On a high country farm somewhere in the South Island, a hatchling magpie tumbles out of the nest and is, he tells us, found by Marnie Veldman, a farmer's wife who picks him up and carries him home. For both bird and lonely woman, it's a coup de foudre —love at first sight. So begins The Axeman's Carnival, award-winning writer Catherine Chidgey's seventh novel. The magpie, Tamagotchi, who Chidgey gives the gift of voice and makes her narrator, quickly establishes himself as a precocious boy genius who tells us what he sees and hears. Mostly guileless in his observations, Tama is often enough on the money, to suggest he knows exactly what's going on both on the surface and bubbling away beneath. "I loved exploring the question of how much Tama understands and how much he is just parroting. Mimicry is how we learn a language, of course — but as far as Marnie is concerned, Tama understands every word."
Tama is anathema to Marnie's farmer husband Rob, as both as a pest he as a farmer battles but also in terms of how jealous he is of the attention, Marnie focuses on the bird.
If it wasn't for Tama's ability to generate money as an internet sensation, there's no doubt that Rob would in fact wring his neck and toss him into the putrid maw of the farm's offal pit. Like Scheherazade, Tama, who has the fast-paced patter of a well-rehearsed stand-up comic who's single-handedly keeping the show on the road, has to talk for his and his beloved's lives. The Axeman's Carnival is his One Thousand and One Nights.
The Axeman's Carnival by Catherine Chidgey. Photo / Supplied
The inspiration for The Axeman's Carnival came from a number of sources. "I write early in the morning, sometimes starting when it's still dark. I would open my office windows, and I could hear the magpies that nested on the rural land behind us waking up and warbling. They always had seemed to have so much to say, and seemed to be trying to get my attention — calling to me — when I was casting about for an unusual narrator."
What followed once she committed to the novel, was an extraordinary amount of research which included talking to high country station farmers and reading research papers on the physiology of the Australian magpie, which can sing two notes at once and see two different things at the same time due to the lateral placement of its eyes.
"I play with this duality in the book," Chidgey explains. "Black and white, violence and tenderness, the wild and the domestic."
Research closer to home included talking to a farmer cousin about the blood and guts aspects of farming. "I've been vegetarian since I was 16, so that was confronting — but I needed to get those details right." Bits and pieces of conversations with her husband Alan, who grew up on sheep stations in the South Island, also found their way into the novel.
"I gleaned some wonderful nuggets from him — I give Rob his childhood memory of dressing up like a cowboy and pretending to shoot at the superphosphate truck. And his mother Beryl's diaries from when they lived on the farms were a great source of information in terms of understanding the rhythms of life on a high country farm station."
The exploitation of animals is a theme of the novel, from the in-your-face brutality of breeding sheep with the express purpose of sending them to the works, or cutting their throats when they no longer serve a purpose, to the ostensibly more benign dressing-up of a pet for social media likes and financial gain.
"I wanted to explore our strange disconnect between the 'Lamb with Daffodils' on the postcard and the reality of what happens to that cute lamb — but also how exploitative social media involving animals can be."
Chidgey, ever the research junkie, dove head first into the strange world of influencing, viral marketing "selling a little bit of your soul for likes and financial reward", and the addictive nature of those transactions.
"Marnie thinks she is posting about Tama to save the farm and make Rob and the fans happy, but her motives are just as much tied up with her need for adoration — for love."
The highly contrived nature of social media is also laid bare in The Axeman's Carnival.
Although Marnie says it's important that Tama stays connected to his wild nature, she's not only playing to an audience who demands that she anthropomorphises him, but is guilty of doing this to him herself by treating him like the child she desperately wants.
There's no doubt that on one level the novel is delightfully funny, though as the story progresses the jokes become increasingly sinister. The dog called Help, for example, stops being about the dog's job on the farm and becomes a cry-for as the story reveals itself to the reader. "A non-human narrator allowed me to consider our world and our behaviour through fresh eyes — to throw into sharp relief our flaws and strangenesses and hypocrisies. Paradoxically, it let me talk about being human."
It's the simmering violence beneath the surface that gives the novel a real frisson and somehow makes the jokes even better because everything becomes loaded. Rob's an angry and disappointed man and Marnie is the punching bag at the end of that rage.
These eruptions are heard by Tama through the baby monitor in his bedroom next door and the bruises are seen in the days that follow. There's also a refrain throughout the novel of snippets of dialogue taken from Rob's favourite CSI-type crime show on the television, that always features attractive young murdered women. "Rob doesn't see the correlation between what he's doing to Marnie and what's happening on the show."
There's a real sense of foreboding in this particular refrain, as Rob's Holy Grail beckons: the Golden Axe in woodchopping trophy at the annual Axeman's Carnival. Marnie's safety seems increasingly dependent on him winning the tenth title — as does Tama's.
