ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Catherine Chidgey’s seventh novel has already gone into a second printing, and now that I’ve read it, I know why.  Pet is unputdownable.

The story begins with adult Justine Crieve losing her hard-won composure when a nurse who looks a lot like her teacher Mrs Price is her father’s carer in an aged care home.  He was an antiques dealer but now he has dementia and doesn’t always recognise Justine.  She has good reason to fear that he may confuse the present and the past and that this woman’s resemblance to Mrs Price may be a catalyst for revealing a past that she hoped she’d left behind.

Punctuated here and there by chapters in the present which foreshadow ominous events, the back story then emerges.  Motherless twelve-year-old Justine Crieve is captivated by her charismatic new teacher, Mrs Price.  So, it seems, is everyone else at this Catholic primary school, from fellow-students to the school principal and, ominously, Justine’s father, struggling to cope with his wife’s death from cancer a year ago.  The students vie to be Mrs Price’s ‘pet’ and she dextrously manipulates the children into submitting to her will. Almost everyone seems oblivious to her unorthodox teaching, and her sly cruelties.  The one family that has doubts about her doesn’t dare express them because they fear a racist backlash, and the one teacher who recognises from her own experiences under Nazism the insidious nature of Mrs Price’s behaviour, retreats in fear.

These classroom dynamics sabotage Justine’s long-standing friendship with a Chinese girl called Amy as both boys and girls navigate their last year of primary school.  Their competitiveness and jealousy makes them spiteful, cruel and racist.  When there are multiple thefts of treasured personal items they target the one child who’s had nothing stolen, with disastrous results.

Justine is, at the onset of puberty, subject to occasional seizures while her epilepsy medication is adjusted for her erratic hormones, but this is not the only reason why she is a devastatingly unreliable narrator. Almost all the adults fail her but her judgement is clouded by her own desire to enjoy the power conferred by being the teacher’s pet, to have the glamorous Mrs Price as a replacement mother, and to solve the mystery of the thefts.  She’s very convincing, much like the narrator in Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal which similarly reveals aspects of the plot and characterisation to the reader but not to the characters in the novel.

The cruel intrusion of uncertainty into the domestic world of childhood is pitch perfect in its rendering.

When I lost my bee I pulled out all my books, looked on the floor around my desk, even checked inside my pencil case — but like the ferry pen my mother had given me, the soft little creature with its gauze wings and its ink-dot eyes had vanished.  Paula lost her Sleepwalker Smurf, which was the rarest of all the Smurfs we had collected and the one everybody wanted: we’d made our parents buy their petrol at BP stations because they were the only ones selling the plastic figurines.  It would turn up, we told Paula, but she sobbed no, no, it was gone for good, and not just lost: stolen. Didn’t things go astray all the time, though? Weren’t people always losing this and that? Weren’t we careless children? Then Mrs Price lost something too: her frosted-pink lipstick, taken from her handbag in broad daylight, she said.  She was deeply saddened that we had a thief in our midst; she thought St Michael’s had taught us better values than that. We were all friends, and what sort of person stole from their friends? We were a team  a family. Did they really think they could get away with it? She didn’t want to involve Mr Chisholm, but she would speak to him if she had to.. We listened to her with lowered eyes, every one of us feeling guilty, because as far as Mrs Price knew, every one of us could have been guilty.

‘Told you there was a thief,’ said Paula, pleased to be right, even though being right wouldn’t bring back Sleepwalker Smurf.  Her father had tried to find her another one, driving to BP stations all over town, but they weren’t selling them any more. Certainly, though, because of her tears, nobody thought Paula was the culprit — except how did we know the tears were real? We were all looking at one another askance, all keeping a close eye on our belongings.  Katrina Howell accused Selena Korhari of hiding her own pack of marker pens at home and then announcing them stolen just to place herself in the clear, but Katrina had no proof of this, and maybe her accusation was in itself suspicious. (pp.72-3)

And the menace grows… chilling and suspenseful, Pet will keep you up past bedtime!

Author: Catherine Chidgey
Title: Pet
Publisher: Europa Editions, 2023
Cover design and illustration by Ginevra Rapisardi
ISBN: 9781787704732, pbk., 323 pages
Review copy courtesy of Allen & Unwin