Catherine Chidgey
You’ll know Aotearoa’s very own Catherine Chidgey from her previous works of prolific, internationally recognized fiction such as Remote Sympathy and The Wish Child. Chidgey’s genius is in part down to her ability to maneuver into an entirely different character from one book to the other, and The Axeman’s Carnival is no different. Tama the magpie is at the helm of this novel, witnessing the brutality of Rob and Marnie’s marriage - a young couple who live on a financially failing Central Otago farm. Marnie’s grieving her pregnancy loss and finds comfort in saving Tama. She adopts him as her own, finding comfort in him, feeding him, clothing him, teaching him, and photographing him, until he eventually becomes a social media sensation. His fame is the key to saving the farm, but with wealth and fame comes sacrifice and loss.
Photo credit: Fiona Pardington
1. What does a day in the life of Catherine Chidgey look like?
Most days are busy, and yet quite uneventful! I teach creative writing full-time at the University of Waikato, and somehow I also write full-time. I write early in the morning, seven days a week, usually in the company of a cat. Sometimes Alice (human, 7) bursts in to ask me important questions such as, ‘How do people at the zoo make money?’ and ‘Do you think it would be creepy if a unicorn had an eye with an eye inside the eye?’ Later I take her to school – by car if I’m heading in to campus, or on foot if I’m working from home. I must say, I’m loving the full (well-ventilated) classrooms at Waikato. I get a real charge off being around new writers, and I know they are happy to be workshopping in person again too. In the evening I help Alice with her homework and sit with her and Alan while they have dinner (I dine much later). Then it’s stories and bed for Alice, and back to writing for me. At some stage I eat, and unwind with some questionable telly…MAFS Australia is my guilty pleasure. In bed I write again, until I fall asleep with the laptop on my chest, wake up at 2am wondering if I’m having a heart attack, then realise that the weight is the laptop/my unfinished novel.
2. How do you set yourself up for a day of writing?
I roll over, retrieve the laptop and the laptop stand from the floor and squint at what I wrote late the previous night. I have become accustomed to writing in bed at that hour; it’s easier to trick myself into it if I pretend it’s not actual work (I’m tucked up with a cat – how can it be actual work?). On the days I walk Alice to school, I love my strolls home; they’re a wonderful time for worrying away at any writing problems, and often I arrive back in a rush to grab a pen and jot something down that I’ve been muttering to myself like a crazy woman all the way home.
3. The novel’s set on a farm in Central Otago, it’s not profitable and falling apart along with the family home. Did you have to research farm life to capture the struggles so effectively, and if so what did you do?
I talked to several Central Otago sheep farmers, all of whom were incredibly generous with their time and advice on such matters as merinos versus halfbreds versus crossbreds, dog commands, and lamb castration. I read my late mother-in-law’s diaries from the time their family was living on a high-country sheep station, and I talked to my husband. I also pestered my farmer cousin for months. Sample email to her: Would a full crutch be done before tupping? Would it work to say: 'Ears, B12, balls, tails.’? I wanted to be sure I got that part of the book exactly right. It was a real thrill when my farmer cousin’s mother (also a farmer) emailed me after reading the book to ask ‘How do you do it when you haven’t lived that life yourself?!’
4. Why did you choose to write a novel from the perspective of a magpie rather than, say, a house cat or even Marnie?
Our cats are far from amused, it must be said – but I wanted an animal narrator who could talk. I considered a wolf with an elaborate howl, and I considered other birds that can mimic, until one day I realised that the magpies were right outside my window, strutting around, warbling to me every morning. That decision placed the story in New Zealand, and in rural New Zealand, and from that point everything else fell into place. I never considered writing from Marnie’s perspective; I wanted my narrator to function as a witness to what goes on in the marriage – to see the things nobody else sees.
5. Tama watches Marnie and Rob’s quotidian behaviour and sometimes frames it as odd, which for us readers is at times entertaining because it’s ‘normal’. How did you get into that childlike, playful and cheeky state of Tama’s mind? Why was it important for you to show how human behaviour can come across as quite strange to outsiders?
I loved inhabiting Tama’s feathery skin. There’s a joyfulness about him that I fell in love with, and I was ready to have some fun with my writing. Through him I felt able to give free rein to that desire we all suppress – the urge to blurt out the most inappropriate or annoying thing at the worst possible moment. Having said I’m not writing from the perspective of a cat, there’s a lot of our cats in Tama – he has Mintie’s exasperating contrariness and Jiffy’s court jester antics. Human behaviour is strange…we attack those we love (I’m not thinking only about Rob here); we keep toxic secrets. I wanted to explore that – get readers to consider our humanness through fresh eyes.
6. Tama’s voice and his perspective as an outsider shone a lens on how shameful humans can be behind closed doors, which is most apparent when Tama brings social media fame and live streaming to the farm. Is this novel (in part) a satire of the perils and dehumanisation of social media? If so, what are your thoughts on social media and did that influence the novel?
Yes, I wanted private life and public life to collide in the story. I love the way social media generates a sense of community, which has been all the more important in recent years, but I spend far too much time on it and recognise its capacity to harm. I have been known to dress a cat in order to entertain on Facebook – only the cats that tolerate it, I hasten to add – but I am very aware of the fine line between celebration and exploitation. Marnie is too, I think; her relationship with social media is complex and precarious. She keeps posting Tama content and keeps amassing followers, partly because of the dopamine hit – she’s not getting that kind of adoration at home. She also knows, though, that the monetisation of Tama – the exploitation of him – is the thing that can save their struggling farm, and possibly their marriage.
7. Rob and Marnie’s marriage is stained by Rob’s violent, alcohol-induced monstrousness. Did it take a toll on you writing his storylines?
Yes, but it made a change from Nazis. Actually, the most emotionally demanding sections for me were the ones when he’s apologising to Marnie and promising never to behave that way again – the morning-after remorse, when Marnie wants to believe him and the reader is willing her to leave.
8. Marnie’s grieving her pregnancy loss and Rob’s a gross human being, is the reader supposed to have any sympathy for him?
I have no interest in writing one-dimensional villains, so yes. All the main characters have moments of monologue, when Tama reports back to us the things that they say, sometimes when they think nobody is listening. I allow Rob a bit of introspection in these moments; we get glimpses of his past that help to explain why he’s the angry, disappointed man he is. I lifted some of the happier childhood recollections from my husband’s experiences growing up on their high-country sheep station.
9. The women in Axeman’s Carnival mostly exist through the male gaze - their every move is criticised, commented on or validated by egocentric, bullish men and this is never more evident than when the novel reaches its climax. What was the catalyst for that? Was it to highlight domestic violence rates in NZ? How it no longer feels like things are moving forward for women worldwide, rather backward? Or perhaps it’s not as political as that…
Those concerns definitely fuelled that aspect of the novel. It does feel as if we’ve stalled – or that we’re losing hard-won ground. I worry for my daughter growing up in a world where there is so much pressure not only to look a certain way, but to document and share that ceaselessly online. It was bad enough when I was a teenager; it seems a hundred times worse now.
10. If there’s one thing you hope readers take from Axeman’s Carnival what is it?
Never – and I mean never – let a magpie access the motel minibar.