*I received a free ARC of this book with thanks to the author, Europa Editions UK and Anne Cater of Random Things Blog Tours. The decision to review and my opinions are my own.*
Blurb: In this darkly comic work of literary satire by New Zealand’s most acclaimed and best-selling novelist Tama, a talking magpie and social media influencer, is the sole witness to a marriage in freefall.
Tama is just a helpless chick when he is rescued by Marnie. ‘If it keeps me awake,’ says Marnie’s husband Rob, a farmer in the middle of a years-long drought, ‘I’ll have to wring its neck.’ But with Tama come new possibilities for the couple’s future. Tama’s fame is growing, and with it, his earning potential. The more Tama sees, the more the animal and the human worlds – and all the precarity, darkness and hope within them – bleed into one another. Like a stock truck filled with live cargo, the story moves inexorably towards its dramatic conclusion: the annual Axeman’s Carnival.
Part trickster, part surrogate child, part witness, Tama is the star of this story. And although what he says to humans is often nonsensical (and hilarious), the tale he tells makes disturbingly perfect sense. The Axeman’s Carnival is Catherine Chidgey at her finest – comic, profound, poetic and true.
Review: I have always been fond of animal-narrated and animal-POV stories since childhood – Black Beauty, Tarka the Otter, White Fang, The Silver Brumby – and this story ‘plays it straight’, with no fantasy elements to the narrative voice and the author skirting a fine line round the edges of anthropomorphising to produce a believable animal perspective.
And Tama the magpie provides an exceptional and unique viewpoint to the story, with both the innocence of an animal observing incomprehensible human behaviour, and the wisdom of an animal observing ‘natural’ human behaviour. It creates a perfect double image of the story – the dark misery of domestic abuse juxtaposed with the comic antics of a ‘talking’ animal and social media influencer.
It is incredibly easy to love Tama and Marnie (his human) from the first few words of the book, but I found myself caring deeply about Tama’s magpie family, his father and his sister, deeply as well. Conversely I found myself disproportionately irritated and upset by the actions of the human side characters like Ange and Nick, and Marnie’s mother. And, of course, I simply hated Rob, no matter how he justified himself or projected a better version. Perhaps it was seeing him through Tama’s eyes, but I just never trusted him. And I was right.
The story neatly skewers our modern obsession with social media likes, merch, and influencers and how we use nature and animals in these money-making schemes – whether with the best intentions or not. But the dark beating heart of the story is the dysfunctional marriage and the things that ‘happen in houses’ when there is only an innocent animal (or child/child substitute) there to witness. The violence and abuse is horrific and all too realistic, and could be very upsetting to some readers who have experienced some of the issues touched upon here.
Throughout the plot, the author resists bringing Tama into any sort of full humanistic consciousness, keeping his human speech technically just the repetition of words and phrases he has heard, even though it often cleverly or coincidentally fits perfectly into the context of the situation. His mimicry of Rob’s words – which could reveal the truth behind events if people knew what they were listening to – was particularly chilling and I was on the edge of my seat with anxiety hoping someone would pick up on what he was telling them as the story built towards the obvious, imminently looming crescendo.
Finally, the writing of the setting – place and people – is beautifully evocative, bringing alive the countryside, the hardships of farming life, the culture – both local and more widespread – and the natural world. I really felt I was there with Tama, hearing the birds call and watching the dogs work the sheep, basking in the sun-and fire-warmth and watching – always watching – the humans come and go.
I absolutely adored this book, with all of its stark unhappiness and sly humour, and the depiction of Tama straddling the two worlds awkwardly but determinedly, trying to make sense of humans and animals while not quite fitting in with either of them (very relatable!). This is a story I would recommend to anyone who, like me, loves an animal narrator but framed as realism, and I will be adding Catherine Chidgey’s other works to my wishlist on the basis of how obsessed I was with this one!
Understand this: I was no prisoner. Marnie, who loved me, showed me the cat door and taught me to say meow whenever I used it, and I could let myself out to forage for worms and grubs and beetles and moths, and hunt the mice that nested at the dank foot of the compost pile. Next to the haybarn I discovered the grain silo: a great steel tower filled with barley, and always a scattering of kernels at the base. One day I found the lid left off, and I plunged in and ate my fill, and when I could eat no more I lay back on my barley mountain like a king. ‘You’re being very naughty’, I said in my human voice, and the words shivered and rang inside my silvery vault, the sky a blue coin above me.
– Catherine Chidgey, The Axeman’s Carnival
Purchase Link: The Axeman’s Carnival on Amazon
About the author
Catherine Chidgey’s novels have been published to international acclaim. Her first, In a Fishbone Church, won Best First Book at the NZ Book Awards and at the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (South East Asia and South Pacific). 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. Catherine has won the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship and the Janet Frame Fiction Prize. She lives in Ngāruawāhia, NZ, and lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Waikato. 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, NZ’s most prestigious literary award.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/catherinechidgey/
Twitter/X: https://x.com/CathChidgey
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