Books editor Claire Mabey unravels the dark questions at the heart of the latest book by one of Aotearoa’s most prolific and successful novelists.
The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey is a propulsive experiment in excavating, at a slant, a certain kind of Britishness. Not only is this experiment page-turning, it is deeply serious work. The unravelling of the novel’s central mysteries and mythologies ultimately compel the reader to evaluate what it means to be alive in a human body that can learn, dream and think for itself.
“In this world,” says Chidgey’s character, Mother Morning, “it’s not possible to have everything we want. Everything we think is right. Sometimes we have to make difficult decisions. Yes?”
This stern line of thought comes on page 11 while Mother Morning is taking a lesson with her three boys – identical triplets Vincent, William and Lawrence who live in Captain Scott house, one of a string of Sycamore houses, and who are looked after in shifts by Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night. The boys study from The Book of Knowledge (strangely reminiscent of that skewed and limiting artefact known as the Encyclopaedia Britannica); they report their dreams to Mother Morning who religiously scribbles them down in her Book of Dreams. Their misdeeds – both minor and significant – are recorded in The Book of Guilt.
The boys are sickly, and require an ongoing regimen of pills, syrups and injections to help them beat “the Bug”. And if they do, if their Mothers and the doctor ever deem them healthy enough, they might just wake up one morning to find a brochure on their pillow: a pamphlet filled with the promises of Margate. Where all the healthy kids go, with its Dreamland fun park, its sun and “vast expanses of gold sand” … “It’s a children’s paradise, with trampolines, roundabouts, swings, rock pools, seawater swimming pools and the sunniest and driest weather anywhere in Britain.”
Margate becomes a central container in the novel for illusion-by-design. The cover of The Book of Guilt is a segment of a real, vintage 1950s poster used to promote travel to the seaside town. Even without knowing a thing about the events to be unfolded in The Book of Guilt it is an image we might unpick as spectacularly uncanny on face value alone: the mother figure is barefoot but wearing a tidy, 50s housewifely dress, pearl earrings, and her hair is set. She has a wide open mouth, her teeth are perfect. The boy leaping by her side is the picture of health. The skies are almost perfectly clear. The sea is flat and friendly. In the background a man is seated in a striped deckchair, reading the paper, absorbed in news. Two other boys, one with his thumb in his mouth, look after the mother and the healthy boy, bouncing away from them.
Fading seaside towns are microcosms for faded histories and dreams – and the UK’s coastline is littered with them. The layered architecture of eras gone by affects a kind of haunting; the bright surfaces and ice cream shops pasted on top peddle dreams of beachside holidays often, in reality, rudely spiked by hyper-aggressive, Hitchcockian seagulls. Pastel-coated shopfronts and dusty vintage stores soften the detection of darker underbellies and thinly disguise the failures of capitalism to inject the buoyancy required to keep the nostalgia at bay.
In Chidgey’s hands, Margate is a poster child; a symbol of a national mythology that embedded itself in England’s green hills after the end of Chidgey’s version of World War II. What would England be like had World War II been resolved by treaty and not victory? This is the speculative heart of The Book of Guilt. What if Hitler had been assassinated and Germany negotiated with? What if concessions had been made and “difficult decisions” arrived at?
Chidgey’s latest novel is uncannily similar to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (which she has not read). It takes similar aim at British identity by puncturing its society with the normalisation of skewed medical ethics. What both novels have in common are questions of nature versus nurture and the eternal thought exercise of what does it mean to possess a soul? The two writers share an interest in the dehumanising potential of such questions. Both Ishiguro (one of the greatest novelists of all time) and Chidgey (fast becoming one of the greats herself) investigate how whole societies, entire countries, can enter a path of gross moral corruption one person, one concession, at a time.
The Book of Guilt is being billed as a huge novel for the UK’s publishing year. And it will be: Chidgey’s prose has a hungry quality. There is an energy in it that demands we embrace the characters (the book shifts between child narrators and adult ones) and see all the things. The book is littered with the artefacts of 1979: Spirographs; TV shows Mork & Mindy and Rainbow; Stickle Bricks; dainty sandwiches; and carved soaps of pale green. Chidgey’s prose is alive with the stuff of place and environment that launches the reader wholly into her worlds.
Take this, from the first page: “Before I knew what I was, I lived with my brothers in a grand old house in the heart of the New Forest. It had blue velvet curtains full of dust, and fire surrounds painted like marble to fool the eye, and a panelled Entrance Hall hung with old dark mirrors. And oak griffin perched on the newel post of the creaking staircase; we touched its satiny wings for luck whenever we passed, and whispered the motto carved on the scroll across its chest: Verité Sans Peur.”
The quality of Chidgey’s writing – its richness, its pace – means that this is not a book you can easily put down, despite the sinister drag of its undertow and queasy anticipation of its secrets. You can spy the twists and the slow revelations, but you hope you’re wrong; and then the story twists again and it hurts.
The Book of Guilt is inevitable in the way that another book published this year is inevitable: Crooked Cross by Sally Carson was published in 2025 by Persephone Books, which specialises in republishing old, often forgotten books, mostly by women. Crooked Cross was originally published in 1934 and the author died in 1941. Carson’s novel is about a German family in Bavaria and how each of them responds to the rise of Nazism and the dehumanising of the Jewish people. It’s a profoundly affecting read not in the least due to the knowledge that Carson (who was British but who travelled to Bavaria frequently) was using the novel form to document the violence of her times, and because the outcome of the story is … well, history.
Chidgey’s book is speculative historical fiction. But the project of it resonates with Persephone’s project of republishing a novel that witnessed the rise of fascism and how the scapegoating of a group of people was seeded, and took root, among an entire population as justification for genocide. By changing history, and introducing us to a Britain which used treaty concessions to open the door to grotesque medical mistreatment, Chidgey asks the reader what Carson asks hers: What would you have done? Would you have had the moral courage to resist? What grievances, what perceived fears might you allow to get in the way of the preservation of life? Would you attempt to argue the nature of a soul? Would you allow yourself to take part in a project of dehumanisation, even if it was framed to you as necessary for the greater good?
These books settle in the mind as totems: through the vicarious qualities of fiction they scream at us to wake up from whatever illusions we might be under and pay attention to the history we’re living through right now; to remember that history can, and does, repeat. The novel form lets us into the heart of the humanity at stake, the humanity we’re letting slip: the mind sets, the papering over of reality with skewed politics, with facades, and what narratives dictate what some deserve, but not others.
The Book of Guilt is not only a terrifically compelling read – it is also an alarm bell.
The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey ($38, Te Herenga Waka University Press) is available for purchase at Unity Books.
