All right, be honest, you're a read this listener, so that already tells me that you're a reader and one who's both well informed and has clearly impeccable taste. That's a given. So answer me this. Can you name five writers from New Zealand? Oh wait, if I are a betting man, I'd say maybe you went with Witty eh Mehra who wrote Whale Writer. Maybe Janet Frame, Catherine Mansfield. I don't know. Maybe you're a fan of crime writer Nio Marsh, or you're reaching back to remember Alan Duff
who wrote Once for Warriors. They're the kind of exceptions that tend to come up when people make that list, but it's hardly a list that reflects contemporary, exciting new voices. We've had a wide range of guests in our almost
one hundred episodes from all around the world. We've had conservatively about fifteen thousand Irish writers on the show at this point, But with the exception of Eleanor Catton, the only other New Zealand writer I can think of is Ben Suri, and his status as an Australian is pretty established at the point. Australia's closest neighbors have been shamefully underrepresented, and I don't think it's just an US problem. By and large, Australians have a reading blind spot when it
comes to Keyway authors. I'm definitely guilty of it. There's Lloyd Jones, who wrote the amazing novel Mister Pip, amongst others. There's a couple of poets I like. I read a great novel by Elizabeth Knox last year, called The Absolute Book. I like the work of Emily Perkins, but that's not a huge range of writers. Last year I was a
judge on the RA Historical Novel Prize. It's one hundred and fifty thousand dollars and it's open to Australian and New Zealand historical novelists and the process of reading the shortlist introduced me to countless authors I hadn't read before amongst the entrants. More shamefully, I was embarrassed. I have to admit that it was introducing me to the work of one of my fellow judges, an author called Katherine Chidge. Catherine's written nine novels, she's one COMSS awards and strings
of accolades. She is a big deal, but she remains almost entirely unread in Australia. I swiftly played catch up and was delighted to discover that she's a brilliant writer, one of grace and style, whose books are these imaginative, clever, humane things, each quite different to one another, each rewarding
and enjoyable reads. The x Man's Carnival or Pet might both be good places to start, or you could begin with her new book, The Book of Guilt, which might just be the one that's going to help her find a much bigger Australian readership. It follows a group of triplets in a mysterious care home in late seventies England. But it's not the late seventies as we know it. This is a work that hinges on an alternate history.
The Second World War didn't end in the same way at the same time, and the ripple effects are considerable. The result is haunting and compelling and deeply thoughtful. I'm Michael Williams and this is Read. This the show about the books we love and the stories behind them. You and I first met as co judges on the judging panel of a literary prize, which is one of those jobs. It sounds like it'll be fun and ends up being just an extraordinary kind of avalanche of books that you
have to get your head around. But the thing about that price was it was a historical fiction prize, and I thought, given the singular relationship with history that the Book of Guilt has, I wanted to ask you about history in general and historical fiction and the relationship between events of the past and the imaginative. For you.
Yeah, you know, ever since I was little, I've been completely fascinated by the stories of the past. And I remember when I was a kid growing up with my one sibling, a sister who was just older than me. My mother always used to say to us in the school holidays, what do you want to do on your day? So we'd have a day each and we could choose
what we wanted to do. And my sister always wanted to, you know, go to the Wellington Zoo or go swimming, And I always wanted to go to the antique shops and to look at and handle those objects from the past because they seemed to me to be vessels of story. That was what was fascinating to me about those items that I started to collect with my pocket money and
I'm still an avid collector and admirer of antiques. And then when I went to live in Berlin in the mid nineteen nineties as a student, it was really the first time I'd seen on the landscape ripped large the evidence of the past, and in particular of World War Two, because you know, Australia is the same as New Zealand, we didn't have that kind of damage to our geography.
