Out of the mouths of fledglings

High up in the dry hills of New Zealand’s South Island, a magpie chick falls from its nest and is rescued by a quietly determined farmer’s wife. “I’m worried you think it’s a baby”, says Marnie’s husband, Rob, who watches with thinly veiled disgust as she rears this “scruff of a thing” into a fully formed fledging. But Rob owes her. Something has happened – is still happening – in this house that sends an undercurrent of danger through its foundations, making the matter of this helpless bird’s survival even more precarious.

It is the magpie, Tama – short for Tamagotchi, after the “little plastic eggs” that Marnie played with as a child – who narrates the story. With words gathered like shiny objects from the people, tele­vision char­acters and radio hosts around him, Tama starts to talk. “I felt the words I’d learned to speak chafing inside me like swallowed grit”, he tells us as he spouts full turns of phrase like verbal tics, often with darkly comic timing. “Maybe you’ve had a nose job. Classic whore move, babe. What the fuck’s a peacherine?” It is a clever conceit – allowing Cath­erine Chidgey an outsider’s vantage point from which to expose the absurdity of the things humans say – and the things they don’t. Tama doesn’t only forego social etiquette by parroting profanities, he also inadvertently hints at the dark goings-on between Rob and Marnie, to which he is the only witness: “You know I’d never hurt you, not on purpose”.

Soon Tama’s precocious skills attract attention online and a social media guru is brought in to monetize this loquacious magpie with memeable content. The attention grinds on Rob’s brittle ego and he tightens his control of Marnie, insisting on checking every message on her phone. But online fame brings the prospect of profit to his drought-ravaged sheep station, so he acquiesces to visits from adoring fans and to livestream cameras being installed around the house. (You can see where this might lead.) Chidgey plays with the idea of being trapped, of performing, of being able to speak, but not to speak freely. She draws parallels between Tama, who has chosen to live in the confines of the farmhouse over a life in the wild, and Marnie, who has chosen to stay with Rob in the hope each episode of violence will be the last.

All the while an atmosphere of brutality builds as we witness the harshness of life on the farm: newborn lambs having their tails docked and fried for Rob’s dinner; the dry, punishing landscape, with its unproductive soils; the nine polished axes hanging on the bedroom wall from Rob’s woodcutting contests; the pressure looming for a tenth to be won at the upcoming Axeman’s Carnival. Tama visits his magpie family in the trees and hears of his mother’s “death by car”, his uncle’s “death by powerline”, his brother’s “death by cold”; he watches as a cousin is trapped in a cage. Tama’s father, the leader of the flock, denounces his son’s betrayal in choosing to live among killers: “We have forgotten you. Understand? You are not even a memory. Not even a ghost”.

How do we and Tama square all this with the world of peppy Instagram followers and the chirpy video tutorials that Marnie watches to learn about the best make-up for concealing her bruises? By telling the story from the bemused perspective of a bird, Chidgey finds light relief amid the twin worlds of unforgiving patriarchy – human and corvid. The bathos of Tama’s interjections, his childlike detachment from the situation as he tries to piece together clues about Rob, stashing his cigarette lighter and chapstick under the bath to “Figure out his MO, then beat him at his own game”, make this disturbing storyline surprisingly whimsical.

There is a reason why most novels voiced by an animal are aimed at children, with their superior capacity for suspending disbelief, and The Axeman’s Carnival takes some getting used to. There is an odd and inconsistent shift in tone from Tama’s standard narrative voice, with its old-fashioned, poetic mannerisms – “How beautiful they were, those bowls of twig and vine, wire and twine, no two alike”, he wistfully observes of wild magpies’ nests – to a higher-octane cadence: “I was their little gold mine, their money spinner, their cash cow, their sure thing, their meal ticket”. We must also overlook the contradiction between Tama the character being limited to parroting learnt phrases and Tama our narrator facing no such restriction. Yet this is an action- and dialogue-heavy caper, ripe for screen or radio adaptation, where these inconsistencies will no doubt pose less of a problem. There is little time during its unstoppable acceleration towards a too hasty conclusion for deep insights into its themes, but this does not detract from the joy of the journey. Inspiration surely came in part from Cameron Bloom and Bradley Trevor Greive’s bestselling Australian memoir (later a film) Penguin Bloom (2016), the true story of a magpie chick adopted by a family in a time of crisis. While that magpie eventually took flight for good, in The Axeman’s Carnival it is a person whose freedom is ultimately at stake.

Clare Saxby is a freelance writer

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