On first reading, New Zealand author Catherine Chidgey’s new novel has little in common with her previous one, the Women’s prize-longlisted Remote Sympathy. That book, set mainly in Buchenwald concentration camp during 1943-44, focused on the unlikely affinity between a Jewish doctor prisoner and his patient, the terminally ill wife of one of the camp’s Nazi administrators. It is worlds away from Pet, set in a Catholic primary school in a Wellington suburb in the 1980s, and a care home in Auckland 30 years later. And yet the claustrophobic, slightly surreal aspect of this school, its random violence, racism, misogyny and oppressive authoritarianism, are not dissimilar to the themes of Remote Sympathy, while Chidgey again displays her prodigious talent for psychological suspense and minutely evoking past eras.
Justine, an only child whose mother died of breast cancer a year before, is 12 in 1984. Like all her classmates in their last year of primary school at St Michael’s, she is in thrall to their new teacher, Mrs Price, who is “younger than our parents, and prettier than our mothers”. Superficiality and manipulation – whether by means of body image or religion – are uppermost in this book. Mrs Price “wore her wavy blond hair with a deep fringe like Rebecca De Mornay in Risky Business – not that we’d been allowed to see the film, because it wasn’t suitable. Around her neck a gold crucifix, with a tiny gold figure of Jesus, all ribs and thorns.”
Mrs Price – whose husband and daughter are alleged to have died in a car accident, adding to her mystique – is all ribs and thorns too, existing on diet milkshakes, little brown pills, faux sweetness and actual sadism. “My classroom, my rules,” as she coolly explains to Justine. Mrs Price runs her domain on a sinister divide-and-conquer basis. Individual students are selected as “pets” – to clean the blackboard dusters after class, collect Mrs Price’s endless prescriptions from the pharmacy – before being inexplicably dropped from favour, to their disorientation and dismay.
The atmosphere is redolent with mistrust and competitiveness, especially among the girls. Justine, who suffers from seizures and is lonely and unpopular, apart from her friendship with classmate Amy, is taken up by Mrs Price, who presents herself as a substitute mother. Amy is swiftly shunned when Justine becomes part of an exclusive set who swarm around Mrs Price, acting on her every whim. In one particularly discomfiting scene at Mrs Price’s house, the girls are egged on not only to verbally condemn their classmates but to dress up their teacher, plaster her with garish makeup and even shave her “silky golden” legs. She is a human idol, in contrast to the passive statue of the Virgin Mary at school, “her heart full of roses and fire”.
Chidgey’s examination of sexual politics is ruthless, with the girls crudely ranking each other in terms of prettiness and thinness and avidly watching beauty contests on TV. At school, the children are primed for a morbid fascination with death, from the cruel treatment of the classroom’s pet salamander to the shocking events that play out later in the novel. Lessons on the Indigenous history of Australasia, meanwhile, simply reinforce colonialism. Amy, from a Chinese family, is systematically bullied and ostracised. Karl, the class prankster, who is Māori, is singled out for excessive corporal punishment by the headteacher, “who strapped us for bad behaviour, and sometimes … drew blood”. Justine’s father Neil, an antiques dealer, is kind but depressed, with his “sad drinks and sad records”. Soon he falls into Mrs Price’s orbit. When students’ belongings start to go missing from the classroom, Pet’s sticky tension rises by uncomfortable degrees.
The novel hums with the low-level fever of adolescent boredom and betrayal, as well as providing an indelible portrait of a country still mired in “tradition”. Even popular culture is subject to a geographically induced time lag, adding to the paradoxically unmoored sense of living in a place that is a very long way from anywhere else. Less successful is the rather camp acceleration of the plot into high-octane thriller territory, and the book’s too-neat denouement, set decades afterwards in 2014. Despite this, Chidgey’s grasp of the slipperiness and self-delusion of memory – from Justine as an increasingly unreliable narrator, to her father’s later dementia – is faultless.
• Pet is published by Europa (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