And it blew my tiny mind, especially because I was in Berlin just a few years after the war had come down, and there was still, particularly in the East, so many buildings that had never been restored at all, so you could still quite easily imagine what it had been like in those final days of the war when
Berlin was falling. And the other thing that happened then that really stuck with me was that not infrequently in the news there would be a story about a building site that had accidentally excavated an un exploded bomb from the war and that had to be very carefully defused. And that felt like an amazing metaphor to me of the past being always present and always just underneath our feet,
waiting to explode. So the book that I wrote first, which came out in nineteen ninety eight, you know, A Lifetime Ago, was called in a Fishbone Church, and it did touch on those elements of German history that had so got under my skin, and I guess that always stayed with me and then came to the surface again in my two novels that are set in World War
two Germany, The Wish Child and Remote Sympathy. And I guess as a writer, I store away artifacts that I think will be useful to me, or that I know somehow belong in my writing, and I'm not quite sure how when I first encounter them. But years later, or sometimes even decades later, they'll, you know, they'll they'll be excavated again, they'll rise to the surface again, and I'll realize, well,
that's that's why I remember that particular thing. So an example of that from my time in Germany was that as a student, I enrolled in a university paper that was specifically for foreign students and it was an intro action to German history and it involved subsidized trips around Germany. So obviously I decided to do that paper and we went to you know, some of the most beautiful parts
of Germany. But we also toured the university campus, so this was the freer Univasitet in Berlin, and we saw some of the buildings where medical experimentation had taken place. You know, it was right there on the campus that I always attending. Again blew my tiny key we mind. And another trip that we did was with a history professor who took us all to Broken vald concentration camp and we slept overnight there in the former SS quarters,
which I still kin't quite believe that happened. Yeah, that's bonkers as bonkers. And it was kind of a remnant from the East German days when it had been the responsibility of every teacher, every high school teacher to take their students to boben Veild and they would to the camp and see the atrocities. And I remember our professor telling me about, you know, pointing to this stump of an oak tree and saying that that had been the
celebrated Girta oak. And the story was that before the camp, long before the camp had been built, there there was this oak tree that the great Girta had sat beneath on his hillside rambles and written poetry and plays in the shelter of this oak tree, and so it was sacred to the s s and it was a symbol of you know, the noble Germany that they idealized, and to the prisoners, it was a symbol of everything that
had been lost. So this was the only tree that was spared when the prisoners cleared the land to build the camp. And the legend attached to that tree was that if it perished, then so too with Germany. And sure enough, towards the end of the war, precision US bombing attack that was aimed at the armaments factory next to the camp, some sparks from those bombs flew over the fence and the tree was satellite and had to be felt. So the stump is still there, but the
tree is not. And it was one of those amazing symbols that just kind of drops into your lap sometimes as a writer, and it was one of those moments. Right now, Yes, I need to remember this, I need to write this down. I need to take photos of this, because somehow it will be important to my writing, you know, two decades later, or however long or longer. So I guess that's you know, how I think about history and
the imagination. It's always very much tied to those physical objects for me, and those elements of the concrete world.
I love that. I wonder whether it's the same for Kwai writers as it is for Australian writers. I think Christopher Kosch one of his books about Kind of Spies in Canberra that I remember as being a book mainly
about dampness in an Australian city. But there's a line in that that I'm sure I'm misquoting, but along the lines of history was something that happened elsewhere that actually the domestic history wasn't exciting, that wasn't enough to fuel kind of these imaginative leaps, that you actually had to remove yourself from this part of the world and go
elsewhere to really feel energized and excited about history. And I'm curious for you, from the Wellington antique shops to a sleepover in book involved whether you had a sense that it was only when you left home that you could see this storytelling potential. I guess of these moments.
I do know what you mean, and yes, I think I did feel that certainly in my twenties, you know, when I went off to Boolin but having said that, you know, the first book that I started writing was there was very much in New Zealand's story, even though it did have scenes set in Berlin, you know, with
a young student very like myself studying in Berlin. But it was also looking back to home, and I had that experience that I think a lot of writers talk about, which is the ability to see home in greater clarity when you're far away from it. I have set probably fifty to fifty of my books in New Zealand and overseas, and I think things are starting to change in New Zealand in the way that we think about our own history.
