Catherine Chidgey’s new novel – about the relationship between a woman and a bird – reminded me of another work in which a nonhuman protagonist’s mother-love propels the plot: Stephen Spielberg’s haunting, underrated 2001 film, “A.I.” Chidgey’s book is a gorgeous, sublime exploration of the natural world and the powerful, perhaps unbreakable bonds that can exist between its human and nonhuman inhabitants.
It is also a domestic tragedy, a nail-biting noir and a sly satire of viral online celebrity – a difficult feat to pull off, but Chidgey, author of several critically acclaimed novels, including most recently “Pet,” does it beautifully. Europa “The Axeman’s Carnival” By Catherine Chidgey Europa Editions. 336 pages, paperback.
$18 The story centers on Tama, an Australian magpie scooped up by Marnie, the wife of a New Zealand sheep farmer. Marnie’s husband, Rob, warns her not to grow attached to the newborn bird. Still grieving over the miscarriage she suffered a year earlier, Marnie ignores her husband’s demands that she release the bird back into the wild.
“It’s not normal to keep a wild bird inside. It’s not kind,” he tells her. At first, he seems not unreasonable.
Marnie does attempt to release Tama (whose name is derived from the digital Tamagotchi pet), but his magpie family attacks him, and he flies back to his human home, crying Mar, Mar, Mar, Mar. Even Rob agrees that the bird sounds like a child asking for its mother, and he doesn’t put up a fight when Marnie takes in the magpie again. Marnie doesn’t just feed Tama from syringes, letting him perch on her finger “as if it were (his) home.
” She installs him in the nursery she had prepared for her lost infant, where the bird sleeps in a crib under a blanket with a toy bear after Marnie lovingly tucks him in. She housebreaks him, teaches him to talk, to recognize the reflection in a windowpane not as a rival bird but as Tama. She installs a baby monitor so she can make sure Tama is safe when she’s not there, encouraging him to meow so he can use a cat door to go outside to eat worms and insects and mice, as wild magpies do.
Much of the delight of this gorgeously strange novel derives from how delicately and deftly Chidgey balances Tama’s avian and human selves. Tama narrates the story in lyrical and deeply sensory, often sensual detail, yet his actual communication with humans consists of phrases and sentences (many quite sophisticated) he’s learned by rote, sometimes to hilarious and profane effect. Readers are always aware that Tama is an animal whose experience of the world can be jarringly different from ours: seeing in monocular vision, understanding the complex cries, conversations and social cues of the wild magpies who are hunted and killed by neighboring farmers.
To amuse herself, Marnie starts dressing Tama in handmade outfits. She shares images and footage of Tama online: “Me perched on the edge of the toilet seat. Me as a DIY rotisserie.
...
Me in the bath, underneath the showerhead, wearing a tiny shower cap. ..
. Me wearing a pirate hat, a top hat, a nurse’s hat. Me wearing bunny ears.
Me dressed as Batman.” Tama goes viral as, encouraged by her venal sister and tech-savvy brother-in-law, Marnie begins live-streaming his antics. The bird’s newfound fame inspires merchandise, including a talking Tama toy that replicates Tama’s real voice.
Marnie’s sudden financial success and independence inflame the depressive, alcoholic Rob as he struggles to maintain the grim acreage that’s been in his family for generations, refusing help and suggestions on how to combat the destructive impact of climate change on an unforgiving landscape. His history of violence against his wife is chillingly described by Tama, who witnesses it as a child might. For all its humor and evocative descriptions of its isolated setting, “The Axeman’s Carnival” is a disturbing book.
The carnival of the title takes place at an annual agricultural fair. Here, men whose skills and woodlore once allowed them to make a living from the land desperately compete for the coveted golden axe, splitting logs in a frightening display of barely controlled violence. Middle-aged Rob, the longtime champion, finds himself up against a much younger competitor.
Elsewhere on the fairgrounds, Marnie and her sister perform a musical routine featuring Tama, an innocent entertainment that the reader knows will incite Rob’s rage. “The Axeman’s Carnival,” published in Chidgey’s native New Zealand last year, received the country’s prestigious Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize (the author’s second). I found its riveting finale moving and deeply unsettling, not least for Chidgey’s eerie depiction of Tama’s unbounded love for his adoptive mother.
Chidgey’s novel is an extraordinary achievement: Like Tama, it soars. Elizabeth Hand’s most recent novel is “A Haunting on the Hill.” Modify your screen name Please sign into your Press Herald account to participate in conversations below.
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