THE BOOK OF GUILT, by Catherine Chidgey
In the English countryside, in an alternative version of the 20th century, a group of children live in a grand old house, isolated from society. A stable of adults see to their care and education, paying particular attention to their health and regularly reminding them of their specialness. The children entertain themselves with secondhand toys and treasures whose shabbiness they lack the worldliness to recognize.
Who are these children, what are these children, and for what purpose have they been sequestered? The children live protected from — and deprived of — such essential truths about themselves. But layer by layer, the mysteries of this world are peeled back, as the child narrator — guileless, colloquial and chattily addressing a “you” — journeys from innocence to grim comprehension.
This is a description of Catherine Chidgey’s ninth novel, “The Book of Guilt.” It is also, of course, a description of “Never Let Me Go,” the modern classic by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. Such thorough similarities to such a major novel — ranked ninth in The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century — would sink nearly any book. That they do not sink “The Book of Guilt” is a testament to Chidgey’s own formidable powers and her achievement in this grand and devastating work.
In “The Book of Guilt,” the children are 13-year-old triplets, Lawrence, William and Vincent, the novel’s primary narrator. The triplets are the last remaining residents of the Captain Scott Home for Boys, part of the British government’s “Sycamore Scheme,” created in the aftermath of World War II — which, in this alternate history, ended with a 1943 peace treaty between Nazi Germany and the Western Allies. The ripple effects of this treaty have shaped the lives of the scheme’s children from their inception.
The boys suffer from a mysterious ailment they call “the Bug,” for which they are treated with pills, injections and syrups. Boys who “beat the Bug,” Vincent tells us, get to move to the seaside resort of Margate; the brothers dream of the day they will join the others at this “children’s paradise.”
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The post Triplets in Peril in a Might-Have-Been England appeared first on New York Times.
