Book review: How perspectives can vary

With much to unfold, and many plot twists to hide, Catherine Chidgey teases out her story with great skill in 'The Book of Guilt'

New Zealand author Catherine Chidgey explores various topics in this book, including the ethics of scientific research. Picture: Craig Baxter/Getty

• The Book of Guilt 
• Catherine Chidgey 
• John Murray, €19.99

In previous works, New Zealand author Catherine Chidgey has used a magpie for a narrator, and pondered Nazism from the point of view of a child. 

She is a skilled and inventive storyteller, and The Book of Guilt is another imaginative tour de force.

13-year-old identical triplets Vincent, William, and Lawrence are the sole remaining occupants of a remote Hampshire children’s home. 

It’s 1979, but an alternate one, changed significantly by the fact that Adolf Hitler was successfully assassinated in 1943.

Thereafter, under the ‘Gothenburg Treaty’, governments cooperated to fast track medical and scientific progress, leading to remarkable breakthroughs. 

But they have done so by dubious means, even using research carried out in death camps by the Nazis.

None of this is very clear to Vincent, William, and Lawrence, who live in isolation from the wider world and run wild in the gardens of their enclosure. 

With touching sincerity, the boys quote snippets from an encyclopaedia, the Book of Knowledge, which has been their only source of education. 

‘James Joyce,’ Vincent declares boldly at one point, ‘author remarkable for a style verging sometimes on incoherence’.

Their only human connection is with three carers, Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon, and Mother Night, who feed and tend to the boys, record their dreams and administer daily medications. 

They are part of a government programme called the ‘Sycamore Scheme’, which appears to be winding down, and the boys’ cherished dream is that they will be sent to Margate, the site, they are told, of an idyllic children’s home.

In this alternate 1970s, regrettable artefacts have survived, including Jeffrey Archer, Richard Clayderman, and Margaret Thatcher who, though never actually named, appears to have fulfilled her destiny and become prime minister. 

The only female member of her cabinet is the Minister of Loneliness, a harried, well-meaning woman who is sent to oversee an adoption programme for the Sycamore kids.

The boys, meanwhile, wonder why they are shunned and pointed at by locals when they run errands in the nearby village, and why the pills they pop daily make them feel not better, but worse. 

And why did all the Sycamore kids’ parents die so dramatically in house fires, car crashes, and shipwrecks? 

A trio of girls sent on a socialising date offer clues, but Vincent, meanwhile, is growing more and more worried about William’s cruel streak.

The Book of Guilt is narrated in turns by Vincent, the Minister of Loneliness, and a 13-year-old girl called Nancy, whose connection to the boys will slowly become apparent. 

Some early reviews have noted plotting similarities with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, but while these are sometimes striking, Ms Chidgey’s narrative originality is never in doubt. 

She does a fine job of catching the imagined voice of an early teenage boy with a necessarily limited world view, and her imagery throughout is excellent. 

“Diane wore spectacles that made her eyes too big,” Vincent remarks, “like you couldn’t get away from her.” 

With much to unfold, and many plot twists to hide, Catherine Chidgey teases out her story with great skill, and there are some wonderfully chilling set piece moments, like a trip to Strangeways prison, and a beautifully orchestrated scene where the triplets are visiting potential adoptive parents and fall out spectacularly while playing.

It’s an entertaining and very nicely written book, but as ever with Ms Chidgey there are serious issues rumbling beneath, for instance the ethics of scientific research, universal civil rights, and the arbitrary assumptions about who might and might not possess a soul.

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