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.”
