The Book of Guilt
by Catherine Chidgey

Catherine Chidgey’s most recent titles, the award-winning The Axeman’s Carnival and thriller Pet, were set in New Zealand, a return to that location after two novels set in Nazi Germany.

The Book of Guilt is set in an alternative, imagined Britain in 1979, but it is a Britain hugely influenced by Nazi ideals. The war, as one character explains, had neither a winner nor a loser. Hitler was assassinated in 1943 and peace was established, a treaty drawn up. One of the conditions of the fictional treaty is that Germany must share the results of research conducted by Josef Mengele and others in the concentration camps.

Chidgey’s 1979 Britain feels closer to the war era than 1980, particularly the food, clothes and attitudes. Fascism, as demonstrated by the behaviour of the Mitfords, Oswald Mosley and others, was a powerful force in the United Kingdom before the war. In this imagined Britain, capital punishment is still exacted on the worst, most violent criminals, and a certain doctor is able to go about his business undisturbed, until the government withdraws his funding.

Triplets Vincent, Lawrence and William live in Captain Scott House, which is one of the Sycamore Homes – ‘purchased in 1944, after the war, to accommodate children like us’ –spread throughout the country. They are the last of the boys, their fellow residents having been moved out. Vincent’s chapters are in the first person. He begins the novel, speaking from an undisclosed point in his future, ‘Before I knew what I was, I lived with my brothers in a grand old house in the heart of the New Forest.’ This is sinister rather than idyllic:

Perhaps you’ve heard of the Scheme …? But then again, perhaps not. For the most part, for decades, everyone ignored us – never gave us a second thought. And afterwards, people didn’t like to talk about the Homes because they didn’t like to feel guilty, which I can understand. Anyway, they’re all gone now: boarded up or bulldozed, or turned into flats that bear no trace of what happened there.

Because the triplets are identical they are dressed in different colours, green shirts for Lawrence, red for Wiliam and yellow for Vincent. The three boys are cared for by three ‘mothers’, Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night. Vincent tells us, ‘They weren’t our real mothers – we understood that from the start – but they seemed to love us as their own; often they said they’d like to gobble us up.’

The mothers knit them jerseys, crochet their blankets, cook up corned beef, rice pudding, chicken dinners and biscuits, comfort them and administer medicine. Vincent is an appealing character, stoic and rational, generous and kind, unlike his brother William. Apart from brief trips into the nearest village where the inhabitants are standoffish, the boys are virtual prisoners. They have no television, except for the Queen’s Christmas Message, no radio, and the only book is the Book of Knowledge, a clumsily excised encyclopaedia. On Music Appreciation Day they are exposed to hideously anodyne Richard Clayderman. Toys are limited to a set of Stickle bricks and one jigsaw puzzle.

The Book of Knowledge keeps company in the library with a ledger, the Book of Dreams, where Mother Morning writes down what the boys dreamt about, or Mother Night if the dream was a nightmare and woke the sleeper. Another ledger, the Book of Guilt, contains lists of boyish crimes such as fighting and rudeness and disobedience. The owners of the many listed names have all left the house, ostensibly moving to Margate, where they have blissful existences of side-shows, donkey rides and candyfloss.

Another child is introduced, a girl called Nancy, who lives with her parents in a small suburban house that she never leaves. When rare visitors come, she is shut in the wardrobe with a sandwich and her Spirograph set. Nancy’s chapters are shorter than those of Vincent, in the third person, and the claustrophobia of her existence is real. Like the Captain Scott mothers, her parents adore her, but there is an abiding level of cruelty in their treatment.

Back and forth the narration shifts without a tremor, between Nancy and the triplets. Chidgey’s masterful hand is sure and deliberate, the foreboding story unfolds without a false note or moment of disappointment.  Alterations to real history are fascinating. Among them, the moon landing is brought forward to 1957, mass manufacture of penicillin is a decade earlier and the polio vaccine is available around twenty years earlier than it was in reality. These small alterations would have had an enormous societal effect. Lord Mountbatten, however, meets his end as he really did in 1979, assassinated by an IRA bomb. (‘Maniacs and monsters,’ says Nancy’s father, watching the TV news.)

The Minister for Loneliness, a position in reality not created until 2022, has her own chapters. These occasionally verge on didacticism, but the outside viewpoint is necessary, not only for the imparting of important information but also to relieve the claustrophobia of the children’s lives.

Themes chime with some of Chidgey’s previous work. The Wish Child, set in Germany during the war, is also partly told from a child’s point of view and examines the corruption, racism and cruelty of the Nazi regime. I concluded my 2016 review of that book: ‘Vivid, informed and profound, The Wish Child is a stunning achievement.’ There are also intersections with her disturbing, brilliant 2020 novel, Remote Sympathy but to detail those here would be to introduce too many spoilers.

I thought about these books as I read The Book of Guilt, and I also remembered Steve Sem-Sandburg’s traumatising book The Chosen Ones (2014), which concentrates on a Nazi disabled children’s hospital in Vienna. I had the experience of interviewing Sem-Sandburg at the Auckland Writers’ Festival and he struck me as a very unhappy man, having researched the disturbing facts and from them constructed his novel, which is entirely devoid of humour but bristling with all kinds of inventive cruelties.

By contrast, Chidgey is blessed with a dry, wise and gentle humour, which is encountered mostly in dialogue. Characters’ voices ring true with idioms of the period. The gazing ball in the Captain Scott garden – ‘shimmering in the ferns like a great eye’ – lends grace and metaphorical beauty, reflecting and distorting the world around it.

Given the frightening rise of fascism around the world, The Book of Guilt could not be better timed. We are lucky to have a writer like Chidgey who can throw open history, reshape it, and spin a compelling, sparkling narrative that not only entertains but acts as a warning.