Books

Catherine Chidgey
The Book of Guilt

One of the more perplexing legacies of the British Empire is the continuing separateness of Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand literary culture. Despite the enduring cultural connections and the efforts of a handful of publishers in both countries, books by New Zealanders rarely cross the Tasman to Australia and vice versa. There is a long list of hugely exciting New Zealander writers who deserve to be better known here.

Catherine Chidgey is right at the top of that list. Over the past decade, Chidgey has published a string of striking and often strikingly offbeat books that range from Remote Sympathy, a beautifully poised novel set in Nazi Germany, to the wonderfully odd and deeply affecting The Axeman’s Carnival, which tells the story of a struggling farming family from the point of view of a magpie.

Chidgey’s new novel, The Book of Guilt, draws together many of the preoccupations that move beneath the surface of her previous books and transforms them into something disquietingly new. Set in an alternative version of 1979 Britain, the novel focuses on three boys – Vincent, William and Lawrence – who live in a children’s home in the New Forest.

The boys describe themselves as brothers, although – as quickly becomes clear – they are actually clones (or “Copies”, as they are known in this version of the world): identical versions of the same person, all possessed of the same quick mind and striking blond looks. Their days are regulated by three “Mothers”, Morning, Afternoon and Night, who ply them with medicines to keep away “the Bug”, a disease that constantly threatens to claim them, give the three of them lessons about an outside world they have never seen, and record their dreams in a journal.

Around the story of the brothers’ gradual recognition that there is something profoundly wrong with their lives are braided two other narratives. One is about Sylvia Dalton, the Minister of Loneliness in a government that has recently swept to power, who finds herself saddled with the job of winding up the boys’ home and others like it. The other focuses on Nancy, a teenager who lives with parents who, while loving, are determined to keep her existence a secret from everybody around them.

With its cast of Copies who are clearly being used for some kind of medical experiment, The Book of Guilt owes more than a little to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. But the world of The Book of Guilt is far weirder and more unsettling than that of Ishiguro’s novel. This is not simply a 1979 in which there are clones: it is a version of the world in which biological and medical science leapt ahead in the years after World War I, leading to the invention of penicillin in the 1920s and discovery of DNA in 1938. These advances were compounded when World War II was brought to an abrupt end by the assassination of Hitler, resulting in a treaty that made the scientific research carried on by the Nazis, including work done in the camps, available to the Allied powers (“terrible information, some of it, but of immense scientific value,” Mother Morning tells the boys).

These differences have given rise to a world that is disconcertingly sideways from our own. While the prime minister Sylvia works for appears to be Margaret Thatcher, her father was a schoolteacher rather than a shopkeeper, and it was not Churchill who was prime minister in World War II but Lord Halifax. More troublingly, this is a 1979 in which the social revolutions of the postwar years seem to have mostly passed Britain by.

The result is a stiflingly conservative world that often feels closer to the 1940s than the late 1970s. Yet, as in the novels of John Wyndham and much of the British science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s, the tension between the ordinariness of the society the novel inhabits and the horrors at its heart lends the proceedings a profoundly disquieting charge. This uncanniness is amplified by the sameness of the boys and the Mothers, and the sense of unspoken violence and menace that constantly lurks just out of sight.

And the horrors are real. Although the brothers are the only residents at their home, that was not always the case: once there were dozens of boys, all twins and triplets like them. One by one they have grown ill and died or transferred to Margate, a place the boys believe offers an idyllic life of ice-cream and fun parks. But when Mother Night warns Vincent that “Margate isn’t Margate”, and they must be sure not to be taken there, she disappears and is replaced by another woman who looks exactly like her.

Although it’s likely readers will guess the answers to the mystery of the boys’ purpose and the connection between Nancy and their shared dreams of a dark-haired girl well before the boys do, Chidgey manages the process of revelation deftly and satisfyingly.

It becomes clear in the final pages, which jump forward 40 years to 2019, the questions at the heart of The Book of Guilt are not really about the circumstances of the boys’ imprisonment, however. The novel’s real focus is the capacity of societies to treat certain groups as less than human, thus placing them outside the circle of moral concern, and the complicity of ordinary people in that process.

As the epilogue of Chidgey’s very impressive novel makes uncomfortably clear, not only are these attitudes difficult to shift, but societies and individuals would mostly rather ignore their history than confront the truth of the past.

Penguin, 400pp, $34.99

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 24, 2025 as "The Book of Guilt".

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