New work fulfils all our wishes
Thirteen years after her last, comes Catherine Chidgey’s fourth novel. Paula Green finds it was well worth the wait.
Catherine Chidgey has a terrific writing pedigree. Her debut novel, In a Fishbone Church, won Best First Book at The New Zealand Book Awards along with the South-East Asia/South Pacific section of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. She has since received numerous honours and fellowships, and glowing accolades from home and abroad.
Chidgey’s latest and fourth novel, The Wish Child, was more than a decade in the making. Right from the first sentences I was caught up in the exquisite lure of the writing: musical, clear, lovingly tended. Nothing seems forced.
We follow the lives of two families in Hitler’s Germany. The Kronings keep bees in the country; the mother is devoted to Hitler, the father has disappeared, and the son, Eric, worries about the welfare of their Polish workers.
The Heilmanns live in Berlin with their four children; at work the father cuts out censored words from books, the mother censors what she says to others and obsessively counts things, the youngest daughter, Sieglinde, struggles to understand the deteriorating world as she listens and obeys.
What makes this sentient book matter is the way we get behind the domestic curtains to ordinary families swayed by obscene rhetoric and farfetched lies. Despite grandiose promises, daily lives are worse off. Food is scarce. Everything is under threat yet blind faith continues.
The abominable behaviour of Hitler and his army takes place off the frame of the page, but I carried that history like an unbearable weight as I read. Instead, we are in the shoes of families that see signs (the dead bodies in the street, the shadow patch of a star on a coat gifted) but don’t always know the full implication of what they witness.
What also makes the book matter is the presence and points of view of children as ‘‘the war keeps rolling on like bad weather’’. The children are little windows onto a whole gamut of human behaviour, at its best and at its worst: bullying, kind, authoritarian, loving, fearful, loyal, destructive, ignorant, misguided.
Eric had been in bed with a prolonged illness; the other children had already chosen their friends so he had none. Gottlieb Heilmann comforted his daughter’s anxiety by saying his building looked like a forest and wouldn’t get bombed.
The mysterious heart of the book is the unnamed narrator. Near the end, when Eric and Sieglinde meet by accident in Berlin, foraging for food and squatting in an abandoned theatre, the narrator makes himself or herself known. No reviewer will let that cat out of the bag, but the novel flashed back through my head, lines and incidents ringing with renewed intensity and startling pathos.
I love this book with its subterranean mysteries and spiky issues. I love the way, at this critical point in the world, when fundamental human values are violated, The Wish Child reminds us with grace and understated wisdom of a need to strive for universal good. I ached as I read. This novel is unmissable.