spinofflive
Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

BooksJune 25, 2023

Looking through the windows of a haunted house: a review of Pet by Catherine Chidgey

Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

Hot on the heels of The Axeman’s Carnival’s big win at this year’s Ockham awards arrives Catherine Chidgey’s next novel, Pet. Sam Brooks reviews.

There is nothing so relatable as a shitty high school experience. Even if you happened to enjoy high school, you probably had at least one experience that sticks with you like that one bit of gum underneath your boot that only clings on more stubbornly as time passes. The specifics are different, but the underlying causes are likely to be similar: it’s probably an experience that involved a messed up power-dynamic, a little bit of adolescent sociopathy, and more than a little bit of self-ignorance. If you’re lucky, it probably just involved you and other people at your school. If you’re especially unfortunate, it involved an adult who should have known better.

Pet – a brilliant, simple title, one that you can roll over and say a thousand different ways in your brain, none of them appropriate when referring to a human being – is the latest novel from Ockham Award-winner Catherine Chidgey. It follows, in two timelines, an everyday woman called Justine. In the present day, she looks after her ailing father, in hospice care as his mind pulls slowly away from him, with her teenage daughter by her side. In the past, 1984, Justine attends a convent school in Wellington. Her mother has just died (living mothers don’t make for good thrillers), her father deals with his grief in a classic late-20th century Kiwi dad way (i.e. not at all), and she has a tendency to have unexplained seizures (a brilliant dramatic device, well executed here).

The crux of the story, and the drama, comes when Justine’s new teacher Mrs Price arrives in town. She is widowed, glamorous, and breathes new life into the convent. Justine, and her entire class, falls under her spell immediately. It’s another relatable thing – who of us hasn’t been in a class with a new teacher who suddenly feels like the one person in the world you need to impress most?

What unfolds is a thriller that compels not because anything especially ridiculous happens, but because it all feels hauntingly close to home. Chidgey’s attention to detail is especially helpful: the classroom and its inhabitants feel like it could be straight out of any Christian-based educational institution from the past 50 years, especially with details like Justine’s books “covered with leftover wallpaper from home” and the picture of the Virgin Mary gazing out from her picture frame “her heart full of roses and fire”.

Strong cover game from Chidgey so far this year.

As I read, I kept on thinking of Pet as a haunted house with impeccably clean windows, all the easier to see the horror within. Even though what Justine is subject to is a mixture of gaslighting, grooming and scapegoating (so, you know, abuse), she’s unable to see it as such until it’s far too late. She loves Mrs Price, wants to emulate Mrs Price, and wants to keep her in her life, through a mixture of emotional transference, psychosexual attraction, and because if Mrs Price’s light is shining on her, it means it’s off of the rest of her classmates. However, adult readers, burdened as we are with age and experience, can see the horrors right from the start.

Even through the lens of an unreliable narrator, any right-thinking adult can see that Justine, if not her entire class, is being held under the thrall of a mentally unwell adult. It speaks to Chidgey’s brilliance, and command of this very particular voice, that the main horror of Pet is not anything specific that Justine goes through, but that this child is conditioned to believe that the “abuse-by-a-thousand-cuts” that she experiences is acceptable. The audience knows this isn’t going to end well, because how can it? We’re adults, closer in age to Mrs Price than Justine. We’ve heard these stories, perhaps lived them, and we know how bad it can get.

In that way, it’s a thriller that seems uniquely, horribly, suited to the current moment. It’s hard to read the book and not think of all of the abuses that have gone on in institutions that were meant to be safe spaces for children, places of learning and solace. Pet never gets quite that heavy – it is, after all, thriller and not horror – but the book gains an extra weight from being among the current moment. We know that these systems allow for people to wield power like a principal’s leather belt; indiscriminately, and without need or reason.

When Pet eventually does take off, and starts to sit extremely comfortably in its chosen genre – out of the bounds of reality, well within the given frame of plausibility – it becomes a horrible joy to read. As Mrs Price infects her pupils’ lives more and more, as the injustices mount against Justine (perhaps an on-the-nose name there), we want to know how this could possibly resolve. We know, from the two time periods, that it will resolve, and probably not in a way that is pleasant for Mrs Price, and Chidgey throttles us towards the ending with breathtaking momentum. If there’s any recent book I’d recommend reading in one sitting, it’s this one. But once you start, I doubt you’d need my recommendation to keep going.

