The Starving Bride by Catherine Chidgey review – a girl wastes away in a gothic near-future
The New Zealand author’s ninth novel is gorgeously written, but feels tame and almost quaint against the real world of GLP-1 drugs and looksmaxxing Catherine Chidgey’s new novel was inspired by a magnificent piece of archival flotsam: a 1930s newspaper report of a bizarre pay dispute.
A young woman had “undertaken to fast for 40 days and 40 nights in a lion’s den” as an attraction in Blackpool – a prowling spectacle of hunger artistry – but abandoned the feat partway.
Her employer claimed she had broken the contract; the woman claimed the lion was at fault – it had been set loose.
It’s a little hard to skip dinner when you might become one.
What writerly catnip: the lion, the kitsch and the wage-probe.
The Starving Bride restages this big-cat sideshow act in a near-future where old-timey attractions are being revived in the hope of reviving something else: “A sense of nostalgia, that was the thing.
A sense of innocence.
Even if the stags and hens still vomited in the gutters.” It’s bread-and-circus misdirection: the sea is rising; the buildings are crumbling; the city is beset by poverty; and the bureaucrats are masters of denial and delay.
But at night, on the boardwalk, the lights are shining and the past is alive again – England in its imagined prime (the tourist board hashtag: #Asimplertime).
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5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on www.theguardian.com — the content belongs to The Guardian Culture.
