Catherine Chidgey

Catherine Chidgey’s novels have been published to international acclaim. Her first, In a Fishbone Church, won Best First Book at the New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. In the UK it won the Betty Trask Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her second, Golden Deeds, was a Notable Book of the Year in the New York Times and a Best Book in the LA Times. Chidgey has won the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship and the Janet Frame Fiction Prize. Her novel Remote Sympathy was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her novels The Wish Child and The Axeman’s Carnival both won the Acorn Prize for Fiction, New Zealand’s most prestigious literary award. She lives in Cambridge, New Zealand, and lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Waikato.

Chidgey's new novel is The Book of Guilt.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I knew from very early on that The Book of Guilt was the right title for the book because of the way it works with the three-part structure. The novel tells the story of thirteen-year-old triplet brothers living in a shadowy boys’ home in the New Forest, England, in a skewed version of 1979. Their three carers – Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night – record the boys’ wrongdoings in a ledger called The Book of Guilt, so the title refers to an actual book within the book. It’s mentioned early in the story, on page 14, and signals to the reader that these are children who are closely monitored. It also speaks to the emotional atmosphere of the novel; almost every character is culpable in some way – or believes that they are, which is possibly more corrosive. The title is also the name of the last of three sections in the novel: The Book of Dreams, The Book of Knowledge, and The Book of Guilt. While all referencing specific texts, these titles also trace the main characters’ journeys from dreamy unawareness, through dawning knowledge, and on into an abiding guilt.

What's in a name?

I named the boys’ carers after their daily shifts to suggest that – just like their young charges – they are ensnared in a system that values some lives less than others. Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night are expendable, easily replaced – every other children’s home within the mysterious Sycamore Scheme has carers that bear these names. And yet, the boys do love them – the only mothers they have ever known, and the ones who administer their daily medications to keep them safe from the mysterious and unpredictable illness known only as the Bug.

One spark for the book was reading a news story about a Japanese politician who holds the role of Minister of Loneliness; I seized on that and knew it belonged in my writing. In The Book of Guilt, when the new government announces that they will be closing the homes and releasing the remaining children into the community (which is making the community very nervous), it’s the Minister of Loneliness who is tasked with implementing the closures. I love the strangeness of her official title, with its notes of wistfulness, sorrow and compassion, and I love the fact that during the writing of the book, this same position was created in the United Kingdom.

The boys’ home lies on the outskirts of a sleepy New Forest village called Ashbridge. I invented this name to suggest a separation between the boys, who have been confined to the home for most of their lives, and the outside world – it may be possible to bridge this divide, but that bridge will be exceedingly fragile, as if made of ash.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

She might be surprised that I’ve finally stopped writing angry, angsty poems about Ronald Reagan and nuclear war. When she was 15 or thereabouts, she wanted to become a nun, so she would probably be pleased that I still have an eye on complex moral issues – is there ever a sound reason for drawing on the medical research conducted in concentration camps in Nazi Germany, for instance? She would recognise some of the questions the boys are asked to consider each week in their Ethical Hour classes, led by Mother Morning: A building is on fire. You can rescue a trapped child, or you can rescue a valuable painting and sell it in order to raise enough money to save twenty children from starvation. What should you do and why? These are lifted from her own Religious Studies classes at her Catholic high school, where – after wrestling with them – she and her classmates were told that there was no right answer. This all makes the book sound like quite a weighty read; I hope teenage Catherine would also laugh at the many moments of humour that thread through the novel.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I definitely mined my own nerdiness at age 13 when writing the boys. The only books they have access to are the eight volumes of a children’s set of encyclopedias called The Book of Knowledge. Outdated and biased, these tomes speak with the stuffy voice of authority, and the boys believe that all knowledge in the world is contained between their covers. In their day-to-day conversations, they geekily drop in facts from The Book of Knowledge, and even quote passages from it. With the closure of the home looming, the boys attend Socialisation Days with girls from another home to learn how to behave when they meet other people beyond those few they’ve known all their lives. Here I really had fun in playing up the utter awkwardness I felt at that age, especially in the presence of the opposite sex; the children’s common ground is The Book of Knowledge, so they resort to peppering their small talk with extremely niche factoids from these familiar, safe texts.

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--Marshal Zeringue