Book Review: “The Axeman’s Carnival” by Catherine Chidgey
A Little Birdie Told Me …
About 25 years ago (my, how time flies), I was living at home with my parents in rural Ontario, Canada, during the summers and working at a small-town newspaper during this time off between years of studying journalism at university. One day in the summer of 1997, a family of squirrels found themselves on our property. The parents were missing, but there were four or five little ones who nuzzled up to us humans. We fed them and looked after them; even a photo of them taken by yours truly made the front page of that small-town newspaper. (It was a slow news week.) However, as the days progressed, the number of youngsters went from four or five to two to one and then none. Did they venture back out into the wild to live out their lives? Or were they snatched up by predators? I don’t know. However, this memory returned to me when reading Catherine Chidgey’s stupendous The Axeman’s Carnival. Set in New Zealand, the story is about a magpie who can speak English and his adventures with his human owners, if adventures are an acceptable word.
Now, in New Zealand, magpies are considered a pest, especially to the lamb farmers of the South Island region. However, a woman named Marnie saves a young magpie and nurses him back to health. As someone who lost a child before it was born, Marnie takes to the magpie like a son, even naming it Tama (short for Tamagotchi) and letting it live inside her house. So, the magpie learns to talk like a human. This doesn’t sit well with her husband, Rob, who is an abusive lout with a jealous streak. The farm on which Marnie and Rob live isn’t doing too well, and their house is rotting on its foundations. However, once Marnie starts putting Tama on social media (the former Twitter, to be exact, in a bit of a pun), the followers begin to pile on. Eventually, fans start showing up at the farm, wanting to be photographed with the bird. Marnie learns they can monetize their talking bird, who parrots things back at inappropriate times. Can they make enough to save the farm? Will Rob learn to control his vitriolic impulses to beat Marnie? Will Rob win the coveted trophy for tree felling for a 10th consecutive year at the local carnival? These are all questions that you will need to read this novel to have answered.
I found The Axeman’s Carnival to share similarities to Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne and Iain Reid’s Foe. All three novels are works of speculative fiction, and all three have troubled male-female relationships at their fore. The Axeman’s Carnival is also a book about the lure of social media and the banal quest for ready-made superstars among the hoi polloi. However, it’s the cycle of abuse that I return to. Rob has been abused by his father, which has led to that perpetuating itself in his relationship with Marnie. Marine, in turn, finds that she cannot leave Rob because her mother would disapprove. This is also a novel about the male gaze: cameras get installed in almost every room of the house to follow Tama as he does his business, keeping his fans happy. Meanwhile, Rob smolders whenever another man looks at his wife the wrong way. Ultimately, this book unveils many things — it’s easy to see why Chidgey has been nominated for many awards. (She’s been longlisted partly for this novel at the 2024 Dublin Literary Awards and the 2024 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for another book.) At its heart, The Axeman’s Carnival is a novel you won’t be able to put down and should be the sort of thing that four and a half stars out of five should get appended to.
So, where does the book lose that half-star? Well, aside from the talking bird aspect, this is a book that requires you to suspend your disbelief. For one thing, Marnie saving the young magpie is a bit of a stretch, considering that the farm has traps for these birds so they can be later killed. Thus, why would she go to any length to save the bird when magpies are viewed as vermin? It’s like someone trying to save a mouse or a rat (though I have a good friend who has kept pet rats in her house, so maybe not). And, of course, Rob comes away as a very unlikable character whose redeeming qualities only start to shine through when he realizes the magpie may be something of a meal ticket. Thus, it’s hard to see what Marnie sees in him and why she lacks the courage to flee his violence. Still, this is probably the whole point of the book: that domestic violence can be a norm when someone is dependent on their abuser so much that leaving doesn’t seem to be much of a viable option. With all this said, The Axeman’s Carnival is worth buying and reading (and possibly re-reading) as Tama is such an appealing charlatan of a character. This is easily one of the best books I’ve read this year with something of a more literary bent, and I’m happy to see the book has a home in America through its publisher there. If you’re an animal lover or love a good read, The Axeman’s Carnival has something to offer everyone. If they managed to survive in the wild, I’m sure those squirrels I helped to look after would probably offer their seal of approval if they could.
Catherine Chidgey’s The Axeman’s Carnival was published by Europa Editions on August 13, 2024.
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