An Interview with Elizabeth Knox

Today, I'm talking to Elizabeth Knox, the New Zealand fantasy author, perhaps best known in the U.K. for her book, The Absolute Book, which she wrote in 2019 but which was published in the U.K. in 2021. And before that, her best-known book was probably The Vintner's Luck from 1998 and its sequel, The Angel's Cut in 2009. And so we're delighted to be talking to Elizabeth here this morning. So, Elizabeth, why did you choose the fantasy genre for this particular book?

I well, I had. I had always wanted to try to write a book like one of THE books of my life. I read it when I was 16, Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita. Which is a fantasy book and also a political satire and a number of other things. And a book set in Moscow in the late 1920s, and it was written in the 1930s but wasn't published until the 1960s and the first time it was published was published outside Russia, of course, because it was one of those more ... he had displaced Stalin.

So but the thing is about this book is that it? That it kind of swaps between telling the story of Pontius Pilate and telling the story of some unhappy people in Moscow, and it has witches in it and it's the devil, and ithas a demon who's a large black cat. And it's kind of it's just a wild book, but it's wild and it's grand and it's funny and it's silly and it's.

meaningful and pertinent, and I always thought I wanted to try to write a book that had this sort of sense of mixed tone and wildness to it, and I didn't have a way to get into it, though I knew I wanted to put Fairyland in it.

My idea of Fairyland. And I knew I wanted to end up being kind of a book with a hidden intention, but I didn't have a way in, and then I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about a gene of books that we were calling arcane thrillers, things like Dan Brown, the book with the scholarly hero. And I suddenly thought, aha, that's my way in. And that's how I got to that book.

I'd always wanted to write a book that did the kind of things that it did in terms of going out wide and then it seems to proliferate, but everything comes back again. So a kind of a mystery where it's an inclusive mystery. But the way into it had to be like an arcane thriller. That's wonderful. Like describing the different tones and we are keen to avoid too many spoilers here. So I wouldn't ask you to to rehearse the plot, but I think that explains quite a lot.

Your reference toBulgakov there, because the moment you said that, I thought, yeah, that's absolutely the kind of thing that Master and Margarita is all about, isn't it? So was that beyond Bulgakov? What were your fantasy influences when you were growing up? What did you read? Everything, really. But well, because I'm the age I am the fantasy that I was first getting was a young adult fantasy writers, writers of fantasy and science fiction.

And I can remember that I loved Ray Bradbury, who my father introduced me to, but on the less classy but but all very exciting for a young person. Andre Norton. The American writer who the prize is now named after the young adult fantasy writers prize, so I loved Andre Norton and then, of course, like everybody else around about that time, I discovered Ursula Le Guin, firstly, The Earthsea Chronicles. like lots of young people and The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed and so on.

And I wasn't distinguishing between fantasy and science fiction because I knew I loved both. So if I was reading Ursula Le Guin's science fiction, the thing that I was loving about it and the fantasy without distinguishing, was how involved with the real natural world they were, I mean, how deeply physical and embodied her fiction is. So I just think those were the things that formed my tastes pretty much. And then, of course, you know, there was Samuel Delany and so on.

So the interest in science fiction stayed with you then? Because I know speaking from my own experience and it's something I think quite a lot of young women say, is that they sort of enjoy science fiction quite a lot up until they become adolescent. And then maybe it's the kind of science fiction that's really all about space craft and the kind of highly technical and has really sort of a simple adventure plot.

And everything depends on rules around time-bending and so on, that they lose that kind of taste for science fiction. And I must say that I love Le Guin's Earthsea chronicles, but I never got around to reading any of her science fiction until the last year or so. And I've been guzzling it down, I think. it's absolutely fantastic. Because its, some of these things? You don't know where they are?

I think that's partly the problem is, is you need to kind of you need good readers to point to not just in the general direction of science fiction, but on the more specific directions, like the science fiction that has an interest in sort of anthropological things. Like Orson Scott Card's not very popular at the moment, but those Ender stories, Speaker for the Dead and so on, are incredibly good at creating different beings. And it's not about, it is partly about the technology.

But but even even the AI, it's about the soul of the AI that they end up, the stories, about people and about different ways of looking at the world. So I think. I think I don't know whether it's girl readers or just readers who want the science fiction to be really about people, even if the people are trees.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. I think the the anthropological training that Le Guin had, I think both her parents were anthropologists as well, which allows her to create all those different kinds of people in really quite densely imagined worlds. So so was Le Guin someone you felt you were speaking back to, in some ways in this book, or are the influences that you were kind of pushing against too many to count?

