Welcome to this instalment of the Oxford Fantasy podcast. My name is Elisha Smith, and today we're looking at contemporary New Zealand, the fantasy author Elizabeth Knox. So we start with a scene from her 2007 novel Dream Hunter. A boy is exploring a graveyard at sunset. He's been trying out a divining rod looking for water. He climbs up on felled eucalyptus tree and looks out of the sky. The sunset was so violent that it should have been making a noise.
The light cast the shadows of the far hills upward across the sky, bristling rays of opaque blue and a huge bright slicing pane of orange light. There was a noise in the churchyard. It was not the sort of noise the Sun might make for a bird inspired by the sunset. It was a move. It might have been a human sound. Only there was no human consciousness or intelligence or character in it. It sounded as though it came from a very dark place. It was a sound of absolute despair.
The boy climbed down from the felled tree. He followed the mown, creeping softly amongst the tombstones. The Sun went down. The billows in the sky seem to roll and swell as they filled with purple shadows, a light went blue. The boy stopped, he listened, he heard the sound again, a muffled rustling, then a terrible roar, throat moaning. A little way off between two tall headstones, we could see a pile of coloured colours still even in the blue twilight.
It was a heap of white, red, yellow and purple flowers. The boy crept closer. You saw a fresh grave piled high with late summer flowers and wreaths, florals painted black and gilt. Nothing stirred. But the ground moaned again and shrieked, thumped, scraped and rustled. The boy stood staring his hands spread as though he held his Hazel Rod, wavering in his loose grip and turning. Turning down to what he had devised.
This section of Dream Hunter, also published as the Rainbow Opera, is describing a dream or a nightmare, but it's not a dream as we experience them. This dream has a name. The water diviner and it's always the same story. It has been caused by one of the characters in the novel, whose Dream Hunter is intended to be shared with others as part of a unique entertainment industry. The dream hunter will sleep in the same room as those he plans to share it with when he falls asleep.
So will they, and they'll experience a scene as he does vivid and details like no ordinary dream. I chose this scene to begin with for a couple of reasons. It introduces one of the fantasy conceits for which Knox is perhaps best known. It also indicates some of the most distinctive features and preoccupations of her work. Her novels display in my new sensory attention, the setting and place. Her style is generally fairly spare and plain, though it's full of atmosphere and tension.
She's concerned with alternate mental states of various kinds. Often dreams, but also illness in Chapman's possession. And she comes back again and again to the theme of Return from death. Whether that's resurrection or something more sinister. Knox is the author of 14 novels, as well as three novellas and a book of essays. And she's won many prises. She also teaches a class in worldbuilding at Victoria University in Wellington.
Her work spans multiple genres, from young adult fantasy to horror to semi fictionalised memoir. Her first novel to garner international attention was the vintners look. In 1998, it broke the mould for New Zealand fiction at the time and being set elsewhere in the world, specifically 19th century rural France. In the dream to do it, which is made up of Dream Hunter and its sequel Dream Quick Not to return home, but with a difference creating an alternate history South Pacific nation Southland.
It's both like and unlike Real World New Zealand, and it's also the setting for her later novel Muscle Fire. In her most recent novel, The Absolute Book, New Zealand and France both appear, but their only brief stops along the way in a narrative which jumps from fairy lands to purgatory to the roots of the World Tree.
Knox's approach to fantasy is varied. She's written about angels, vampires on time travel to name a few, but three linked things turn up again and again land and place the body on memory, particularly problems with or disruptions off memory. These themes come together in a particularly interesting way in the dream. When did you get? I've mentioned already that it sets in alternate history, roughly in the Edwardian period in a country with very similar geography to Real World New Zealand.
One of the big differences between Southland and the real world is the existence of the place with a capital P. The place is where dream hunters go to find dreams flying beyond an invisible border in an otherwise unremarkable stretch of countryside. It's an empty, barren when changing landscape, which only a few people have the gift of entering. Dreams seem to exist at particular geographical points within it.
There are all kinds of stories immersive sensory experiences that to be called shared and sold. The story's protagonist, Laura Jane, is the daughter of the first dream hunter, who discovered the place when it suddenly appeared two years before the narrative begins. But when Laura starts to enter the place for herself, the previously stable plot lines of dreams start to swerve and change when she dreams them.
