Review: The Book of Guilt, by Catherine Chidgey

Feverishly anticipated by both readers and critics, The Book of Guilt has been touted as a potential book of the year by many local and international pundits. It’s Catherine Chidgey’s ninth novel, and the latest in a career defined by critical acclaim, diverse and genre spanning styles and voices, immaculate research, and an unrelenting dedication to great storytelling. The Book of Guilt is full of hidden secrets and plenty of suspense, underpinned by a thoughtful consideration of individualism, bioethics and the ways we ‘other’ and dehumanise people who are different to us. 

It’s been a busy couple of years for Chidgey. Her last two novels, the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction-winning The Axeman’s Carnival and the schoolgirl thriller Pet, dominated the Aotearoa New Zealand bestsellers list for months, and were both longlisted for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award. Chidgey is no stranger to awards – she’s won variously the Best First Book Award at the New Zealand Book Awards, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Betty Trask Award in the UK, and the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at the Ockham Book Awards twice, as well as being longlisted for the prestigious Women’s Prize. 

The Book of Guilt isn’t set in Aotearoa like her previous two novels, and nor is it set in Germany, the locale for Chidgey’s two World War II novels, The Wish Child and Remote Sympathy. Instead, we find ourselves in southern England, where we meet identical triplets Vincent, William and Lawrence, who wear coloured shirts to identify themselves - Lawrence wears green, Vincent yellow, and William red. They live in Captain Scott, one of the Scheme’s Sycamore Homes. 

The Sycamore homes were created in 1944, the book tells us, ‘after the war’, and this is one of the first signs that this novel is not in the world as we know it, but a world where flags from America, Germany and Britain were ‘planted in the moons dust in 1957’, a world in which Hitler was murdered by suicide bomber Major Axel von dem Bussche in November 1943, an assassination which led to immediate peace talks with western allies. Certain compromises on both sides were made - as Lord Halifax is quoted as saying in the triplets’ Book of Knowledge, they must ‘act to bring about peace, whatever the price’. A treaty was swiftly signed by all countries, a treaty that paved the way for significant advances in the biological sciences, most crucially by Britain’s ‘own’ Dr Roach, the founder of the Scheme.

But what was the price to be paid for the hurried peace plan? The Book of Guilt sets out to uncover exactly how high, and how damaging, such a toll might be. 

All the children at the Sycamore Homes are orphans and they ‘sometimes felt poorly’, suffering from a mystery illness, which they call the Bug. This illness presents itself with many differing symptoms, sometimes a rash, other times a temperature, maybe an upset tummy. Sometimes children died from the Bug, if they didn’t maintain the rigid schedule of personal wellness instructed of them: ‘even the wrong sort of attitude could set the Bug running rampant inside us’. Vincent, Lawrence and William are the last remaining boys at Captain Scott. The rest have recovered, and as a reward, have gone to Margate, to the Big House, to the theme park, the famous Shell Grotto, the sunshine, and the beach. The triplets work hard to be ‘Good boys, helpful boys’, so they too can recover - going to Margate is an all-consuming dream for them. 

 The boys don’t live at Captain Scott alone - they have Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night. Each Mother has her role, although all three Mothers can write in the Book of Guilt, a tome reserved for the recording of every child’s misdemeanours. At the outset, the worst behaviour exhibited by the triplets is a penchant for trickery – swapping their coloured shirts and pretending to be another brother; but the novel is long, and the boys are young. 

Their entire lives are limited and ruled by books: everything they know about the world comes from the encyclopaedia collection The Book of Knowledge, and every morning, Mother Morning records the ‘garbled fragments’ and the ‘nonsense’ of their dreams the instant they rouse from sleep into the Book of Dreams, which, together with the Book of Guilt, is written up for Dr Roach. 

There are also two secondary storylines, one about a young girl, Nancy, who lives with her parents Kenneth and Marjorie, and the other about the new government’s Minister for Loneliness, who is tasked with disclosing some big news to the children of the Sycamore Homes. It gets tricky to discuss much of what happens in the book beyond this point without giving away huge spoilers. Like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker-shortlisted Never Let Me Go, a novel that could sit as a sister, or cousin, to The Book of Guilt, the true nature of the triplets and the Scheme is central to the slow, suspenseful unravelling of the plot. 

The Book of Guilt examines the ways in which societies weaponise ignorance for our own selfish gain and asks us to also consider the debate of nature vs. nurture. Are we born with our personalities intact through genetics, or do our minds begin empty, shaped only by experience and conditioning? Are children destined to follow in the paths of their ancestors or are they free to make new choices? 

The Book of Guilt is a propulsive and accessible read, cleverly peppered with hints and clues. It’s also a cautious and curious look at how we might integrate technological advances into our lives and asks us to reconsider ideas around the value of individual life versus the value of humanity as a whole. Is the harm of one person justified if it creates better outcomes for a greater number of people? What harms do we each cause in order to protect those we love? Like all great novelists, Chidgey doesn’t seek to give us definitive answers, giving us only the inspiration to ask new, and possibly better, questions. 

Reviewed by Josie Shapiro