Catherine Chidgey, while perhaps not the most famous name for British literary audiences, is a star in her native New Zealand. A multi-award-winning author, Chidgey has established a name for herself in creating fully-realised worlds replete with plot and substance, whether that’s in the swamps of 1890s Florida or the horrors of Nazi Germany.
Her latest novel, her eighth, Pet, is set in more recognisable climes – her home country, split thirty years apart. The plot vacillates between two timelines – in 1984, Justine is a grieving schoolgirl, following the loss of her mother, who finds herself in the thrall of enigmatic school teacher Mrs Price, while in 2014, a grown Justine recalls the trauma of those fateful weeks and the impact it has on her life and her relationship with her ailing father.
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Chidgey is a master of voice and suspense, sprinkling nuggets of darkness into scenes of domicile innocuousness, as Justine and her classmates battle it out for the pleasure of being Mrs Price’s favoured pupil as well as trying to uncover who is behind a spate of thefts amongst the student body.
The fact that this all takes place in a specific time and place (the locals around Justine are dazzled by the Miss Universe success of Lorraine Downes the year prior, for example), helps root the novel’s simmering tension in the tangible, particularly as the older timeline reaches its dizzying climax as mysteries are solved, allegiances are revealed, and the plot of Pet reaches a largely satisfying catharsis.
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While it sometimes struggles in balancing its literary character examinations and the psychological thriller it arcs towards by book’s end, Pet is a darkly luminous novel of trauma and longing to belong, anchored with a magnetising spectre in Mrs Price and a sense of dread that even the most hardened reader won’t be able to easily shake.
Pet is out now from Europa Editions.