Well, there are no, there are always specific people that I feel like I'm talking to one way or another, and it isn't that they are like me, it's just that, um, I think I approve of the ambition when it comes to thinking about what genre can do like Ursula Le Guin determinedly understands thatgenre. That literature appears in all genres and that literary fiction is only a genre. So if you get that kind of healthy frame of mind, you can.

Be ambitious for know the things like beauty and depth and so on in your genre work. So I think I'm always thinking of people like her and Philip K. Dick, but specifically with that book, I was thinking of two things. The first was Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, and the other one was Buffy the Vampire Slayer because of the mixed tone in that, because it can be so incredibly grand and beautiful and moving and silly and funny and, you know, full of action and full of character.

And it was the kind of the scope of not just taking one tone and going all right, this is a drama. So it will be dramatic. It's like I understand why people like the Scandi Noir, for instance, television series, but I don't really like them myself because they they just they don't make you laugh. And it's not that I require things to make me laugh. But I kind of think that you can make people worry and and feel horror and and be moved and make them laugh all in the same thing.

That's really important, I think, to to get that sort of variety of tone. I know exactly what you mean about Scandi Noir in which I have to confess I'm quite addicted to, but tell us a bit aboutt the secondary worlds that you created for The Absolute Book, because it's a really capacious sort of universe, isn't it? I know that you've you've taught a course on worldbuilding at Victoria University in the past, so you must have thought quite a lot about the Secondary World.

Can you tell us a bit about what your thinking was when you were creating that version of Fairyland? Well, I wanted it. I mean, Fairyland as I was thinking, you know, where the fairies are like elves, you know, that they are beautiful and forbidding and very, very pleased with themselves and heartless.

And so they got all that going on. But they live in the most beautiful world where they care for their world and they care for each other and they care for the human beings who are living with them and in they're sort of hunter gatherers. And they're at one with nature. So they are admirable in very many ways.

But then they have this business with the Tithe where they tithe, they had these these Taken people with these wonderful lives, they lead and then every hundred years, they have to give souls to Hell, and so they give their people more than one hundred years, but they do eventually just funnel them on to Hell in order to pay for the rent basically, on the land that they have.

But I sort of wanted to make it a plot like they had that problem with Hell because Hell could take the land back, because they took the land originally. So it's you know, it's kind of a colonial thing thatthe demons of Hell, are dispossessed from the land that the fairies are now occupying. So it's complicated like that. And that's the insoluble problem that that's in the book.

There are a number of insoluble problems and one of them is the problem that we have, the real problem of the fact that we are destroying the planet, but they have this problem of being stuck in this treaty that makes them into brutes. So they're very pleased with themselves. They live wonderful, civilised lives and they're brutes. And they look away all the time and they look away in order to survive. They have to not think too hard about what it is they have to do.

And yeah, I wanted to make it as difficult as possible for them to get out of that situation and for it to be not entirely resolved, though the resolution to all of that is sort of built into the book. But I left all the closing there so that certain readers will be able to if they started thinking about various things, they would go, oh, you could do that. You could do this. You could do, because I quite like doing that, leaving a few clues, breadcrumbs.

And the idea of the Tithe, I guess you took from traditional stories about Fairyland, like Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin? Yes, which are less folkloric traditional. than literary traditional, like the folkloric ones tend to be slightly more peculiar. So I read the Katharine Briggs book about fairies, you know, the big compendium, it's a fantastic book and then promptly discarded.

as most of it was not useful for my purposes that I realised quite soon that mine were those literary fairies of Thomas the Rhymer and Shakespeare and so on. So, yeah, I though a very medieval kind of fairy in a way, not the sort of Victorian flower fairy type tiny creatures, but something that's much stronger and more powerful and on the same par as humans in terms of size.

But with that kind of ruthlessness, I think that you always get with medieval fairies that they know what they want and they are going to get it. Yes. In the end, that they they're resolutely contractual, which is kind of interesting to have people that are that they are, it's not just the sense of honour. It's their kind of addiction to reality that they you know, that there's a contract involved. They have to follow it like it's like instinct. Yeah.

That's what I always sort of admire about them, because in a way, nine times out of ten, the fairies can rely on the humans doing something that makes their contract void because they're stupid or foolish or greedy and the fairies can just destroy them or take what they want. But that 10th time, the the human says, no, you promised this and this is what you have to give me. And then I'm thinking about Sir Orfeo, the fairy king says, yeah, OK, I promised.

