Review: The Starving Bride, by Catherine Chidgey

I've heard Catherine Chidgey called 'prolific'. I'd suggest 'productive' instead. The first word seems to imply ease, even a certain glibness. The second acknowledges the craft and graft that go into making fictions as good as hers.

I've also heard reservations expressed because some of her narratives have overtly overseas settings. (In this latest, we have the UK's Blackpool.) It's a curious criticism. We laud those NZers  in other fields who aim at overseas markets, so why not our writers?

Chidgey has long been intrigued by violence, physical and psychological, manipulative and eruptive. That violence flickers and flares from the start in The Starving Bride.

It's 'The Near Future', and eponymous protagonist Hazel is minus partner, profession and parents for various reasons. Well, in the almond-processing factory where she worked, she did keep carving some of the product into tiny skulls, to startle consumers. 

Thanks to apparent-friend Gilda, she lands a job at the retro Blackpool Tower, as a sleeping, dwindling, bridal gown-wearing exhibit in a reinforced glass coffin, around which prowls Xander the lion. All you 9-to-5 wage slaves may feel appropriately abashed.

It's a typically ingenious Chidgey concept, one that makes readers exclaim 'How does she think of....?' and other authors mutter 'Why can't I think of....?'

Setting and trappings are instantly, insistently contemporary: 'food riots, dead bees, climate change, sea level rise', along with texting emojis and the savagery of social media. And as with the author's other recent novels, there's a sense of threat, an ebbing then swelling menace that slinks through the story.

As 'the prettiest girl in Lancashire, starving for love' begins her 40 days of public exposure, with a wad of prize money glinting at the end, the narrative becomes a countdown – '35 days left....25 days....'. She lies there under her veil, allowed to sip water, stumbling back to her shabby room at night. Xander lopes and sniffs centimetres away, while crowds peer and pronounce: 'I thought she'd be prettier....Look at that pimple scar'.

But people have been staring and sneering at Hazel for years. One of the skills and strengths of The Starving Bride is its treatment of the female body image, with all the attendant prurience and persecution, objectification and exploitation. Distressing, destructive scenes from Hazel's childhood; the presentation at Blackpool of her apparently failing form as a spectacle with spectators' blithe assumption of the right to criticise; and the increasing role played by the Anabelles, 'silent girls with no flesh on their frames' (read and find out), are threaded deftly, always plausibly through the narrative. Hazel's switchbacking attitude to food is both power and punishment. Meanwhile – and this is terrifically done – Xander seems to grow more formidable as she grows more gaunt. 

A pleasing parade of secondary characters passes. Regard Dmitri the security guard with appropriate suspicion. Feel for Frank (see next para). Prepare to be jolted by pretty blonde Gilda. Suppress the urge to kick flawless Jacqueline. Draw breath at council hypocrisy and the perversion of truth. Find yourself hoping things go OK for Xander.

Time and place, nights and days become disjointed, evasive. Hazel drifts then lurches between past and present. Her attendants seem to wear multiple faces. The crowds' yammers swell to crescendoes. So do the threats and portents, a number of them seen via decent, distressed Frank, the teacher / father / agitator whose trajectory veers towards that of Hazel. The plot swoops into horror, salvation, a protracted scene of hallucinatory revelations which is as good as anything Chidgey has ever written. 

I'll carp about just one thing. The Axeman's Carnival, Pet, The Book of Guilt all built powerfully, engrossingly to a narrative peak, then followed with a denouement, an aftermath that had a marginally perfunctory quality. Things are more comprehensively concluded here, and the 'Three Years Later' which concludes the narrative is enviably neat and apposite, but there's the whiff still of things being hurried along to a conclusion. As I say, I'm carping. 

A Catherine Chidgey novel is always engrossing, inventive, novel in both senses. The Starving Bride is all of those. A queue will already be forming for her next one.