Guilty pleasure

Catherine Chidgey's addictively readable new novel explores a parallel dystopian 1970s Britain.

- EMMA NEALE

“Before I knew what I was, I lived with my brothers in a grand old house in the heart of the New Forest. It had blue velvet curtains full of dust, and fire surrounds painted like marble to fool the eye, and a panelled entrance hall with old dark mirrors.”

Right from these opening lines, Catherine Chidgey lightly traces several abiding themes of her tense, compelling, genre-fusing book. There is the hint of submerged identity; of aspiration and prosperity, rubbing skins with disappointment and neglect; a preoccupation with what is authentic and what is fraudulent, the self and truth only dimly visible. Several themes, but certainly not all - this gripping novel is folded through with many preoccupations.

Calling on the deeply rooted psychological power of the storytelling rule of three, the novel is divided into The Book of Dreams, The Book of Knowledge and The Book of Guilt. Three women, Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night, care for a set of triplets in an all-boy's orphanage. There are three main narrative perspectives: Vincent, one of the 13-year-old triplets; the Minister of Loneliness, a government minister in charge of national care institutions known as the Sycamore Homes; and Nancy, a young girl kept in seclusion by fastidious older parents. This attention to pattern also cooly embodies the quest for order and control, the troubling obsession at the core of the fictional investigation.