ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Thanks to a review copy from Ashleigh Young at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University Press, I have at last been able to read the winner of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction (2023).  I have been wanting to read this book since the day it was launched in 2022 but it is still not yet available in Australia.

I wanted to read this book,
and I was right to do so.

Deceptively easy to read, Catherine Chidgey’s seventh novel is a stunning achievement.

The Axeman’s Carnival could have been the bleak story of a farming Otago couple struggling to stay afloat while their relationship deteriorates past the point of no return, but the quirky presence of its narrator makes it a different story.

Marnie rescues a magpie that fell from its nest and raises the chick, which becomes her saviour in more ways that one. It is not just that this magpie can speak and narrates the story in an utterly convincing voice… it is also that its presence changes the dynamic in the couple’s relationship and lifts the curtain to reveal it to the wider world.

Social media is both a villain and a hero in this novel…

Marnie has lost a baby in circumstances not revealed till late in the novel, and in her loneliness and grief she mothers the chick.  Its bed is in the nursery, and she surrenders to its every need. Prompted by the jealousy of her husband Rob, she names it Tama as a salute to the virtual pet Tamagotchi but soon discovers that its talent for mimicry extends to copying everything it hears.  (As she showed so brilliantly in The Beat of the Pendulum (2017), see here) Chidgey depicts the intersection of social media and real life with what happens next… a Tweet with a cute photo and caption leads to a growing horde of followers and suddenly Tama is a social media presence like no other.  There are photos of him in all kinds of situations, wearing all kinds of cute costumes and reproducing the funny things he says.  ‘Don’t you dare!’ becomes his tag line.

As Tama’s fame on social media grows, Marnie’s creativity is revealed.  She grows Tama’s audience with daily stunts and photo opportunities, and with help from an agent, Tama’s ‘brand’ is monetised.  The sale of Tama merchandise — mugs, T-shirts, all the usual stuff — becomes full-time work which augments the family income.  Marnie is able to give up her casual job in town, but Rob’s resentment grows.

Inevitably, there are negatives.  Animal activists don’t approve of a wild bird being domesticated…

Chidgey is too good an author to depict this couple’s relationship in crude black-and-white, but there are no excuses either.  The Axeman’s Carnival is set in our own era, long after Tammy Wynette’s 1968 ‘Stand By Your Man’ but Marnie has succumbed to its creed of long-suffering loyalty to a man who does not deserve it.  She is not just trapped by her feelings for Rob, and by the emotional blackmail that always accompanies his apologies, but also by the knowledge that the failing farm is all they have.  As Tama observes while Rob is in training for the woodchopping event at the axeman’s carnival, (see a video here), their income depends on a boost from the cash prize that goes with the trophies hanging on their bedroom wall. There are nine golden axes there from the nine consecutive wins that establish Rob as the one who cannot be beaten, and he wants to make it ten. But despite the obsessive sharpening of his axe, his times aren’t reaching his personal best…

Some of Tama’s narrative will bring unwelcome thoughts about little kids witnessing things they should not see and naïvely planning some kind of intervention.  This revealing passage begins with a refrain that surfaces from time to time, adding to the tension:

And I did not trust him and I was right not to trust him.

I began to keep a very close eye on Rob.  I crept under the bath and examined the sock that looked like a thing I’d killed, and I started to take more of his things too: the pinch-edged top from a bottle of beer, a coin that he spun on the kitchen table till it turned to a golden blur, a box of cigarettes with a picture of a baby breathing through a tube, a box of cigarettes with a picture of man dying in a bed, a slice of toast thick with butter, a green plastic lighter, a blue plastic lighter, a coffee mug with a splodgy flower on it, a toenail clipping, his headache pills in their sheets of silver foil, a page of newspaper he’d twisted into a fake twig to burn, an egg cup shaped like a chicken with a hole in its back for the egg, a chicken bone he sucked clean, the chapstick he said wasn’t gay, the rind of an orange he’d peeled in one unbroken strip.  Under the bath they went, into the shadows, stowed against the gurgling pipe where no one would find them, all my clues, all my evidence — only one day, when Marnie came home from Lynette’s Gowns and Casualwear, she caught me making off with the matted mate of the first sock.

‘Now then, sneaky sneaky,’ she said, aiming her phone at me and starting to video, ‘you mustn’t go rummaging about in Rob’s things if I’m not here.  Well, not if I am here, either.  You mustn’t touch his things at all.’

But I remember that she was smiling because of what I’d done, and she put the video of me taking the sock on the internet all the same.  And ten thousand people liked me, and over three thousand shared me. (p.127)

Readers will recognise the signs of coercive control.  Marnie is isolated on the farm, and any money goes towards propping up the farm.  She has no friends, and has only limited contact with her in-laws.  (Who are doing much better than Rob and Marnie, and they have a baby too.) Her sister-in-law observes some worrying signs, and once Marnie makes a heart-breaking call to talkback radio, but as the carnival approaches the narrative tension grows.  This novel was a 3:AM finish for me because I could not put it down to turn out the light…

Highly recommended.

Author: Catherine Chidgey
Title: The Axeman’s Carnival
Publisher: Te Herenga Waka Victoria University Press
ISBN: 9781776920051, pbk., 352 pages
Review copy courtesy of Ashleigh Young at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University Press

(Yes, that Ashleigh Young.  See my review of her 2017 collection Can You Tolerate This?

Available from Fishpond NZ: The Axeman’s Carnival, but beware the cost of postage.