In a remarkable literary feat Catherine Chidgey’s seventh novel The Axeman’s Carnival is told entirely from the perspective of a magpie on a high country farm.
Taken under the wing - so to speak - of a farmer’s wife, the cheeky Tama (short for Tamagotchi) becomes a social media sensation and a big player in an isolated couple’s future.
Chidgey’s last novel Remote Sympathy was shortlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award and longlisted for the international 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Chidgey talked to Saturday Morning’s Kim Hill about why exactly she chose to make a cheeky magpie the star of The Axeman’s Carnival.
Catherine Chidgey author of The Axeman's Carnival Photo: Helen Mayall /
"Magpies are sinister and quite dark, I think.
"They occupy this curious place within the NZ psyche. On the one hand we marvel at their melodious song and their astonishing mimicry, but we also fear them."
Their vicious "swooping" habits give magpies a nasty reputation, but scientific opinion remains divided on the impact magpies have on other New Zealand birds and their pest status.
Chidgey said she did her own very deep dive into magpie studies to tell Tama's story.
"I feel very well acquainted with magpie biology and with their song patterns and their behaviour when they're nestlings and when they're fledglings.
"All of that, while it sounds quite dry perhaps, did really drive the story."
Chidgey said that for instance, the lateral placement of the eyes on magpies "means that they can see two things at once".
"That was really interesting for me as a writer who was creating this figure to be a witness, really, to what's going on in this rather unhappy marriage.
"(Magpies) being able to sing two notes at once was also really fascinating and spoke to the kinds of dualities that I'm touching on in the novel."
The novel examines the conflicts between "black and white and wild and domestic and violence and love," she said, as Tama becomes involved in a troubled, conflict-filled marriage between humans.
"Tama's an outsider, he is a creature of the wild who is raised in a domestic setting.
"I can use him in that regard to see things about the facade of domesticity and of marriage that another person ... might not see."
The high country rural setting required a lot of detail and research, which Chidgey said she was keen to get correct.
"I was lucky enough to have my late mother-in-law's diary from when my husband was growing up in a high country sheep station."
"I also spoke at length to about four or five high country sheep farmers in central Otago who were very, very generous with their time and knowledge.
"As a townie I felt I really needed to get those details exactly right."
There was a long break between Chidgey's third novel The Transformation in 2003 and The Wish Child, published in 2016, which won her the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
"Now that the writing has started again I feel as if I have to make up for lost time," she said.
"There was something about turning 50 as well, and turning 50 under lockdown."
Chidgey feels spurred "to produce as much as I can in the couple of decades of good writing time that I might have left to me."
"That sounds really grim, but it feels quite joyous to me, really."
The Axeman's Carnival is also one of the first books she has set in New Zealand in a while as her last few books were based in Germany, where she lived for a time.
"It wasn't a deliberate decision to return to New Zealand for this book. It was really Tama who was telling me what I had to write about.
"I do feel very much that he's real to me. He really possessed me for the writing of this book and demanded that I tell his story and tell it in his voice."
She has already started on her next work, which will also be set in New Zealand as well.
Already being hailed by some critics as one of this year’s local bests, The Axeman’s Carnival will be launched alongside Chidgey’s picture book Jiffy's Greatest Hits at University of Waikato 27 October, and in the South Island at the Queenstown Writers Festival 12 November.
