I have finished this book here on my very last day in Auckland and am going to have to leave it behind because of the weight of my suitcase, and unfortunately, I don't have the time to write the thoughtful review that it deserves.

In a Fishbone Church is Catherine Chidgey's debut novel, and it's so interesting to read it after falling in love with The Beat of the Pendulum last year. That was a book constructed out of fragments of daily life, and contrary to my own expectations, I was utterly captivated by it. Well, In a Fishbone Church—published 20 years beforehand—has some similar elements...

The reader learns about the characters from a diary, not the diary of an educated or especially literate man, just the daily notes of what is mostly a humdrum life, recorded by an Everyman who recognises that even an everyday life has significance of a sort. He's a butcher, and he goes hunting, and he buys presents for his wife, and he records his pulse rate because he's got a heart problem. He is not very interested in other people, and he finds it surprising when others, especially his family members, end up not doing exactly what he expected them to.

So much, so ordinary, and yet Chidgey has constructed from this material an absorbing tale of three generations interacting with this man and being influenced by him sometimes against their will. The book made quite a splash: longlisted for the Orange prize in 1999, and winning the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book in South East Asia and Pacific (1999), the Betty Trask Award (1999), the Hubert Church Best First Book Award (1998), and the Adam Foundation Prize in Creative Writing (1997).

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/05/19/in-a-fishbone-church-by-catherine-chidgey/ ( )

This is the first book I have read by this author. It won the Montana New Zealand First Fiction Award 1998. I enjoyed much of this book. The author evokes a strong sense of place and draws recognisable characters.
It begins with the funeral of Clifford Stilton and the author builds a picture of Clifford through the memories of his son Gene and Clifford's diaries, excerpts of which appear spasmodically throughout the book, sometimes with very tenuous links to the story thread and herein lies the fault. The story after a strong beginning jumps somewhat erratically between the generations. Although the reader has a fairly strong image of the family story by the end.
I am pleased to have read this book at last and I did enjoy it, I just felt the change in narration at times jarring.
I look forward to reading some more from this author in the future as this was her first book. ( )

There is a lot to like about this novel: it is crisply written, engaging, and contains some memorable characters and incidents. Its chief weakness is that it starts out focusing on one character, family patriarch Clifford Stilton, but ends up being more about his children and grandchildren. They are supposed to be under the influence of Clifford and his diary, but that influence never adds up to anything conclusive.

The novel is strongly reminiscent of a family memoir. Elizabeth Jane Howard, to take one example, is a writer who is excellent at taking this kind of material and shaping it into a coherent and moving story. But this is Catherine Chidgey's first novel, and, at least at that stage of her career, she did not have the same firm grasp on her material. It's an entertaining and well-written read, but ultimately something of a let-down. ( )