If you’ve ever taken an intro to fiction writing class (& chances are if you’re reading this you have), there is often a list of early writing pitfalls to avoid, & one that figures prominently on most versions of said list is the gimmick of writing from the perspective of an animal. Which was one of the reasons I was initially tickled by the concept of The Axeman’s Carnival, a book entirely narrated by a magpie named Tama who, through savvy magpie observation, absorbs the ability of human speech, though only obliquely — his is more a parrot-like ability to repeat English phrases & less a fully sentient conversational ability.
Magical realism can be a tricky balancing act. The narration here is a twitter-pated dance between authorial oversight & avian cognition (I can see why they advise against it for early writers), but Chidgey pulls it off. As a fan of the whimsical & the absurd, I was rather hoping for a full-blown magpie version of Watership Down, but alas, there were only glimpses of Tama’s life within bird world — though these glimpses were poignant enough. He falls from the nest as a chick & is found & kept alive by Marnie, our human heroine, in a shoebox in the laundry room, where it’s nice & warm. Tama becomes hopelessly devoted to Marnie, & she to him, placing tension on her already fraught marriage to the Axeman from the title, Rob, a good-looking sheep farmer struggling to keep the farm he inherited from his father financially salient in tough economic times (though I can’t for the life of me figure out why the book is named after him, he who is ostensibly the villain of the tale).
I wish I could say things get better for Marnie & Tama, y’all, but struggles ensue. Little Tama is excommunicated from his family when he tries to return from Marnie’s care (wild birds are known to cease interaction with any of their species that have been handled by humans, which fascinating habit could very well, I imagine, have been the initial inspiration for this book). Tama’s father is stern on this point, roundly ignoring Tama, though Tama’s birdbrained sister continues to interact with him — hers are some my favorite moments, her chirpy bird dialogue feels like a humorously accurate depiction of how magpies might actually speak to one another, & when she becomes instrumental in luring other magpies into a trap set by Marnie’s sister who lives on the property next to theirs, hers is a prickly & yet oddly funny quagmire. The lessons Tama & his sister learn as chicks about the dangers surrounding them are koans throughout the book, & a visceral reminder of the fragility of life for creatures so small (all of Tama’s several other siblings die early as chicks). Again, all this comes in glimpses throughout the book as background to the human drama.
And what is the human drama? The marriage gets violent, the characters are isolated on an acreage in New Zealand, & in true modern fashion, the joy in Marnie’s life — Tama & his uncanny ability to speak human words — becomes her path to viral fame, which comes with its own typical pratfalls. The claustrophobic powder keg marriage, exacerbated by an offstage prior miscarriage & money issues, lend an anxious tension to the book but at times feels unintentionally two-dimensional— Rob is a monster with no gray area, an evil man who threatens the cloyingly perfect woman. The viral fame of Tama becomes the driving force of the book, & call me old-fashioned, but I’m rather bored of stories of viral fame, aren’t you? It would have been nice to have seen the book steered in a different direction, a little more character development, a little less internet-post-imbedded-as-dialogue (really), & more bird world. Certainly the drama was there, but I was left with a glass-half-empty feeling: like the many thousands of online fans that Tama gathers through his cute on-camera shenanigans in the book, I simply wanted more Tama.
—Cowboy Books