If there’s one thing to quibble about with the novel, it’s that the nature of Mrs Price hews a little too close to novels that aren’t anywhere near as smart or as assured as Pet is. An unexplained mental illness, complete with vague needs for bottles of pills, is the realm of Lifetime movies and pulp novels, which is not to devalue the entertainment that either of those brings. Chidgey gets away with it, thanks mostly to the lens of the unreliable narrator who wouldn’t have access to the diagnostic language that we have today (let alone the desire to do so), but it can cut a little too close to the trope of “the evil other woman” for my comfort. The rest of the novel is so precise, so detail perfect (the references to Lorraine Downes being crowned Miss Universe feel especially poignant and aching) and has such generosity of humanity to everybody in it that the lean into this trope, accidental or otherwise, keeps pulling me out of that brilliance.

Chidgey has proven, again and again, that she writes thrillers with the best of them. She does something different, and threads an admirably thin tightrope, with Pet. She draws on experiences that could be truly triggering for an audience – because whomst of us has truly, really resolved that high school trauma, truly removed the gum from the bottom of the shoe – and rather than use anything highly specific, instead blows it up on a canvas that is in part haunting dreadful, in part unsettlingly psychosexual, and in its entirety thrilling. 

Hacks draw on relatable trauma to score emotional points and brutal, leaking catharsis. Legends draw on that trauma to get something different; something that might let you view your own experience through another lens, another kind of emotion, and process it that way.

Pet by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) can be purchased at Unity Books Auckland and Wellington.

Keep going!
Robert Kerr; a scene from Jack & Sandy by Bob Kerr (Image: Archi Banal)
Robert Kerr; a scene from Jack & Sandy by Bob Kerr (Image: Archi Banal)

BooksJune 24, 2023

The story of my father’s war

Robert Kerr; a scene from Jack & Sandy by Bob Kerr (Image: Archi Banal)
Robert Kerr; a scene from Jack & Sandy by Bob Kerr (Image: Archi Banal)

Bob Kerr’s latest graphic novel is based on his father’s experiences as a merchant seaman who was part of Operation Substance in World War Two – a story that for years was stored away in a suitcase on top of the wardrobe.

“What happened to you during the war, Dad?” 

“Nothing exciting,” my dad would say, and then he would talk about the kangaroo they had on the ship. The kangaroo had been kidnapped in Townsville in 1940. It was still on board when the ship left for the Victoria Docks in London. There’s a photograph of the kangaroo in my father’s album. If you look closely you can see the crew have made a harness for it. They are rather proud of Joey, their new ship’s mascot. You can also see that it was really a young wallaby, not a kangaroo at all.

“What happened to the kangaroo?”

“One morning we found him behind a pile of wood on the deck. He must have died of fright during the night.” 

If nothing exciting happened to my father during the war then why did the kangaroo die of fright, I wondered. At the time all I wanted to know was that my dad wasn’t shot at or bombed or torpedoed. That was great when it happened in the Commando War Comics I read. But I didn’t want things like that to happen to my dad, so I didn’t enquire further. That suited him.

‘Joey’ on board (Photo: Supplied)

Long after he died, I decided to find out more about my father’s war. In the suitcase on top of the wardrobe were the letters he wrote home to his parents in Scotland, his Seaman’s Discharge Book and his photograph album. It was the Discharge Book that was most useful. It listed all the merchant ships he sailed on and where they went, starting with the Accra sailing out of Liverpool in 1935, with young Robert Kerr as the 7th engineer. In 1940 he sailed from Townsville to London as the 4th engineer on the Mahia. That must have been when they kidnapped the kangaroo. In July 1941 he sailed out of Liverpool on the Sydney Star as the 3rd engineer. There is no destination recorded, just a note in pencil saying details to be added later.

The Sydney Star joined six other fast merchant ships taking a cargo of food, medical supplies, fuel, aircraft engines, anti-aircraft guns, ammunition and a regiment of troops to the besieged island of Malta in the middle of the Mediterranean. If the convoy did not get through to the starving population, Malta would have to surrender to Italian forces that were bombing the tiny island daily. 

The six merchant ships were escorted by 25 navy warships, including an aircraft carrier. They were expecting trouble and it came on the morning of the 23rd of July one day out from Malta. The convoy was attacked by Italian bombers. The cruiser Manchester was hit and had to limp back to Gibraltar. The destroyer Fearless was sunk. 37 of its crew were killed. 

