As promised, this is a follow-up review to my first thoughts about Catherine Chidgey’s The Beat of the Pendulum. which is longlisted for the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. This ‘found novel’ is a remarkable experiment in fiction, drawing on – or purporting to be – the language that was all around the author. In twelve chapters named for the months of the year, a life is laid bare through language that is both impersonal (TV, radio, social media, email, SatNav) and intensely personal – her conversations with friends and family, apparently recorded on her iPhone.
The first chapters of the book are engaging because of the challenge of interpreting a cacophony of words. There are no markers to guide the reader as to context and many of the slabs of text comprise, as life does, multiple voices. On the very first page, Catherine, who we are led to believe is the author herself, is talking to her mother and to her baby at the same time, and her mother is talking to Catherine and to the baby. But it gets more complicated when there are not only more people talking at the same time but also references to media, which sometimes bleeds into the conversations and is responded to, but is sometimes just background noise. I was fascinated by these early chapters, and also very impressed by the skill with which they had been constructed.
But as the book progressed and I became familiar with the ‘characters’ I also became intrigued by other issues, the most obvious of which is privacy. Every author draws on life experience to construct fiction, but The Beat of the Pendulum explicitly uses the people in Chidgey’s life as material for the book, presumably with their permission (but maybe not always). One of the aspects I wondered about was how this impacted on the conversations she had. Surely there were times when she was asked (or told) to stop recording, or chose herself to stop it, but just as we all modify our communications in the presence of outsiders of one sort or another (e.g. neighbours in the garden next door) surely those who were conscious of that iPhone felt constrained at times? What does it do to a marital relationship?
*chuckle* It’s not hard to imagine Chidgey’s friends, family, students, colleagues, acquaintances and hapless individuals who encountered her during this year, scrambling through the book to find themselves within its pages. But the detached reader such as myself realises early on that these 494 pages are not only – of necessity – only part of a life, snippets extracted from a morass of language over 365 days – but they are also filtered. There is some discretion impacting on the author’s choices.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/02/01/the-beat-of-the-pendulum-by-catherine-chidge... and https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/02/10/the-beat-of-the-pendulum-by-catherine-chidge...

It should be a contender for the Goldsmith’s Prize! ( )