In a Fishbone Church

by Catherine Chidgey

Book Overview

When Clifford Stilton dies, his son Gene crams his carefully kept diaries into a hall cupboard - but Clifford's words have too much life in them to be ignored, and start to permeate his family's world. Clifford taught Gene about how to find rocks and fossils, and about how to kill birds and fish. Gene passes on a similar inheritance to his daughters, Bridget and Christina - they have their own ways of digging and discovering the past, keeping an account...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0864733356
• ISBN13: 9780864733351
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Victoria University Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Lapidary prose from new New Zealand writer

Catherine Chidgey is a writer to watch out for. This is her first novel, but it doesn't read like one at all (another reviewer called it a refreshing change from all those other "how I bonked my flatmate" first novels, and it is!). It's the deftly constructed story of one ordinary New Zealand family in the late twentieth century, told from a cunningly revolving viewpoint that covers a lifetime and slices of several lives. At first we see a philandering fossil-collecting father through his own diaries and his son's memories; then we follow that son (whose name is, fittingly for a family tale, Gene) and his wife (who at one point imagines herself inside the "fishbone church" of the title) through their marriage; and finally the book turns its focus on their two daughters (one of whom is adopted) moving away from home and into uncertain adulthood as their parents age. It's not a saga, as such. Rather, reading this book is like looking through an old Viewfinder found in the attic: we see a series of stereoscopically alive and detailed depictions of different moments and events in the life of a family. The book unfolds via small epiphanies, delayed revelations, and memories left unvoiced. Readers might be reminded of the wry and brilliantly efficient family histories of Kate Atkinson or Penelope Lively (although Chidgey's plotting is less dramatic and her characterization slightly sketchier); there are also glimmers of Woolf and (George) Eliot. The writing is utterly flawless, although the different narrative threads don't necessarily come together into one powerful denouement. This left me vaguely dissatisfied at first and may bother readers who prefer high drama and a neat wrap-up. But on reflection, I think Chidgey's saying something pretty damn smart about how "a family" works, and the ultimate incommensurability of the different lives lived inside one family. We're offered several different narratives that in the hands of other writers might have become the Big Story (adultery, adoption, terminal illness) but in Chidgey's novel each event has its own force for the characters it affects, but is not allowed to hang over the book like a giant metaphor for everything (and everyone) else. This is a finely balanced work, enhanced by the careful observation of everyday objects that become, in Chidgey's gentle hands, moving images of what her characters dare not say about life in an ordinary family -- lost diaries, fossils trapped in rock, treacherously steep staircases, and a dead fish that, viewed from the right angle, becomes a soaring church. Gorgeous.Also keep an eye out for Chidgey's newest book, Golden Deeds, which brings together in the same subtle way the stories of an English medievalist in a coma, a young New Zealand woman newly moved to the big city, and a missing child. It's even better than this one.