THE BEAT OF THE PENDULUM
Catherine Chidgey (Lightning)
A book, New Zealand author Catherine Chidgey’s fifth, in an apparent genre of one. The Beat Of The Pendulum is dubbed a “found novel” on its jacket, having been assembled daily throughout 2016 (although the wider world only ever invades this hermetic one when a celebrity dies or wins an election) using spam emails, Facebook posts and, primarily, taped dialogue between the writer and her friends and family.
The rear of The Beat…’s jacket (in addition to a quote from Nick Hornby – “a wonderful new talent” – which is actually from over 20 years ago) includes an excerpt from early in the year which seems to hint at either Burroughsian cut-up techniques or Joycean streams of consciousness. Ultimately, this proves misleading; Chidgey is a lucid and witty conversationalist, although no doubt we all would be given the chance to star in our own novel, and her artist husband and genial publisher are capable foils.
A good couple of months slip by before anything emerges that could be described as a plot. Chidgey’s days are by no means idle or without incident, but by most people’s expected standards of fiction her peaks and troughs are not especially towering or cavernous. An infant daughter is raised, a mother’s declining health is managed and – less relatably, with an heroic dose of meta navelgazing – this novel is written. Or assembled. You’ve likely not read anything like The Beat… before, which should not preclude your right to wonder, while reading, what about this year in a life was supposed to be so worthy of literary conversion.
words Noel Gardner
Price: £12.99. Info: www.lightning-books.com