The Axeman's Carnival, by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35)
The Stupefying by Nick Ascroft (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $25) Reviewed by Siobhan Harvey
The Stupefying by Nick Ascroft. Photo / Supplied
"Sarcasm is," writes poet Nick Ascroft in his clever, confessional fifth collection, The Stupefying, "the bottommost and blackest depth of wit, which is a compliment, / the lowest form of compliment." So, I apologise to him in advance for complimenting his new book on its sarcastic, perceptive take on the world, its values and quandaries, as well as for its lyrical dexterity and gentle revelatory prowess.
So much of The Stupefying walks a tricky literary tightrope between the wry on the one hand and the honest on the other. A poet who, early on in the book, earnestly offers the above-quoted lines which, in their delivery, simultaneously mocks them and the poet who wrote them, offers you a taste for the kind of smart cynicism that is also evident in another opening poem, "You Will Find Me Much Changed". There a narrator with an apparent brain injury deconstructs their ailment, veracity and existence. Other verses in the first section, "After", like "Cross-Eyed Martyr" and "Silver Vixen", also showcase Ascroft's ironic bent.
But wait! For it turns out that Ascroft's ironic bent doesn't belong to Ascroft at all, but, as "Why I Changed My Surname" reveals, to someone called Nicholas Croft Brook. An imposter? And if so, whom — Ascroft or Croft Brook? In a poem that journeys through the author's frequently difficult school life and meditates upon bullying, it turns out Ascroft and Croft Brook are one and the same. The wider takeaway from this poem as well as the painfully honest work about relationships, House, Kid, Dog, Divorce and Always Saying Sorry is that the powerful exposure on display counterbalances the well-crafted mockery offered elsewhere.
In a collection that blends sincerity with satire, The Stupefying's most significant disclosure may well be the spectrum nature of these two qualities. Indeed, in the poem "Couples Therapy", the author ably fuses frankness and ridicule, as he concludes, "You were trying to utter your truths, and / I was nodding, buoying up, validating, / commiserating, but, / also trying / to get the couples, therapist, to take my side."
This book's other profound realisation is its technical dexterity. For it comfortably and capably weaves together rhyming poems like "Niki's Handbrake in Tokorozawa, 2004" with limericks, prose poems such as "1988" and a host of other more traditional and inventive forms.
The result, when considered alongside the proficient interplay of tone, humour and admission, is a collection that honours the best definitions of its title.
Formica by Maggie Rainey-Smith (The Cuba Press, $25) Reviewed by Katea Duff
Formica, by Maggie Rainey-Smith.
Maggie Rainey-Smith is best known as the author of the 2015 novel Daughters of Messene, a story set in contemporary New Zealand and decades earlier during the Greek Civil War — a bestselling book in Greece. Her latest poetry collection, Formica, explores concerns closer to home, including growing up in 1950s and 1960s New Zealand, from being "a post-war/baby whose trajectory is history" to a woman in her 70s surrounded by "tight bright bums" at a gym class.
As the title suggests, Rainey-Smith's appealing collection navigates her working-class childhood, blessed by sun and the sea. Her family had few "appliances", so her mother "used a lemonade bottle/to roll pastry" and their "half-size/apple-green fridge/ purred luxury but/ never fully replaced/the meat safe".
This idyll is threatened by her father's enlistment during World War II, and by the shadows that followed. In Autumn and Anzac, Rainey-Smith dissects the contrast between the ceremonies exalting the returned war veterans and the effects of war on the individual.
The shock of the consequences of the "forward march" experienced by her father infects the whole family, not only "the drunkenness/of all these old soldiers, their sorrow" but of a darkness that none "of us fully understand", a darkness that cannot be illuminated by "shiny medals".
The clear, unaffected language of Rainey-Smith's poetry reveals the realities of domesticity and of being female in a language that is without ornamentation or sentimentality. In Jogging, the collection's opening poem, she describes her first sexual experience and herself as a good Catholic girl who is "too afraid to say yes". A young woman in the days before sanitary products, she recalls "the bloody rags/ soaking in salt/ in the stone tub", and — in Instructions on insertion — describes the surreal scene of her own mother, lying on the floor, attempting to show her daughter how to insert a tampon.
The women in Rainey-Smith's poetry do not dominate, nor are they traumatised by men. Yet they have to navigate the lonely spaces within the family dynamic. She writes with maturity and awareness, managing to convey an ache for the innocent days of childhood without sentiment, and celebrating the absurdity of "our hair rinsed/ in beer and ocean/ sprayed, teased/ thick with possibility."
In Formica, the past is woven together with the present, memories presented alongside strange meetings with unnamed characters — like the woman who catches the poet's gaze when Rainey-Smith is looking out of a window, after the death of someone in the family.
Maggie Rainey-Smith.