Later that night the convoy was attacked by torpedo boats. The Sydney Star was hit in its number three hold. Water flooded in. The engines stopped. The ship began to list to starboard. The Australian Navy destroyer Nestor came alongside. In the dark planks were laid between the two ships. The regiment of troops and most of the crew transferred to the Nestor. Those remaining on board shored up the buckled hull plates, and started pumping out the water. The engineers got the Sydney Star’s engines going again. They were determined to get that ship to Malta. 

The Sydney Star, attacked by torpedo boats on the final night of its desperate dash to the besieged island of Malta. (Illustration: Bob Kerr)

As the sun rose, torpedo bombers came skimming low over the water. The ship swerved violently. A torpedo slipped past the stern. In the middle of the morning a group of high level bombers let loose their deadly cargo above the ship. They missed. Then a second wave of torpedo bombers attacked. The Sydney Star, too full of water to make sudden turns, kept doggedly on. This time the torpedo snaked past the bow.

Towards midday dive bombers came screaming out of the sun. Three bombs exploded beside the ship. It heeled over and wallowed in the turmoil. The anti aircraft cruiser Hermionie came racing back from the convoy to protect them and now there was air cover from Malta. 

In the early afternoon the Sydney Star reached the relative safety of Malta’s Grand Harbour.

When the Star Sydney made it to Malta’s Grand Harbour bands played, the population lined the ancient harbour defences and cheered. (Illustration: Bob Kerr)

As a self-centred adolescent I didn’t give my fathers war experience any thought. Before the convoy to Malta he had sailed back and forth to America during the Battle of the Atlantic. Down in the engine room, listening to the gunfire above, did he glance at the exit ladder and think, “If we’re hit, I won’t make it up there”?

The last words in his Discharge Book are, “Discharged from the Merchant Navy. Released on termination of war service, 6 May 1946.”   

The psychologist and parent educator Steve Biddulph describes the 20th century, especially the first half of it, as a nightmare for families. “Most men were involved in planetary wars,” he says; “there were recessions, hammer blow after hammer blow. Dealing with this meant men shutting down and often using alcohol to self medicate.”

“If a dad is with his little boy and the little boy sees a dead pet on the road and starts to cry, the nature of our minds is we want to start crying as well,” says Biddulph. “But that dad has seen his friends dismembered in fields of fire. If he starts crying he will never stop. He’ll go mad. The only way he knows how to fix this is to change the child, so he’ll yell at the boy to ‘cut that out. Stop sniffling.’”

Biddulph talked about this in the many public lectures he gave. Sometimes he would see men leave. He would question the ushers afterwards, and they would say: “Oh that guy, he was in tears”.

His experience led him to conclude that if you took 100 men, 30 of those men barely speak to their fathers, another 30 have a prickly relationship, another 30 have a dutiful, token, go through the motions, type of relationship. Only 10 men out of 100 are close to their dads, he estimated.

Very few men that experienced World War Two are still with us, but the effects ripple on down the generations.

I fell into Biddulph’s “prickly relationship” category. It was fine while I was young. There were horse rides on my dad’s back around the living room and games of hide and seek, but as I grew into an adolescent there were arguments about haircuts and arguments about going to church and arguments about the music I tried to listen to on the transistor radio in the kitchen. There was no need for Bob Dylan to sneer at him that the times they were a-changing. He retired to his workshop in the garage and left any communication to my mum. 

My first car was a Ford Prefect. My dad heard the clattering valves and clanking big ends. He looked at the blue smoke from the exhaust and suggested the engine needed reconditioning. I stood on the side of the garage with the firewood. He stood on the side with the workbench and silently we began to repair our prickly relationship. I came to admire his logical engineer’s approach. Gradually conversation turned from worn piston rings to other things. 

The times they were a-changing.

Some months later there was a phone call from my mother.

“Your Dad isn’t able to go to work any more.”

“Should I come home?”

“Yes.”

I understood the code. 

He died of liver cancer three months later.

Robert Kerr, third engineer on The Sydney Star, 1941. The cover of Bob Kerr’s book based on the life of Robert Kerr.

I tried to piece together a future of missing conversations. I went to Greenock in Scotland where he grew up. I went to Malta to get a sense of what it was like during the months it took to repair the Sydney Star. I drew pictures, wrote words, made up bits to complete a story, shuffled them into a graphic novel. 

The best stories are hiding in that suitcase on top of the wardrobe in family photograph albums and letters. But most important are your parents’ or grandparents’ spoken memories. 

Make sure they tell you before they leave.

Jack & Sandy by Bob Kerr (Bateman, $28) can be purchased from Unity Books Wellington and Auckland.

But wait there's more!