So you can take your wife back. Yeah, that's it. You got me. But you've got to understand their rules in order to kind of figure out how to live by it. Yeah, it was fun doing that and it was fun. Like the whole business of not throwing away the fairy magic, like if you mention glamours.

You've got to say, well, this is how this works. So I got that. I've got a whole chapter towards the end, makes and makes the ordinary business of the plot that has to play out in that chapter more interesting that it completely eliminates one of the main characters because of a glamour, like they actually are literally invisible throughout the whole chapter. And that was that was that was great fun.

But yeah, I've thought, well, you can't go around mentioning glamours without saying and this is what this looks like. I thought the way in which you built various kinds of, I guess, magic technology into the Secondary World was really interesting, that you had problems that the Hunter-Gatherer society have to deal with. I guess within that that wonderful natural environment in which they're living and they have sort of different classes of magic that that they employ.

And it's not just a question of they wave their hands and this thing happens, but they have quite dedicated sort of magical devices. Yes. And and they've got a class of people who know how to operate the force beasts. Yeah. Sort of the builders who go off and, you know, repair the road through the swamp or shift the boulders that have fallen down into the mountain paths or yes like I, I like.

fantasy that looks like science fiction, so towards the end of that, you get the idea that actually the fairies come from somewhere else, originally, they've stolen the territory and made it. very different than what it was before by basically terraforming. I mean, just you realise that that's what they must have done. So there's a kind of a science fiction underneath the fantasy. I quite like that sort of mixing genres. What would you say?

Oh, no, actually, the next question I wanted to ask was alongside that Secondary World of the fairies, there's really a very strong theological debate going on as well in some ways, and kind of, I guess not a million miles away from Philip Pullman's rethinking of the Fall and its implications. And obviously in The Vintner's Cut, The Vintner's Luck, sorry, you have an angel protagonist as well. Is is theology something you've always been particularly interested in?

Well, I was raised by a evangelising atheist who was a lapsed Catholic, so my dad was an evangelising atheist. I don't think there's anything more. stimulating for your interests in religion as a child than having an evangelising atheist parent, and and at the same time, my mother was probably she was herself a second generation atheist. Her father was an atheist. Possibly, possibly. His parents were too. And she, so for her it was all a settled matter

You know, there was no argument to be had. So there was a sort of calm atheism going on in the household and this kind of raucous atheism going on. And he just made religion very interesting. So, of course. You know, I was always reading things and with The Vintner's Luck, it's very definitely coming out of the Christian imagination and you have a heaven and a Hell, but you don't have anything else noticeable.

But The Absolute Book sort of decides the gods are a class of being and that their well-being is dependent on human beings and the ways in which they're worshipped, which is kind of a parallel to the the sort of badly managed stewardship of human beings of the planet. That's kind of like you can you can make your gods ill and also I was interested and I thought, well, I'm going to write a pagan book, you know, a pagan book, you know what, like I was thinking that?

But then I just decided in the end that it was a book in which all the gods were true. So and they were all more or less equivalent, but rising and falling throughout history according to the kind of energy they were getting from their worshippers. And that you you come to understand that that's the way the world's working throughout the book. And then you get to see more or less the beginning of a God, like somebody becomes a god in the course of the book, a little god.

But it's a trajectory, a little god of a particular place, isn't it, where the Christian God is is, I guess, quite a big God. Yeah, the Great God of the Desert. Yeah. And I was quite interested because I had not expected this at all, to suddenly find my my own favourite god Odin popping up along with his two fantastic ravens'. I love the stories. I love the comedy that the ravens produce and and the sort of the origin story that you have for them. Why Odin in particular though. Oh well OK.

So this is my, I've always know I was never interested in Odin, particularly any more than any other Norse gods. And when I was a child reading mythology all the time, I loved the Greek gods and the and the Norse gods. I was like, hmm I cou,ld take them or leave them, but, um. Well, it would have been the year two thousand or two thousand one, I was off at a writers festival and sleeping very badly because of the different time zones and all the excitement.

And I had a dream in which I was in this vast, cavernous space and I was about to be shown the God who was in charge of my life. And I came up to this God who was standing in front of a throne facing away from me. And they turned around and I saw a sort of a division or difference at first, I glimpsed a division or difference in the face.

And I had a bit of a sensation of enormous disappointment that I was about to be shown Janus, the two-faced god, and that for some reason this was something to do with me. And then I realised I was looking at a god with one eye and that it was Odin. And I can remember I went down to breakfast and I told the poets at the table, Matthew Sweeney, the Irish one, being one of them, about this dream, and he said, well, why don't I have dreams like that?

