The main attraction of Catherine Chidgey’s imaginative and well-executed novel The Axeman’s Carnival is its winsome narrator, a young Australian magpie living on a sheep farm on the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. Named Tama (short for ‘Tamagotchi’, also Māori for ‘son’) by Marnie, the woman who takes him in as a nestling, he grows into a surrogate child, though Marnie’s husband Rob disapproves.
An astonishing mimic of human speech and lovable comic trickster, Tama becomes a Twitter sensation, and Marnie and Rob start monetising his fame to salvage their ailing farm.
Despite this feelgood premise, Chidgey’s fable has tragedy at its core. Disappointment, anxiety and trauma colour most relationships in the novel, human and non-human. Marnie is grieving a failed pregnancy and always fearful of upsetting her violent husband. Rob turns to drink to forget his financial woes and is constantly preoccupied with his desire to win the local annual axeman competition. Marnie’s mother Barbara still hasn’t processed her divorce and projects her frustration on her daughters, while Marnie’s sister Ange no longer feels desired by her husband. Tama himself has father issues and is haunted by death.
Animal narrators tend to be used to expose the strangeness of human behaviour, and Tama is a highly effective device in this regard. Neither fully human nor truly magpie, he’s a perceptive observer of the complex lives around him but can’t always make sense of people’s actions and motivations. Often, he simply concludes that “that is how houses worked”.
[ ‘The first pang I got for the book was wondering if Jeeves ever feels class rage’Opens in new window ]
Equally, the novel’s humans often fail to understand its avian characters. It’s intriguing how Chidgey plays around with misconceptions and superstitions about magpies – not least because, as the novel points out, these have simply been transposed from Eurasian on to Australian magpies, which aren’t even corvids.
A slightly discordant note is struck by a redundant interlude with vaudevillian eco-activists who bumble around and bicker like a pair of central casting Coen brothers baddies, and some of the foreshadowing feels heavy-handed.
These are minor quibbles, however. Chidgey elegantly weaves together social commentary, magic realism, folklore and myth, and her treatment of serious themes is deft. The language is poetic without feeling overwrought. The Axeman’s Carnival is a deeply engaging novel with an original and remarkably charming star.
