Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.  

“THE BOOK OF GUILT” by Catherine Chidgey (Published by Te Herenga Waka, $NZ 38) 

                                      The New Zealand Cover for "The Book of Guilt"

            England in the 1970s – but it’s a dystopian version of England. The Second World War finished when Britain made a deal with Germany after Hitler was assassinated, Germany was allowed to keep the territories it had conquered and England was not invaded. In England, a certain Dr. Roach is regarded as an expert in medicine and health. With  the approval of the government he has set up a series of Sycamore schools in remote areas away from towns, some for boys and some for girls, where they are taught ethics and cleanliness and healthy sports and are told about some science and a very patriotic version of history with only one set of books, known as The Book of Knowledge, to teach them. Dr. Roach regularly visits Sycamore Homes to check how they are getting on. In one of the Sycamore schools, a boy called Vincent tells us in the first person of his experience. He is one of a set of triplets – Vincent, Lawrence and William – and they are looked after by women, Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night. They are the only parents the boys know.  They are reaching the age of adolescence and Vincent is beginning to question things. Such as why have other boys disappeared? And why he, Lawrence and William are the only boys still living in the school? And when are they going to visit Margate where, they are told, they will have a whale of a time? And why are they separated from girls? Girls have to be called “young ladies” and are kept in other institutions except on special days when they can fraternise with the boys under supervision. Vincent, Lawrence and William may be triplets, but they have slightly different temperaments – Vincent is more likely to question things, Lawrence is a little bit of a pedant and is afraid of going against the rules, and William likes fun and games and sometimes breaks the rules. But on the whole they are normal boys who get on together.

            Vincent’s first-person narrative dominates most of the novel, but there are two other characters who speak in the first person. One is a young girl, Nancy, who is beginning to wonder why her parents always keep her indoors and won’t allow her to meet other people. The other is a member of parliament, a woman dubbed The Minister of Loneliness, who is beginning to have doubts about the real nature of the Sycamore schools while her boss, the Prime Minister, is mainly interested in saving money and therefore shutting down the Sycamore schools.

                                  The English cover for "The Book of Guilt"

            Among reviewers, only swine would give away all the twists and surprises of a new novel. [On my blog I am happy to give away whole plots only if I am dealing with old, well-known or classic novels.] Surprise is an important weapon for novelists, and I am not going to give away all the surprises. But I can say that it would have to be a very dull reader who did not understand, by a third of the way through The Book of Guilt, what the schools were really up to, viz, using boys [and girls] as human guinea-pigs in testing drugs, trying a sort of hypnosis by getting the boys to tell their dreams in the hope of finding out which of the boys could possibly become a delinquent, and weeding out and disposing those who were not perfect. And possibly [as I guessed early in the novel] that while the triplets are fully human beings, they had been cloned, that is, made artificially instead of being born the natural way. Much of this rings bells for me as I remember Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where people are cloned [not that the word “clone” was known in the 1930s when Huxley was writing] and where people who were not physically perfect could be eliminated. I should also note that towards the end of his novel, Huxley has a character who neatly explains how the whole system works. Catherine Chidgey also, late in the novel, has a character who explains how the whole system works. Then there is, in The Book of Guilt, a minor character who notes that without Dr. Mengele’s work many medical breakthroughs would not have happened.

            Chidgey makes it clear that her dystopian England is very influenced by Nazi ideas. But she also has other issues. One is the bigotry of “ordinary” people when they have to meet the cloned. This surely reminds us that every so often in [existing] England there are outbreaks of xenophobia. She drops in mentions of the type of TV programmes young Nancy likes to watch. One is Jim’ll Fixit, in which children were given all the things they had requested. This is a reference to the programme that, beginning in the 1970s, was hosted by Jimmy Savile but who, after his death, was revealed as a paedophile and predator who violated children. Maybe [I surmise] Chidgey was pointing out that children are often misled about what they think is good for them. There is clear reference to the Moors Murders - involving the murders of children. Then there is the complaisance of the general public who don’t really want to look into the flaw’s and rules of the country they live in. And Chidgey gives us a prime minister who seems awfully like Margaret Thatcher... wnich seems to be linked to the type of ultra-patriotic curriculum that is taught in the Sycamore Homes.  In some respects then, Chidgey is using satire to critique England as it is rather than critiquing a dystopian England.

 Catherine Chidgey now seems to be New Zealand’s best known and most widely read novelist. Her novel The Book of Guilt moves at a steady pace. She looks deeply into the psychology of her major characters but she also makes vivid her minor characters with their unique habits. Even if she deals with weighty things, she knows how to turn a tale and she moves her narrative to a surprising ending which I will not reveal.

I do not usually refer to what other reviewers have wrtten, but in this case I had a good look at what they said because the issues Chidgey raised are essential ones. Too many reviewers seemed to assume the novel is simply a warning against Nazi ideas which “could happen here”, so we should watch out for totalitarian states. Two of Chidgey’s novels The Wish Child and Remote Sympathy (both reviewed on this blog) are set in Nazi Germany and of course Chidgey deals with some of the horrors of the Nazi regime. But among many other things, she is concerned with how children are treated – or mis-treated. Even before the Holocaust was set in motion, the Nazis ruled that mentally-impaired people or people who were suffering chronic diseases were of no worth, could produce nothing and therefore they should be eliminated… “humanely” of course. Nazi doctors poisoned or suffocated people in gas vans. But this idea was not wholly invented by the Nazis. From the late 19^th century right up to the Second World War the idea of Eugenics flourished in much of the Western World, with the basic idea that only fit people should be allowed to give birth, others should be sterilised, with some advocating the elimination of unwanted people “humanely”.  Eugenics was not a small movement but was mainstream . It was embraced by many people in England (Marie Stopes and others), in America (Margaret Sanger – who was greatly admired by Hitler) and even in New Zealand where some of the founders of the Plunket Society were in favour of sterilising the poor and the weak. Nazis greatly expanded the ideas that had been promoted by the Eugenics movement.

Why do I go on at length about this? Because, at least in my view, far from being only a warning about totalitarian states, The Book of Guilt is also a warning about forms of Eugenics that are still with us. Your turn to tell me if I’m wrong about that.

 Footnote: The Book of Guilt was released first to an English audience. Only some months later was it marketed in New Zealand. Hence the two different front-covers. I understand that there was a third front-cover for Austrailan consumption, but I haven't been able to track it down.