I’d been toying with reading The Book of Guilt for a while thanks to some very positive reviews on NetGallery but it was Laura’s comment about Catherine Chidgey on my New Zealand writers post that tipped the balance. Chidgey’s novel follows a set of triplets living in a children’s home in the New Forest, one of several that formed part of the Sycamore Project to be wound down under the new government in 1979.
We never thought of trying to escape. Those days were happy days, before I knew what I was.
Looked after by three ‘mothers’, thirteen-year-old Vincent, Lawrence and William have been told their parents both died young from heart attacks, obediently accepting the medicine administered every morning, recounting their dreams when they wake and attending lessons based on the Book of Knowledge. They’re polite and well behaved although sometimes William is malicious, covered for by Vincent. They all long for the day a brochure arrives on their pillow, promising the delights of a trip to Margate with its fabulous amusement park. Now that the project is to end, the boys need to be rehomed, as do the Sycamore girls they meet on Socialisation Days. When Jane lets slip something about the daily medicine, Vincent begins to question what’s been done to them. Meanwhile, thirteen-year-old Nancy has never set foot outside her parents’ garden, hidden from view whenever tradesmen call and dressed in silvery-green on special occasions.
We didn’t mention the medicine our mothers had fed us all our lives, the things they hadn’t told us. The fear we felt when we lay in our beds in the great dark house.
Chidgey’s novel is largely set in an alternate version of 1979, close to reality but unsettlingly different, unfolding the Sycamore story through Vincent’s voice. The inmates of the home have been brought up in isolation, treated with disdain on rare visits to the local town, comments that make no sense to them muttered as they pass. As the story unfolds, we learn about the Sycamore project through a series of reveals made even more jolting seen from Victor’s perspective. What seems comforting and routine to him, is a little off then alarmingly so to the rest of us. There’s a lot of darkness in Chidgey’s novel which asks big questions about nature and nurture, what makes us human, and the ethics of research all wrapped up in a gripping piece of storytelling.
John Murray London 9781399823616 400 pages Hardback (Read via NetGalley)
