Author(s): Catherine Chidgey

Novel | Aotearoa Fiction | 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards | 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards short lists | 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards — winners

Everywhere, the birds: sparrows and skylarks and thrushes, starlings and bellbirds, fantails and pipits – but above them all and louder, the magpies. We are here and this is our tree and we’re staying and it is ours and you need to leave and now. 

Tama is just a helpless chick when he is rescued by Marnie, and this is where his story might have ended. ‘If it keeps me awake,’ says Marnie’s husband Rob, a farmer, ‘I’ll have to wring its neck.’ But with Tama come new possibilities for the couple’s future. Tama can speak, and his fame is growing. Outside, in the pines, his father warns him of the wickedness wrought by humans. Indoors, Marnie confides in him about her violent marriage. The more Tama sees, the more the animal and the human worlds – and all of the precarity, darkness and hope within them – bleed into one another. Like a stock truck filled with live cargo, the story moves inexorably towards its dramatic conclusion: the annual Axeman’s Carnival. 

Part trickster, part surrogate child, part witness, Tama the magpie is the star of this story. Though what he says aloud to humans is often nonsensical (and hilarious with it), the tale he tells us weaves a disturbingly human sense. The Axeman’s Carnival is Catherine Chidgey at her finest – comic, profound, poetic and true.

‘Catherine Chidgey fuses the sensibility of our cinema of unease – of life on a struggling back-blocks farm with a dour farmer – with the liberating and alienating madness of fame, all of it seen by the novel’s hero, the magpie Tama. Tama does all the voices – orchardists, tourists, fairground commentators, daffy activists, and the unappeasable axeman – and he does them justice. The Axeman’s Carnival is a compulsive read and flat-out brilliant.’ —Elizabeth Knox

Catherine Chidgey's latest inventive, acute and entertaining novel THE AXEMAN’S CARNIVAL has been awarded the prestigious Jann Medlicott Acord Prize for Fiction at the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Narrated by Tama, a magpie who very cleverly 'does all the voices' and mimics even an author's relationship to their story and characters, the novel treats life in the backblocks of rural Aotearoa as a scenario in which humans fail to suppress their inner faults and play out their ambivalences towards each other and toward the so-called natural world.
>>All hail the Book of the Year.
>>Each book is a different creature.
>>Book of the Week: Bird of the Year. 
>>Life on the farm. 
>>Pecky reviews the book. 
>>An excellent conversation with Sara Baume (author of Seven Steeples). 
>>"There's a fire under me."
>>The New Zealand 12" Championship. 
>>Read Stella's review of The Wish Child. 
>>Read Thomas's review of The Beat of the Pendulum. 
>>Remote Sympathy. 
>>Quardleoodleardlewardledoodle #1
>>Quardleardleoodlewardledoodle #2
>>Other winners in the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.