That's a poet's dream. Exactly, well, he is the god of poetry. And I've always had a sort of a. I've thought about the dream a lot, I thought about the whole thing of sacrificing an eye for wisdom and end sacrificing a kind of a depth perception for something else, you know, for ravens and I just I just thought about it and and then so when I came to the book, I thought, well, I'll probably better put Odin in it. And then but then I was much more interested in the ravens than Odin. Yes.

In the end, he doesn't turn up as much as you might have expected once once he makes his first appearance. I thought we would see a bit more of him. But his agents are there, aren't they? All the time? Yeah. His agents are there, you know, they're they're about to, you know, abandon him. I mean, yeah, Odin's a god in the process of being corrupted by worshippers. I had some fun with that. And I think Odin seems like someone who is quite well suited to the modern world in a way,

because he's ready to do any kind of deals to maintain his power. Yeah, Odin's a terribly interesting God and often turns up in modern stories. But of course, there is the unfortunate. You know, revival of of the sort of lovable Norse gods and people tattooing valknuts on them, and the white supremacists. So, you know, I was aware of that, which is why I kind of commented on it in the book.

I thought, well, what would this mean for Odin if he had unfortunately managed to attract all these white supremacy, attract these white supremacists. I bookmarked that paragraph because I'm writing a book about the reception of Old Norse myth myself. And I thought, yes, that this is what I want about these kind of right rightwing lunatics who adopted Odinism without having a real sense of what it's all about.

So before we move on to the kind of really large question about the major themes of the novel, this wants to come back to the question of your being a New Zealand writer and. The kind of in a way, I was asking myself, why an English and European imaginary, and not something that's set in New Zealand, or drawing upon New Zealand myths. Oh, I can't suddenly appropriate,

appropriate Polynesian mythology? Mm. 213 00:25:03,160 -- So there's that said is that I mean, I could be a consumer of those stories, but I don't think I necessarily get to dabble my feet, but I sort of end up with these non New Zealand books becoming highly visible, whereas my last book, Wake, like the sort of horror science fiction, which was published by Corsair and did reasonably well in the U.K., is completely New Zealand.

It's set in New Zealand and all but one of its characters is a New Zealander. And yeah, the the joy of being able to do a contemporary New Zealand book. But then, I just have much of a book and it has to come out the way I want it to. And obviously I just wanted to do a book that had Fairyland. And if you going to do Fairyland, you really have got to get yourself over to the British Isles. My grandmother .. I think in a way your fairyland, I was asking myself, where is New Zealand?

Because in the kind of real world, your heroine goes over there briefly and her father is knocking around in the southern hemisphere, appearing in this kind of Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones mash up, I guess. But then it struck me that actually Fairyland seemed to me very much like New Zealand must have been before people were there, with their huge range of different habitats. Yeah. Yes. My fairyland, you know, I, I wasn't going to not use the landscapes I love.

So my fairyland's New Zealand yeah, definitely different bits of New Zealand, a little bit of some lagoons and {Inaudible}, it's boiling mud pools, the hot pools. I mean, that alerted me so that's where New Zealand is. , So you talked a bit about your interest in what we're doing to the planet. The kind of huge environmental theme is, is one of the things that the book is about. Are there other things that you felt that you were kind of unpacking?

Well, that writing a book with a hidden intention, which is about a hidden object and has a person on it with a spell that hides them, having had the sort of hidden things built into the plot, I realised quite soon that I was going to have a hidden theme. And the hidden thing was the sort of ecological theme and how I wanted that to play out for the reader. And it's risky because some people sort of rebel against it because they go, oh, well, nothing like that can ever happen.

That's just wish fulfillment. I wanted it to be wish fulfillment, I wanted it to look like wish fulfillment, because I wanted people to think about what they were saying and instead of thinking. Well, what say, the fairies and a god and some ravens and so on can save us? To think who is there, who can save us, because, of course, we can be saved, our governments could save us. That's if they acted like ?? like, instead they act like

Idiots. Well, your government, I think I'd have more faith in than ours - Idiots thinking of the share-holders. I was struck by the theme of loss, not just planetary loss, but kind of personal loss as well as there's a lot of mourning going on in the book, isn't there? Well, I mean, the protagonist, my scholarly hero, Taryn, who we haven't even talked about. She's she made the book possible and that she plot wise because she ends up being possessed and it looks like she's being possessed.