So you know, that was something that I noticed time and again in Germany and that I really admired about the German people was how I'm afraid they are to look their dark past in the face and to acknowledge it. And it felt like New Zealand was a little bit behind them in that. I think that started to change over a couple of intervening decades. And today, for instance, the day that we're speaking, I said to you, as public holiday, So it's the Natouruke holiday, which has been
in existence now for maybe four years. This might be the fourth year that we've had it, and it celebrates the Maori New Year in Nturukei is a star constellation that appears at this time of the year. And for me that felt like, and I know from a lot of New Zealanders, when that holiday was established, it felt like a real acknowledgment of the people who were here first and a celebration of that. So, yeah, I think things are starting to change.
I don't want to read too much into the fact that one of the things in the Book of Guilt underpinning it seems to be a deep skepticism about the value of a treaty, in this case, an imagine treaty that ends the Second World War, and you give yourself a world where, instead of a decisive victory, instead of a military victory the Second World War, the assassination attend on Hitler is successful, and a treaty is broken and negotiated.
And I found it funny that you, Catherine Chig, seemed to be setting up an imagine world where there's something a bit dangerous and poisonous about the compromise that comes with making peace.
Yeah. Absolutely, I was really interested in exploring that possibility. You know, it's kind of territory that's been quite well trodden before. What if World War two had ended differently, but instead of you know, what if the Nazis had been victorious? Yeah, I wanted something a bit more kind of grayscale than that. What if uncomfortable compromises had to be reached? And how would Britain have looked in the wake of having to make those sorts of compromises and concessions,
and what might they have gained as well? You know, what might they have have bought with those thirty pieces of silver?
And that very much comes back to your tour of the university campus and the question of medical experiments happening during the war, because one of the things in imagined reality that you're presenting us with is what happens if the spoils of that research belonged to everyone after the war is done.
Yeah, you know, this was a question that I kept coming up against when I was researching the West Child and Remote Sympathy. Those two books said in Nazi Germany, is that painful debate around what should happen to the research that was conducted during the war, like should we ever touch it? Could it ever be used for good?
Or should it just be shelved and should it be treated as probably the pseudoscience that it was, but that really intrigued me, so, Yeah, it is something that sparked the idea for the book of.
Gift coming up. Catherine explains why the Second World War is such a central historical moment in so many books, and she also share some of her favorite contemporary New Zealand writers that we should all be checking out. We'll be right back. As you've said, this is kind of the third time that not just German history, but the Second World War plays a central role in one of
your books. And I'm curious about what it is about that historical moment that is such a rich inflection point in our understanding of so many things humanity, international relations, that in a storytelling sense, it's hard to think of another historical moment, certainly of the twentieth century that has been so central to so many stories.
Yeah, it is, and I think it's because for me anyway, it's because it was still easily within living memory when I was growing up and my dad was completely obsessed with World War Two. He was born in nineteen thirty one, so wasn't old enough to go to Wolban desperately wanted to. And you know that informed all of the games that he played with his friends when he was growing up,
which 'sed to tell us about. And all the books he read were you know, Churchill's autobiography, or they were books about Hitler or you know, those were the books that were on our shelves when I was growing up. And then I went to live in Germany for a while, so you know, I couldn't really escape it. I think it was something that was always going to find me
and stimulate my imagination. It just loomed so large for me in my childhood, and it is crazy to think that, you know, I was born in nineteen seventy that's really not too long away from nineteen forty five. You know, it is the well that so many writers keep going back to draw from, and has it all been said already? So with all of my books, and especially with those, I was really conscious to come at it from an
oblique angle or from an angle that hasn't been tried before. So, you know, kind of telling stories that are on the periphery and that aren't looking, aren't placing atrocities center stage. I'm not interested in kind of sensationalizing those terrible events. I'm much more interested in telling the stories of those people on the fringes.
