess some darting and swerving twists ahead of the game, others sharpen the urge to read for solutions.
There are persuasive, unforgettable aspects of this world warped only just out of alignment with ours. There is the Pied Piper-esque vision of children’s paradise Margate promised to well-behaved, cured orphanage residents. There is the molested and essentially neglected teenager Karen, a minor figure whose character arc is depicted with aching accuracy. There is the meticulously constructed miniature railway village in Nancy’s secluded suburban prison – an imitation that is part thoughtless parental taunt, as it displays the society Nancy is barred from.
Although there are small tugs at the limits of credibility, another triad – character, voice, pace – keep the novel addictively readable. Glinting here and there with alternatively spry and sombre comedy, the novel works deftly as social parable, one that speaks of everything from unfounded prejudice to gross derelictions of duty in the state care of children; from unethical medical practices to rigid, perfectionist parenting.
A most moving and simple line ghosts up from the final pages. “We talked of our past as if we might still change it.” Yet perhaps an even more sobering aspect of the book is that it starts with a version of our world where the past has changed – and where, even when the figurehead of fascism and tyranny is annihilated, innate cruelty in ordinary citizens persists.
The Book of Guilt, by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38), is released tomorrow, Thursday, May 8.