They take unexpected and disturbing turns that seem to be trying to convey a message to the. In the place, Knox creates a landscape literally filled with fragments of memory and experience, which continue to speak and have real world effects dreams, and this story can be exciting, beautiful and powerfully healing experiences, but they can also be silent instruments of power, keeping the body captive and influencing its behaviour far beyond the single night sleep.
And the land itself emerges as a speaking voice. We learn in the second book that the Telegram lines which crossed the real world space at the place now tend to produce corrupted text. Something is speaking. One character says it was the place the place used the Telegraph to try to talk to us. What is it saying? One of the corruptions reads, Rise up.
I said, rise up. Knox's fiction is full of places where atrocity has happened in the past and continues to reverberate in the landscape and often supernatural effects in these places, time and people's memory of it becomes disrupted. The novel Muscle Fire, also set in Southland takes place in the rural valley, still affected by a mining disaster which happened several years before.
Up in the hills nearby is a house which no one seemed to take any notice of, their attention is always gently or not so gently turned aside by distractions and delusions. But the novel's protagonist, Connie, has a kind of second sight sort of halfway between a magical gift and what we might see as nero divergence. Enables her to enter the uncanny orbit of the House, where even time itself has become locked in a powerful spell of repetition and renewal.
In the absolute book, the main character, Taron, is driven primarily by the series of disastrous events, which began so we think with his sister's murder at a spot near the former family estates at Princes Gate on the borders of England and Wales. The place where Beatrice Cornick was run down and killed is 20 several times in the narrative. A crucial instance early in the book is when Taryn brings a man who she thinks of only as a mule Skinner.
He is tacitly offering her revenge on the murderer, who's about to be released after five years on a manslaughter charge. When they first arrived at the wounded oak, Tarin felt she was sleepwalking into an exceptional state of being is it the leaves of the trees with the days and days between Beatrice and her in the same place, almost the last place Beatrice ever was? Tarin had felt she was taking the mule Skinner, not so much to the crime scene as Beatrice herself.
Beatrice, this is your Avenger. The fallout from this pact drives the whole rest of the novel sprawling narrative it needs, first and foremost, veterans possession by a demon which causes memory lapses and terrifying losses of bodily control. She's only able to heal with the help of the. The fairy ladies and gentlemen of Irish mythology.
But their beauty and generosity, and the beauty and abundance of the land to which they take their abducted humans is darkened by the revelation that their eternal life is paid for by a tide of human souls to help. This takes place every century at Hell's Gate, a beautiful flowering fields filled with the countless graves of people sacrificed for the show's benefit.
The graves were so close together that they had to go single file, making her way through the reminded terrain of a game she and she would play on flagstone paths and plazas, walking on the cracks instead of avoiding them, which was a traditional game of step on a crack and area at. B had walked a zigzag tightrope across various public spaces, shouting, bring on the rats, her little sister bumbling after her.
Bring on the rats. Karen muttered to herself until they were through the patchwork of blooming great mounds and out onto the meadow proper, where the flowers were thinner, no doubt hundreds of windblown generations when the plants first propagated by these gracefully mourning murderers. The murder, which shaped times, life is mirrored in the narrative by the centuries of death at the heart of the world of the show.
You can see a similar dynamic in not too soft on novels with their supernatural hidden spaces. Family grief and regret spreads outwards, poisoning memory so that people become trapped in its dysfunctional cycles. And this pattern then becomes a symbol for wider, deeper systems of exploitation and suffering. It's worth noting here the complexity of some of Knox's positioning of her fantasy world.
In the duet, Southland is not shown to have any equivalent to the real world Maori, if at which a few viewers have grappled with and found problematic, particularly as Knox is a non-Indigenous New Zealander herself. On the other hand, in Mosul, fire NOCs depicts the existence of various specific settler peoples in Southland. The protagonist, Connie, has grown up in a mixed household with a mother from the fictional Shackle Islands and a stepfather of apparently European heritage.