And to be clear, the Book of Guilt is not about the Second World War. The reason I use the phrase inflection point is that in this imaginative world, that's the moment of departure. So it's a book that is set in England of the nineteen seventies, but an alternate, slightly subtly different England. The moon landing didn't happen at the same time, things are not quite as they were
because of that shift. One of the recurring things in your work, it seems to me, is the voices of younger people trying to understand or process kind of adult scenarios and schemes. And the Book of Guilt is very much centered around these three young boys. Can you tell us a bit about them?
Yeah? So, the Book of Guilt is the story of identical triplet brothers, Vincent, Lawrence and William, who are growing up in a boy's home in the New Forest, and they're cared for by mother morning, Mother afternoon, and mother night, and every day they have to take particular sorts of medicine to protect themselves from an illness called the bug, something that they and children like them are particularly susceptible too.
And if they recover permanently from the bug, then they are allowed to go and live in Margate, the seaside resort where all the other children who have recovered before them have gone, And they can swim in the sea every day, and they can sun themselves, and they can eat as much candy floss as they like. So this is what every boy wants. And every couple of months theresited by doctor Roach, who comes to check on their
health and is also particularly interested in their dreams. So every day Mother Morning comes into their bedream to wake them and has a ledger with her called the Book of Dreams, and she records their dreams in this book. So the triplets are thirteen thirteen years old, and there's another child who's also thirteen, Nancy, who lives a little way away in Exeter and is confined in a similar way as the boys are confined, but in her case she has never been allowed to leave the family house
her whole life. Her parents are more or less keeping her prisoner. At the beginning of the book, we find out that the boys home and other homes like it in England are about to be closed down and the remaining children, the few remaining children are going to be released into the community, and this process is being overseen by a woman called the Minister of Loneliness. So yeah,
that's kind of the setup for the book. And I guess, going back to your question, Michael about child narrators, I'm so interested in that time of life when we're not really still a little child, but we're also not yet adult. We kind of have a flat in both worlds and
we're beginning to question adult infallibility. And this is definitely something that Vincent, who is the main narrator of the Book of Guilt, it's also partly narrated by the Minister of Loneliness and Nancy, where Vincent is beginning to question everything that the adults in his life have told him, and gradually he begins to piece together that's of knowledge and discovers the truth. As the reader discovers the truth.
Part of what I so love about and what I think is so effective is not just that process of understanding trust, understanding the world and what you learn as a thirteen year old who's been brought up in such as singular environment, let's to say to be as elliptical abottle as possible. Is the ethical framework of a teenager is a fascinating thing, not just what you're taught, but what your instincts are about cruelty and kindness, about generosity
and your relationship to others. And the ways in which Vincent is both sympathetic and unsympathetic seem to me to be one of the real skills of this book. How did you plot that out? How did you work out where your comfort levels were with your protagonist?
I really loved writing Vincent. You know, he has had this very unusual upbringing and hasn't been exposed to the outside world, so there are these kind of structures built into his life to replace what he hasn't encountered. For instance, once a week, the boys have ethical Hour where they get together in their classroom slash library, and one of the mother's writes a question on the blackboard along the lines of the questions that were posed to us at school.
You know, I went to a Catholic school in religious studies class, Like a building is on fire and you can either save one child from that burning building, or you can save a painting that's so valuable you could sell it and raise enough funds to save twenty children. And what do you do? And you know, the answer in religious studies class was always well, there is no answer to that. You can't. You shouldn't even be debating questions like that.
Please debate this question. No, not so fast, you can't.
And is that kind of disconnected? I was really interested in exploring with Vincent and his brothers, and you know, they sort of they say to themselves, well, you know, on craft day we made these bird feeders with suet and seeds for the birds to hang in the trees and when to when there's very little food, and so therefore we must be kind. Doesn't that show that we're kind? But they're never quite sure who they are or what they are.
