Tama is just a helpless chick when he is rescued by Marnie, and this is where his story might have ended. "If it keeps me awake," says Marnie's husband Rob, a farmer, "I'll have to wring its neck." But with Tama come new possibilities for the couple's future. Tama can speak, and his fame is growing. Outside, in the pines, his father warns him of the wickedness wrought by humans. Indoors, Marnie confides in him about her violent marriage. The more Tama sees, the more the animal and the human worlds—and all the precarity, darkness and hope within them—bleed into one another.
Chidgey’s book is a gorgeous, sublime exploration of the natural world and the powerful, perhaps unbreakable bonds that can exist between its human and nonhuman inhabitants ... Much of the delight of this gorgeously strange novel derives from how delicately and deftly Chidgey balances Tama’s avian and human selves. Tama narrates the story in lyrical and deeply sensory, often sensual detail, yet his actual communication with humans consists of phrases and sentences (many quite sophisticated) he’s learned by rote, sometimes to hilarious and profane effect ... For all its humor and evocative descriptions of its isolated setting, The Axeman’s Carnival is a disturbing book ... I found its riveting finale moving and deeply unsettling, not least for Chidgey’s eerie depiction of Tama’s unbounded love for his adoptive mother. Chidgey’s novel is an extraordinary achievement: Like Tama, it soars.
It makes for a gamesome against-the-odds tale, even if you sense that Ms. Chidgey has not entirely played fair with the reader. The challenge of telling a story through the consciousness of a bird, even an intelligent one, is in depicting the limited perspective it will have on human affairs ... To get into the spirit of this book you’ll need to suspend your disbelief with more rigor than usual.
Imaginative and well-executed ... Despite this feelgood premise, Chidgey’s fable has tragedy at its core. Disappointment, anxiety and trauma colour most relationships in the novel, human and non-human ... Minor quibbles ... Chidgey elegantly weaves together social commentary, magic realism, folklore and myth, and her treatment of serious themes is deft. The language is poetic without feeling overwrought. The Axeman’s Carnival is a deeply engaging novel with an original and remarkably charming star.
