'I just respect the coming of the book', says Elizabeth Knox

With Black Oxen, her follow-up to The Vintner's Luck, Elizabeth Knox establishes herself further as
a free spirit, listening only to the dictates of her own imagination, writes MARGIE THOMSON.

Because it's so hard to say succinctly what Black Oxen is about, adjectives are a good place to begin.

As one ploughs through Knox's vast project they easily come to mind: sprawling, passionate, magical, exciting, wise, complex, infuriating, claustrophobic, confusing. It has the logic of a dream, which is to say, once entered into, it has no mundane logic at all.

Elizabeth Knox's sixth book, her keenly awaited follow-up to The Vintner's Luck, is a 500-page banquet in which you may sate yourself on 40-odd (odd) characters, two worlds (and various countries within those worlds) and four decades, stretching out to 2022. Not to mention the three narrating voices and constantly shifting time frames. Aaargh! You'll either want to throw it out the window, or you'll want to read it twice, to see how everything fits into place.

Pushed, Knox will admit - just - that Black Oxen is complicated, a factor she insists is easily overcome by the paying of close attention. We are aided in this, although also intimidated somewhat, by the inclusion of a dramatis personae, a kind of helpful joke which in style reminds us of the teeming novels of Dickens (Abra Cadaver, a foundling; Fernando Sola, a revolutionary hero, etc). And indeed, Black Oxen is modelled on Little Dorrit, in its playfulness and the interconnectedness of its plots.

Black Oxen, Knox says, is the right one, meaning the right novel to follow the tremendous success of Vintner (which lived in the top 10 for years, sold 100,000 copies around the world, and has brought Knox around $200,000 a year, with more to come when the film rights are sold).

With Black Oxen she will establish herself further as a free spirit, a writer who bows only to her own untrammelled imagination. You will not read Black Oxen and think she's just trying to re-concoct the winning formula of Vintner. Not that she was trying: "I just write the book that comes along. I just respect the coming of the book," she says, in that eerie way writers have of suggesting their books have a life which is quite independent of their own will.

From earliest times, even from the publishing of her first novel, After Z-Hour, Knox has paid tribute to the imaginary games she shared in particular with her sister Sarah and friend Madeline Smith (to whom Black Oxen is dedicated). First, she and Sarah would play the game while sheltering in bed at night from the rampagings of their alcoholic father, the girls creating stories together, figuratively taking on new identities and transporting themselves to a better place. Later, they played it with flatmates, sitting around in the evening, inventing places, events and characters, all told to each other in the third person, present tense. They'd continue the game on screeds of paper stuck up on the toilet wall, which the different characters would write on - this was the model for Black Oxen's Democracy Wall, where the revolutionary leaders leave messages for each other, becoming known to the people in the process. In a sense, this new book is her old game, her training ground for the imagination.

Knox's debt to the imaginary game is huge, and in her acknowledgments for Black Oxen she even uses the word collaborators to describe her fellow game-players. So, the world we enter in Black Oxen is the one created in those draughty Wellington student flats in the 1980s, where the progenitors were involved in student politics and where the issues of the day included the dismantling of welfarism, and membership of the local Latin American committee.

Hence Laquama, the small, fictional South American country in whose dry landscape and social tumult much of Black Oxen is played out. Abra (the foundling of the opening chapter, where he first occupies a rather shadowy Britain before stumbling into an entirely different world which we come to know as Eden) turns up there after the tragic loss of his lover. But nothing, certainly not identity, ever stands still in this book, and Abra is no longer known by that name. Instead, this mysterious personage has become an amnesiac with two new identities, Ido Idea also known as Walter Risk (an apparition, the dramatis personae informs us), the nature of his being increasingly called into question.

What's in a name, Los Angeles therapist Sean Hart wonders during the great unmasking in the book's final chapter, and we realise that this is so much of what the story has been about: the tracing of personal credentials; the uncovering of an authorial conspiracy we had not even been aware of.

Once in Laquama, Ido becomes part of a group of young revolutionaries who have triumphed over the old regime. It's a world of passionate friendships and betrayals, of uneasy alliances between groups of people who always represent grander themes than are at first apparent. This is the kind of thing Knox thrives at, emblematic names, but they do keep us at arm's length from the characters as people.

Sorcery is a potent force in this small country, most terrifyingly embodied by the Black Room, whose nature can be understood on a number of levels, from sheer human brutality but also supernaturally, as the site of one of Ido's most epic struggles.

Medicine, surgery, healing are central motifs (Abra trains as a doctor; so does his daughter, Calme Risk, and several kinds of healing and dismantling are investigated in the course of the story) and it is a medical doctor who eventually reveals to us that Ido's mystique may be attributable not to autism but to something else altogether. In fact, it is as if Knox's Xas, the angel central to Vintner's Luck, has continued his wandering of the worlds, turning up to play a key role in his inventor's next novel as well. Abra-Ido-Walter has the same enigmatic, not-human magnetism, beauty and power, and is the foil for the same epic struggles between good and evil.

Calme Risk is the chief narrator of the book. In the year 2022, now a fading beauty in her mid-40s, she enters narrative therapy with the extraordinary Sean Hart (say it aloud) to find a more hopeful interpretation of her story.

At the age of 10 Calme was brought by her father to Laquama, where she lived her childhood among the eccentric band of revolutionaries who have taken Ido for their own. Bizarrely, and not for any apparently logical reason, she grows up to become the wife of one of that country's most brutal mass murderers, the torturer Ricardo Pastrez, an event that we readers miss by several years as the narrative takes a long jump, but whose mystery finally unravels by near book's end.

The black oxen of the title make several appearances in the book. They are there in Yeats' awe-inspiring lines: "The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet."

There is a lot in this book that one must take on trust - perhaps too much. For much of it we're as blinkered as any amnesiac; we don't know what is going on and we have to wait a considerable time to find out.

The relentless inventiveness of Knox's imagination ironically results in a certain flatness of the narrative, where momentous events occur in an unheralded sentence, or off the page altogether, yet long passages are devoted to obscure histories, so that the overall novel seems at times to become merely a device for further imaginings.

That said, if you have the faith to simply enjoy the wild ride, to sit at that banquet table for the long duration, simply savouring each dish without worrying too much about what's coming next, Knox's talent will cast its usual glamour.

And if you love irony and the twists and turns of a tricky plot and enjoy that peculiarly mathematical satisfaction of solving cryptic crosswords, this book will be well worth the effort.

While Black Oxen is a book Knox says she had to write, she is already eager to talk about her next novel which, amazingly, is already completed and sold, and which she believes is going to be a huge bestseller, bigger than Vintner.

Knox has an extraordinary and unusual self-confidence, a Peter Pan-like joy in herself. Strangely, it is not offensive, as it comes with great openness and warmth.

"I'm con-fi-dent!" she cries. "But it's nothing to do with me, in this case. You can just read the signs, and one of the things is that they give you a lot more money."

Billy's Kiss bypasses the supernatural, opting instead for romantic realism. Set in 1903, it is, she says, a mystery, with crimes and clues.

She is delighted with it, but then, she is simply delighted with life - "What a wonderful gift consciousness is!" - which is what she tries to convey in all her fiction, in particular in Black Oxen. "I wonder what it's like being him," one character muses about Ido, in Black Oxen. We might wonder the same about Knox. The answer, if you want to know, is to read Black Oxen.

* Black Oxen by Elizabeth Knox (VUP, $29.95), published this week.