With a world like this where clearly, I mean, there's the stuff that's on the page, but I imagine there's lots of stuff that's not when it comes to building the imaginative framework and the speculative framework in which this world exists. You know, the alternate history elements aren't the subject of
the book, they're the setting of the book. And I think that's a really lovely approach that the story is one that can only happen in that world that you've created, but you don't feel the need to explain or to fill in all those gaps or to put that in the foreground in the writing of it. What does that look like? Do you have a giant schematic where you're like, Okay, well, these are the things that I know to be true, and some of them will make their way onto the page and others just wanted.
Yeah. Absolutely, I have a very detailed timeline about what really happened in Britain in nineteen seventy nine, and then picked from that that the real life events that I wanted to weave in because it was it was important to me to kind of hang this imagined world on the real world to make it seem as believable as possible.
So yeah, although I do take quite light touch with the speculative elements of the book, I've really wanted to weave in those things that I remember from nineteen seventy nine, like the television shows, you know, the Generation Game and the Two Ronnies, or in the UK, Jimmy Savile's show
Jim Will Fix It. That's kind of there in the shadows as well, to suggest that even though this is an imagined world, it's very much tied to the real world and there were some pretty terrible things going on in nineteen seventy nine.
It baffles and distresses me that you're not better known in Australia and I just want to, like, I know, it's it's a strange kind of structural thing, but I just I want to take a moment to think about Australian reading of New Zealand writers and ask whether whether you read Australian writers there or whether you have a similar blind spot to the one that we appear to have culturally. What the hell is going on there?
Catherine, I don't know what the hell is going on and it baffles me too, and it frustrates me no end. I remember it must have been nearly ten years ago that I was on a panel at a New Zealand literary festival with Kate Grenville and the subject of the panel was basically, why are we not reading each other's books? And you know, nearly a decade on, nothing has changed.
And I do think there's an element of cultural cringe going on there, you know, I think underneath it all, we think that if it's from this part of the world, well it can't be very good then, can it. So you know, let's read American writers, let's read British writers or writers in translation, anything but read our closest neighbor. And it used to be like that here until very recently it was like that here with New Zealand writers
as well. We didn't read ourselves much either. And certainly, you know, I would never see my books at the Airport Bookshop, which has always been kind of a gauge for me to see how much market penetration I'm achieving. And just probably this last year, I've started to see my books at you know, the more commercial chain store book stores and at the Airport bookshop.
Catherine help us out name a couple of New Zealand writers that Australian listeners to this show should be across and maybe aren't.
Okay, So, Danien Wilkins has just won the Jan Medlo Acorn Prize for Fiction, which is our biggest literary prize. It's you know, the big fiction prize at the National Book Awards, and he's just won that for a novel called Delirious. Danien has been publishing for a few decades now, and it feels like with Delirious, he's really starting to the big time in New Zealand. He's been kind of
underappreciated here until now. And Delirious is a really beautiful, contemplative, quiet sort of book about an aging couple who make the decision to move into a retirement village and then decide it's the worst thing that they've ever done in their lives, and against that there's this tragic past where they're still trying to come to terms with the loss of a child. It's just it's beautifully nuanced, it's really moving. It sounds depressing, it's not. There's a whole lot of
humor threaded through it as well. So I really encourage Australian readers to connect with Damien Wilkins. Another writer, a New Zealand writer I love is Adam, who is wildly experimental or like nothing else. You will read her novel Audition.
It came out in New Zealand a couple of years ago, I think has just come up out internationally and it's the story of three giants who are hurtling through space in a spacecraft that is very cramped and if they stop talking and stop telling their stories and trying to feel their way to what's happened to them in their past and who they are, then they grow bigger, and the space and the spacecraft shrinks even further and they
will die. So yeah, she is a really exciting, risk taking writer that should be known all over the world. Another writer I love is the poet and essays Kate camp who talks about the every day in her poetry in a way that makes it seem strange and magical. She's also written a book of essays called You Probably Think This Song Is About You, which is about growing up in New Zealand in the nineteen seventies. And yeah, she's a stunning, stunning writer.
