Elizabeth Knox: Billie's Kiss

By MARGIE THOMSON

If you loved Vintner's Luck but were scared off by Black Oxen, relax: here's another richly satisfying, exotic novel with a gripping story to tell.

In fact, I even thought it a bit of a literary Victoria Holt, of all things: an Edwardian mystery romance with a vulnerable heroine and a handsome villain who may yet be more than he seems.

Twenty-year-old Billie (short for the even less likely Wilhelmina) is travelling, in 1903, by ferry to the Scottish island of Kissack and Skilling (based on the Hebridean island of Lewis and Harris), where her brother-in-law Henry is about to take up a job as cataloguer to Lord Hallowhulme, the owner of the island and its people.

Billie is very much a dependant: illiterate (because of dyslexia which is only just beginning to be understood, known as "blindness to words"), physically clumsy and inarticulate - an unlikely heroine, it must be said.

She has marvellous hair, though, and an affinity with the sea, in which she loves to swim. Her obvious disabilities are a mask for her intelligence, revealed obliquely through her piano playing.

There is an explosion, however (accident, sabotage, murder?), and a shipwreck in which several people die, although Billie herself leaps to safety just seconds before the blast, thus exciting the suspicion of the angry Murdo, who is seeking vengeance for the heartbreaking loss of his loyal butler in the accident.

We of course know that Billie was not to blame, but are quite in the dark about who was, or whether, indeed, a crime has been committed.

We also realise that Murdo, Lord Hallowhulme's cousin and, through straitened circumstances, also a dependant in the household, cannot be the perpetrator, either. His villainy is more in the order of insensitivity, and of being blinkered by preconceptions.

Thus we come to one of the book's dominant themes. It may look like a light romance, yet it is also an exploration of the power of ideology.

Ideas - even wrong ones - are more powerful than anything, even hard physical evidence, and can tear at the fabric of life itself, and certainly of happiness. "My principles are only prison bars," one character laments.

Knox is always clever, and she plays with genres in a most unsettling way, drawing us in with her strong characterisations and dramatic ideas, and then holding us at arm's length with bright, shiny artifice and playful parody.

You can't name a brooding, wounded blackguard "Murdo" and expect your audience to be able to forget they're reading a story; or contrive a melodramatic showdown in the library without feeling that the author is also present in the room, orchestrating, manipulating, staging.

It's as if she's borrowed certain cardboard cutout characters and hackneyed devices from genre fiction - beautiful, sad heroine; handsome, misunderstood villain-hero; jovial philanthropist; lecherous lord; intelligent, honest servant; dour, shifty servant - and then moved them around on a layered emotional stage that is very much her own.

And the thing is, such is the power of her storytelling that by book's end we are hooked, despite the trickery.

There is not the magical realism of Vintner's Luck - no angels, no metaphysics as such. Instead, there is a kind of glorious physicality - a robust scenery which Knox evokes with all her skill: the colours ("rolling bronze bogland"); the sounds (the unceasing hissing of the heather, the clattering of waves on stones, the noisy whispering of silk); the sensations (of cold water shivering over skin, of irresistible sleepiness); the inexorable, awful effect of nature on our bodies.

She thinks of everything, and characters are nailed into place by all the little things they do (one "worms one hand into a glove, settled the leather over her wedding ring") and their idiosyncrasies (one fidgets with irritation over a door not properly closed).

You may at times feel rather bogged down in all this texture, though. At times it holds up the reading pace, forcing slow absorption, chivvying you into the realisation that this is not just romance but something denser, more time-consuming.

There are lots of "issues" to provoke thought. Lord Hallowhulme is a social reformer, intent on improving "his" islanders' standard of living, whether they want to be rescued from their traditional way of life or not.

There is much recycling of turn-of-the-century debate about eugenics - essentially, nature versus nurture - and quoting of contemporary texts such as George Bernard Shaw. "The only thing hereditary about poverty is being born into it," one character asserts, while another less progressive thinker opines that "society's sympathy for the weak thwarts proper evolution".

The film rights to Vintner's Luck have been optioned to a British/New Zealand production company for around three years now. I predict there will also be much interest in the rights to Billie's Kiss. Knox has handed it to the film industry on a plate. The lush physical and emotional landscape, the full range of experience it offers on the page, will translate effortlessly to the big screen.

In the meantime, Knox's huge readership will be glad to see she's back on track with an engaging story that trots happily along an easily discernible narrative path. I don't think it will knock Vintner's Luck off its perch as her best, most special achievement to date, but it will certainly bring her readers back into the fold.

VUP

$29.95