I mean, for for people who think that oh that means it's because she's sinful enough to do that as her sin is big enough. But actually no it's just the demons of trying to find out something she knows. So they're being opportunistic. She's just bad enough to get a demon in there. Yeah. So but, yeah, she's she's taken revenge for the death of her sister, for the murder of her sister because she didn't think that the.

The man concerned was punished enough, and that's bad, but she never repents from killing the man she repents from using someone else to kill the man, which is which is this her sin. So she spends the whole book facing the consequences of their actions, taking revenge and never getting properly reconciled to the loss of her sister until the very end when she more or less. Fills the hole in her heart with other people, which is probably the way that grief like that works.

That's a lovely way of putting it I must say as filling it with other people, because I guess there is no, the narrative offers possibilities of a much more kind of, you know, Christian reconciliation. I can see why, as an atheist, you might leave that aside. I'm not really an atheist. I was just raised as on, a questioning. Well, at least somebody who's not completely steeped in the mechanisms of Catholic theology as providing all the answers to this kind of thing.

But, yeah, I think that that's that's very striking in the way that what might be a kind of feel-good. moment that could have been the feel-good climax there comes up against the kind of reality about what's possible with the afterlife, let's say yes. Yes. And you get, when you're get an afterlife, you get you get purgatory, which is. Yeah, I was very proud of my version of purgatory. It's a really recognisable place in a way, isn't it?

And it's kind of antithesis of of Fairyland, it's got hospitals and railways and the kind of darkness and... but not souls burning in agony or trying to be purged of their sins. There's just that kind of almost Kafkaesque notion of what's purgatorial. Yeah, unwieldy bureaucracy and invisible bureaucrats. And nobody helps anyone else.

They're are always just trying to work out their own problems. This is sort of a solitary, solipsistic, chasing of something to solve their problems which is purgatorial, It really is recognisable. Or people seeking the information that they think they need. I had a lot of fun with Purgatory. Yeah. It's a really big book, The Absolute Book, isn't it? Carrying it around while I was reading it

was kind of arm-stretching. Did it. Did you know always how it was going to end up or did your ideas change while you were writing it. I knew where it wanted to, where I wanted to take it in terms of the the sort of things that had to say about the world needing saving, but, you know, you always think of better ways of solving the book's problems as you go along.

I mean, I'm not a I'm not a person who plots things out. Ah you don't have a big whiteboard? I have anidea and then I and then I kind of follow my nose and I usually have a good, satisfactory, a satisfactory ending, a satisfactory course for the plot at a certain point. And then as I go, I deviate when I think of something better. ,

Yeah. Uh huh. So I just do, I knew most of my decisions were aesthetic ones like that people will keep turning up, so that the the man who set fire to Taryn's grandfather's library turns up completely unexpectedly towards the end of the book. And the Mule-Skinner, who kind of threatens to turn up at the beginning, and doesn't turn up and doesn't turn up and doesn't turn up, and then suddenly turns up extremely alarmingly.

And then is eventually comprehensively got rid of, turns up again, like a horror movie like Carrie leaping out of her grave more or less. So I wanted to do those things. I wanted things to come around. Yeah, I really like that. Particularly when when Jacob, not Jacob, the fire-starter in the grandfather's library came back, again in the book I was delighted. Battle, Battle. Yeah, that was him and the Mule-Skinner himself I find absolutely terrifying character.

And I think when I was reading that kind of central sequence where Taryn is, let's say, placed in considerable danger by the Mule Skinner, I, I didn't at that point know that you also wrote in the horror genre. And I was really taken, by the way, in which the kind of mechanics of the the horrible fate had been thought out by the Mule- Skinner, but obviously by you as well. Yeah, that was that was sort of my ... the whole chapter is kind of a mini thriller.

And inside the thing was like, and here this is Elizabeth doing a thriller, you know, so I was channelling Lee Child at that point. I think, you know, there are mechanics to the horrible fight. Someone has a plan and this is the awful thing they're going to do. And it doesn't look like he can get out of it. And honestly, I didn't know how I was going to get Taryn out of the problem there. And then I realised I was writing a fantasy book ...

So, yes, you have a kind of well, deus ex machina, might be one way of putting it, but I thought that was a remarkable way of resolving that particular situation. Very unexpected, extremely unexpected. And I suddenly thought, well, wait a minute. Is is this actually, is Peter Pan in here somewhere? Oh wait a moment, no it's the shapeshifter, it took me quite a while to figure out the shapeshifter's role in the whole thing.