Are three excellent tips. I'm very grateful to it. And you know, of course, Katherine Chiggy is the other person that we want every Australian listener to this show and beyond to get onto the work of. And it's been such a trait to talk to you today all.
Thanks so much, Michael. Great to catch up with you.
Katherine Chidge's latest novel, The Book of Guilt, is available at all good bookstores now and hopefully quite a few airport bookstores as well. So this is it. This is our final episode for now at least, and it's bittersweet. It's been such a pleasure getting to host this show and share the stories behind some of our favorite books. A massive shout out to the more than ninety writers who have appeared on our show over the past two years. We couldn't have made the show without you, and you
continue to inspire and delight. We are very grateful for all those reading hours. A massive thanks to Schwartzman. It is outgoing head of audio, Sarah mcvee. She was the founding editor of the show. It was her brainchild. She pushed me through many many pilots before we got the formula right. She is one of the country's foremost audio storytellers. She will go far and she is a huge supporter of this show. I'm very grateful to her for the work and for her friendship. At the end of each
episode you hear Travis Evans and Salton Fetcher's names. They have been an indefatigable part of team read This helping with the editing and the mixing and all kinds of stuff that makes the show actually sound great and Zultan Fetcho composed the music that you hear in each episode. A big thank you to both of them, and I'm sure they're going on to great things. And to my producer and partner in crime on this show, Clara Ames. Clara is the one who makes the whole thing hold together.
She's the one that makes things sound smart. I'm probably the right time to confess functionally illiterate, and Clara is very good at stitching it together in such a way that lets us pretend to be something that we're not. I'm going to miss her enormously and it's been so much fun working with her to put these episodes together. And to you, our listeners, I know we always say share, review, rate,
all of that stuff. If you do that now wherever you get your podcasts, it will keep read this alive in the interim while we try to find it another home. Make sure that you're subscribed so that if something drops in the feed one day, not too far down the path, you'll know that it's there and you'll be able to keep listening. Read This has been a Schwartz Media production, and that's no small thing. Schwartz believed in us and
set it up when we got started. I'm very grateful to them and our proprie to Murrow Schwartz and his wife Anna are two of the most avid listeners to read this, and I get constant and delightful feedback from them on it. I'm grateful to both of them, and to our CEO, Eric Jensen for supporting the show, and to all the other colleagues at Schwartz who have supported the show. The other major supporters have read this are
ar group. They're managing direct day. Edward fetterman inenthusiastically back to the show and made sure that it was possible for us to be ambitious and to keep going. Ed Fed, you are a delight A big thank you to you and the team at our. This week's episode was produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans
and original compositions by Zulton Fetcher. I moved house only a couple of months ago, and that meant boxing up all my books and my extraordinary and supportive partner, Steph may have found the limits of her supportiveness when she saw the many, many boxes coming to our new house. It put me in mind to the fact that when we were first creating read this Our working title for it was too Many Books, the idea that there were too many books and not enough time, and we would
help people sift through them, but we resisted. I hate the idea of too many books. There's not enough. Give me more, give us more to read. I tried to explain to Steph that while individual books on those shelves might be easy to get rid of, that they might be somehow dated, or not particularly interesting, or not something I would ever read again. It wasn't about the individual book.
It was about the collection. It was about the stories behind the books that we loved, and the ways in which they all link together to tell a story of a reading life. And that gives me a whole lot of pleasure. The show has given me a similar kind of pleasure, and I hope that it continues. We're not going to call this the end. We'll call it the end of part one in that ominous way that suggests that this could be a multibook series going into the future.
Happy reading, and hope to speak to you again soon.