The look they share is framed as one of life's "possibilities" for connection, one that leaves an indelible mark. Rainey-Smith is unafraid of exploring her own vulnerability in these poems. In The Coroner's Report, she addresses her brother who has taken his own life: "(I can't forget the blue of you)", she writes, in rarely used parentheses. An aunt is taken away, in Ngawhatu, to a mysterious and shameful place: "half pie inside I laughed, my shame unspoken/ the loony bin, they shouted, but none of them so sure".
While existential and philosophical elements are expertly threaded throughout Formica, Rainey-Smith's poetry is distinctly physical and often humorous. In After the war, a new husband and wife learn to co-exist: "she could/ climb through/ a broom/ he could stand/ on his head by/ the door". In And unto ashes, a loved one's remains are divided, and the poem notes "how we split his ashes in half/ sealed both boxes and now/ he's in two rooms at one time".
Rainey-Smith writes with such empathy about sexuality, motherhood, madness and suicide that it's unsurprising she spent almost a decade running a readers' and writers' group at Arohata Women's prison. Her keen eye and the natural and unpretentious flow of her poetry, suggests she would be well-suited to working with other writers, exploring the darkness and light of the past, and considering the potential of every woman's unknowable future. A longer version of this review will appear on anzliterature.com.
Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury, $33) Reviewed by Kelly Ana Morey
Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie. Photo / Supplied
Kamila Shamsie's eighth novel is ostensibly a novel about a friendship between two women. However, because Shamsie is such a literary heavy-hitter (her last novel, Home Fire, won the 2018 Women's Prize For Fiction) subtext is everything.
So while on one level, yes, Best of Friends is about a friendship that's tested by a fundamental parting of ways on an ethical matter, it's also about surveillance and its many different manifestations.
The novel begins in Pakistan in 1988. The country is under the rule of military dictator General Zia and there's a palpable sense of unease. It's a dangerous time for anyone to step out of line or voice an opinion. There's always someone watching or listening.
The two main characters, Maryam and Zahra, are best friends from different socio-economic strata, though not different enough for their friendship to be remarkable. They attend the same walled-off private school and their world is one dominated by 80s Western pop culture and their awakening sexuality. But the real world, the one that exists on the streets of Karachi, does often forcibly insert itself into their reality in ways that have reverberations further down the track.
In this first section of the novel, Shamsie establishes who the girls are, and how their respective moral compasses are in the process of being set in this formative time.
The second section, 30 years later in London, shows how those aspects of who they guide the choices that they make. Zahra is a high-profile human rights advocate, divorced, childless and happily single. Maryam works for a venture capitalist organisation that is funding the development of technology that can identify and track anyone. She has a Nigerian wife and a pre-teen daughter.
Both friends are successful and happy in their lives and careers. It's just that the technology that Maryam is working on, and its application for surveillance purposes, flies directly in the face of all that Zahra is fighting against. When a high-profile "client" buys the technology and a couple of faces from Karachi reappear from the past, they reach a crisis point.
Interestingly, for a novel that begins in the Indian sub-continent, there is next to no local colour, arguably once the super-power of novels from this part of the world. Best of Friends doesn't need it. What little that makes it to the page is glimpsed by the girls from afar, in cars with wound-up windows and from the balconies of homes high above the streets of Karachi. Their lives in London are similarly enclosed.
Author Kamila Shamsie.
This is a novel of conversations and ideas. A novel that has left the Indian subcontinental diaspora behind and reflects a far newer set of preoccupations, ones that reflect contemporary challenges faced by women, people of colour and the queer community.
JUST OUT
Zeitgeisty New Zealand writer Chloe Gong is back with Foul Lady Fortune (Hodder & Stoughton, $28), the first of a two-part series. Set in 1930s Shanghai, it features a pair of spies posing as a married couple in order to solve a string of murders. Gong, who lives in New York, began writing fiction at 13 and was just 21 when her debut novel These Violent Delights became a New York Times bestseller.
Foul Lady Fortune by Chloe Gong. Photo / Supplied
Love her or hate her, Lionel Shriver will never bore you. The controversial American author (We Need to Talk About Kevin, Big Brother) has released a spiky collection of essays — including three which saw her "cancelled" — called Abominations (HarperCollins, $35). One is a reprint of her infamous speech to the 2018 Brisbane Writers Festival on identity politics. A sombrero was worn in the execution of this speech.
Abominations by Lionel Shriver. Photo / Supplied
In Farm: the making of a climate activist (Scribe, $33) Nicola Harvey lays out the complexities of our industrialised food system, from the inside. The former Buzzfeed Australia editor and producer returned home to Aotearoa in 2018 to work a cattle farm with her husband, Pat. What was intended as "time out" from the Sydney rat race became an all-consuming mission.
Farm - the making of a climate activist by Nicola Harvey. Photo / Supplied