Her full name is Ashkenazi, but her white teachers and peers call her Agnes, and multivalent identity is an important, if somewhat submerged factor in the story in the U.S. to the apparent absence of indigenous people seems to have symbolic significance is beyond the world building choice. The emptiness of the place is ambiguous with its ruined buildings and traces of past suggesting a history just out of reach.
As you already seen, it's an unexpectedly vocal and one from which suppressed voices are trying to break out. It's very Earth is trying to discourage what has been buried within its. So mainstream is in Southland, the characters in the dreams are just ciphers, background colours, a safe, controlled experience of the dream. In Laura's experience, however, they begin to exhibit the disturbing reality becoming not revellers and friends, but prisoners and victims.
Here's an extract from another dream from the first book in the duet. It starts out as a romance narrative with a heroine running after her departing lover. She had to run. She must get to him before he was gone. She must have him touch her cheek again. She looked to one side and noticed that someone was building a new garden wall. She saw labourers and shapeless great clothes, their trouser legs gathered at the ankles.
Then she was on her feet and ready to run again. The heroin ran on, leaving Laura Jane standing on the lawn of the heroin's house. The wind's blowing and the garden was silent. But for the insects taking like a cooling engine, Laura went to look at the wall the labourers were building. The men were making bricks. She watched a man stamping the drying and fired bricks, marking each with the flat of an arrow head. She saw that while the clothes the men wore were grey and stained with brick dust.
They too were marked with arrowheads and a darker grey. And she saw that it was shackles that gathered their dusty trouser legs at their ankles. Knox's is the pharmacy conceits of the dreams he depicts what we might call the return of the subaltern. This is a term in postcolonial theory for the way in which certain social groups displace to the margins of a colonial society, rise up and make themselves heard by breaking the conventional narratives of that society.
It's certainly debateable whether it's appropriate for Knox to exclude from her world building the actual people who are evoked by such narrative devices. But they provide a deep, symbolic only structure to the duet, which gives it a depth beyond its central coming of age and family narratives. Similar frameworks are at play in much of Knox's work. She describes herself as interested in stories about the others of mythology, folklore, fantasy and science fiction.
This kind of figure is everywhere in her novels, an eclectic range of vampires, angels, fairies and gods. But the other is never just that. Knox depicts complex, messy relationships between human and non-human characters, and they often bring into question the line between the two. The witness look, for example, traces the relationship between a French wine maker, suburban brown shadow and an angel sauce.
The angel agrees with the groom to meet him in the same place once a year for the rest of his life. Zach is obviously uncomfortably inhuman, but his bond with Sobrang grows and deepens throughout the latter's life. It becomes something difficult to categorise contentious, co-dependent, romantic and intense in a way the people around the ground cannot fully understand.
In the absolute box in the society of the UK is both inviting nomadic culture that one with the landscape and disturbing as their possessive glamour allows them to gather groups of enchanted, docile humans. It's very unlike the brutal, shattering, demonic possession which Tarrant experiences elsewhere in the narrative, but it's no less an expression of control. The only exception is the half shame on shift to whose household time becomes attached.
We're told more than once that he counts everyone as people. In this novels, World of God's Angels, Demons and Fairies, and in her various different fantasy worlds, not is always concerned with people of whatever kind and their relationships to each other, particularly their responsibilities to each other in a duet, for example. An important moral crux of the narrative is Laura's creation of a sandman inspired by the columns of Eastern European Jewish folklore.
Through the story, she struggles with what it means to create command and eventually set him free. But just as important is her closest bond with her cousin, Rose, and indeed any realistic depiction of female friendship, which finds a tragic echo in times loss of Beatrice in the absolute book. So there's a lot more I could say in connexion with the various things I touched on in the last few minutes.
The line between fantasy and horror and not as work, particularly body horror and the body in pain, the eclecticism of resources and influences her explorations of time, whether to do with personal memory and experiences in the duet or with more explicit focus on mathematics and physics as in mortal fire.
But I was inspired to explore her fiction also recently out in this podcast series, in an interview with Knox herself by Caroline Laurenson of the Oxford English faculty, discussing the absolute book. Did you check that out? Thanks to Emily Lavallade for providing the extra voicing on this podcast. Thank you for listening.