Review by Stacey O’Carroll
Author: Catherine Chidgey
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
RRP: $32.99
Release Date: 19 March 2024
“And I belonged and did not belong, and I was bird and not-bird.”
With such an unusual title and a proud magpie sitting on the cover, Catherine Chidgey’s The Axeman’s Carnival is an unexpected and brilliant story. Before she wrote Pet, Chidgey’s fiction winner of the 2023 Ockham NZ Book Awards was creating international chatter and inciting warbles of praise.
“A long time ago, when I was a little chick, not even a chick but a pink and naked thing, a scar a scrap a scrape fallen on roots and wriggling, when I was catching my death and all I knew of sky was the feel of feathers above me, the belly of black as warm as a cloud above me, when I was blind, my eyes unsprouted seeds, my eyes dots of gravel stuck under skin, when I was a beak opening for nothing nothing nothing, she lifted me into her pillowed palm.”
Tama is a little magpie chick when he is separated from his family and rescued by Marnie, a lonely farmer’s wife. She takes him home and cares for him, much to her husband, Rob’s irritation. Despite Rob’s protestations to return the magpie to the wild, Marnie loves Tama and decides to keep him. After observing Marnie and Rob, Tama learns to speak. The words that tumble out are nonsensical, but the story told through Tama’s perspective captures every little detail of the wild nature and human worlds around him. Soon, Marnie begins sharing Tama’s funny behaviour and sayings online, and his international popularity grows. When Rob finds out how much money the magpie can make them, he starts to see potential and a way out of his financial woes. But underneath the funny quips and silly costumes Marnie dresses Tama in is a violent and dark tale. Can Tama survive the humans and the trees where he was born now that he belongs to neither?
“Then came another voice, deeper than hers, and it was a voice I knew already, a voice I remembered chopping its way up our tree and into our nest of sticks and wire and wool.”
When I discovered that a magpie is the narrator for The Axeman’s Carnival, I was immediately excited to start reading. Novels written from the perspective of inanimate objects or animals are always unique and take the reader on a spectacular journey that could not be achieved through a human narrator. Tama is no exception. Not only does the narrator provide the reader with perspectives on both the human and animal characters, but his observations also allow the reader to see details that otherwise would not be noticed. Because of his small and unassuming size, Tama is trusted and allowed into places he would not be if he were a human or a larger animal.
“Beyond the yolk-yellow house the wind thrilled through my feathers, fluttered Marnie’s hair.”
Chidgey’s The Axeman’s Carnival is filled with beautiful and poetic prose and hilarious humour, which she weaves into a poignant narrative about the disturbing and sometimes violent reality of the destructive nature of people on each other and nature. So effortlessly balanced is Chidgey’s writing, that often the humour highlights the dark reality of the scene. It is hard not to love the intelligent and witty Tama. One wonders if, during her research, Chidgey sat and observed magpies in the wild; so precise has she captured their behaviour. Even the way Tama speaks in his narration replicates the repetitive noises that magpies make when they communicate.
“People tell bad stories about magpies. That we hold the souls of gossips. That we carry a drop of the devil’s blood in our mouths.”
Although Chidgey’s The Axeman’s Carnival has been out for a couple of years now, if you have not discovered this stunning novel, I suggest you fly off and read about Tama soon. The Axeman’s Carnival will have you wishing Tama was real and is one of the best books I have read in years.