A school for scandal

Catherine Chidgey's latest novel is a twisty, ideas-rich portrait of 1980s adolescence, and much more besides.

- KELLY ANA MOREY

PET, by Catherine Chidgey (THWUP, $38)

Hot on the heels of her second Acorn Prize for fiction, for The Axeman’s Carnival, comes Catherine Chidgey’s eighth novel, Pet, which is of course utterly brilliant. No surprises there. A bit of a thriller, Pet is set in a Catholic intermediate school in Wellington and an Auckland rest home, and packed with ideas far beyond the genre’s remit, so the risk of spoilers limits what can be said of what happens within.

A plot- and character-forward novel, with Chidgey’s trademark artful and clever themes, ideas and observations scattered through the text with the lightest of hands, Pet hurtles towards its shocking end like a speeding American muscle car.

Narrated by Justine in both 1984, when she’s in her final year of intermediate school, and 2014, when she’s an adult visiting her father, who has dementia, Pet revolves around the charismatic and increasingly mysterious Corvette-driving Mrs Price, a newish teacher at Justine’s school, St Michael’s. She’s a woman who plays favourites with her young charges, who worship her, deftly manipulating them less and less benignly as it becomes increasingly apparent there’s a petty thief in their midst. And who doesn’t like a good old-fashioned witch-hunt?