Pet, Catherine Chidgey

Unable to put down Catherine Chidgey's PET, I struggled to sleep last night as I thought long and hard about the "conventions" of society. If you're of a similar age to this reviewer, you'll have probably lived through the experience of the manic house clean, the wearing of "the good clothes" and the general heightened buzz that went with contact with social elites - the doctors, banks managers, religious leaders and teachers that we were told to look up to. So many of those supposed "leaders" turning out to have been people that systematically used their power and influence to corrupt, abuse and generally conflate their own positions. In PET Chidgey sets up a scenario that looks deep into the selective blindness of a teaching profession that refused to acknowledge the wrongs that they could see building before them, and the way that the questioning is left to a young girl, struggling with the death of her mother from breast cancer, what that could mean for her own future as she hurtles into puberty, and all the usual pressures that come with the heightened hormone hit of that age.

At the heart of this story is a master manipulator - Mrs Angela Price. The teacher who arrived in a small Catholic school, glamorous, oh so exotic. She drives an American sports car, dresses beautifully, a blonde-bombshell in a very run of the mill environment. She's teaching a class of small-town kids, all of whom muddle along together, including the very different Asian girl in their midst. Amy is the daughter of the local fruit and vegetable merchants, and she's best friends with Justine, the daughter of the local antique dealer, whose mother recently died from breast cancer. Catholic, devout and seemingly happy, Justine, Amy and the other kids at school lead typical lives of teenagers in the 1980's. 

This is also a novel of two distinct timelines and in 2014, Justine is now a mother herself, dealing with the increasing confusion and creeping loss of her beloved father - who is now in the care of a nursing home, his latest attendant reminding Justine very strongly of her past. 

In the school though, things are getting weird. Small, petty thefts start to happen in Justine's classroom - and everyone starts to miss things, except Amy. Mrs Price is playing teacher's pet favourites with the entire class, befriending some kids, rejecting others. Sweetly nice, her games are known about by the school principle and some of the nuns, but seemingly accepted. Mrs Price, is after all, a master manipulator, and even Justine is initially sucked into the vortex of heightened emotion, becoming the ultimate teacher's pet, which turns out to be fatal for some, and life-changing for Justine and her father. 

Elegantly delivered, the story is told from Justine's point of view and whilst she has lost her mother, and is struggling with puberty and a bad case of epilepsy, she is close to her father, who is a decent and loving man who cares about his daughter, even as he finds himself sucked into the vortex of Mrs Price. She's also profoundly conflicted by the impact that Mrs Price has had on her friendship with Amy. Whilst a few of the kids at the school start to question what's happening, Justine's closeness to Mrs Price allows her to see that there's something weird going on, but she's a kid, and can't find a way to prove it to the adults around her, and then it's too late.

Whilst PET is about manipulation and how society conventions provide fertile ground for obfuscation, it's also an interesting exploration of the female perspective. When the perpetrator and the revealer are both female, the power imbalance is psychological, and dangerously informed. The complications of life as a pubescent girl are shared, matter-of-factly as they should be. That's not to say that this is somehow a "girl's novel". It's a female perspective of men as well - there are boyfriends, fathers, fellow-students, teachers and men throughout - sometimes viewers, sometimes participants, and most importantly, amongst the manipulated. It's also an inter-generational novel. Just as it was when we were kids, and we were being told to look up to many that turned out to be paeodophiles, or corrupt and self-serving, it was left to a lot of those kids to question, and most importantly find the platform and the words to reveal.