1
00:00:00,330 --> 00:00:03,480
Welcome to this instalment of the Oxford Fantasy podcast.

2
00:00:03,480 --> 00:00:09,730
My name is Elisha Smith, and today we're looking at contemporary New Zealand, the fantasy author Elizabeth Knox.

3
00:00:09,730 --> 00:00:16,860
So we start with a scene from her 2007 novel Dream Hunter. A boy is exploring a graveyard at sunset.

4
00:00:16,860 --> 00:00:25,510
He's been trying out a divining rod looking for water. He climbs up on felled eucalyptus tree and looks out of the sky.

5
00:00:25,510 --> 00:00:29,470
The sunset was so violent that it should have been making a noise.

6
00:00:29,470 --> 00:00:40,100
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.

7
00:00:40,100 --> 00:00:48,130
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.

8
00:00:48,130 --> 00:00:57,150
It was a move. It might have been a human sound. Only there was no human consciousness or intelligence or character in it.

9
00:00:57,150 --> 00:01:05,820
It sounded as though it came from a very dark place. It was a sound of absolute despair.

10
00:01:05,820 --> 00:01:13,640
The boy climbed down from the felled tree. He followed the mown, creeping softly amongst the tombstones.

11
00:01:13,640 --> 00:01:23,650
The Sun went down. The billows in the sky seem to roll and swell as they filled with purple shadows, a light went blue.

12
00:01:23,650 --> 00:01:34,750
The boy stopped, he listened, he heard the sound again, a muffled rustling, then a terrible roar, throat moaning.

13
00:01:34,750 --> 00:01:43,230
A little way off between two tall headstones, we could see a pile of coloured colours still even in the blue twilight.

14
00:01:43,230 --> 00:01:49,250
It was a heap of white, red, yellow and purple flowers. The boy crept closer.

15
00:01:49,250 --> 00:01:56,820
You saw a fresh grave piled high with late summer flowers and wreaths, florals painted black and gilt.

16
00:01:56,820 --> 00:02:03,650
Nothing stirred. But the ground moaned again and shrieked, thumped, scraped and rustled.

17
00:02:03,650 --> 00:02:12,860
The boy stood staring his hands spread as though he held his Hazel Rod, wavering in his loose grip and turning.

18
00:02:12,860 --> 00:02:16,670
Turning down to what he had devised.

19
00:02:16,670 --> 00:02:25,460
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.

20
00:02:25,460 --> 00:02:29,720
This dream has a name. The water diviner and it's always the same story.

21
00:02:29,720 --> 00:02:32,240
It has been caused by one of the characters in the novel,

22
00:02:32,240 --> 00:02:38,420
whose Dream Hunter is intended to be shared with others as part of a unique entertainment industry.

23
00:02:38,420 --> 00:02:43,340
The dream hunter will sleep in the same room as those he plans to share it with when he falls asleep.

24
00:02:43,340 --> 00:02:50,850
So will they, and they'll experience a scene as he does vivid and details like no ordinary dream.

25
00:02:50,850 --> 00:02:58,080
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.

26
00:02:58,080 --> 00:03:02,680
It also indicates some of the most distinctive features and preoccupations of her work.

27
00:03:02,680 --> 00:03:07,060
Her novels display in my new sensory attention, the setting and place.

28
00:03:07,060 --> 00:03:12,010
Her style is generally fairly spare and plain, though it's full of atmosphere and tension.

29
00:03:12,010 --> 00:03:19,930
She's concerned with alternate mental states of various kinds. Often dreams, but also illness in Chapman's possession.

30
00:03:19,930 --> 00:03:23,920
And she comes back again and again to the theme of Return from death.

31
00:03:23,920 --> 00:03:32,890
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.

32
00:03:32,890 --> 00:03:39,660
And she's won many prises. She also teaches a class in worldbuilding at Victoria University in Wellington.

33
00:03:39,660 --> 00:03:46,950
Her work spans multiple genres, from young adult fantasy to horror to semi fictionalised memoir.

34
00:03:46,950 --> 00:03:50,820
Her first novel to garner international attention was the vintners look.

35
00:03:50,820 --> 00:04:00,360
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.

36
00:04:00,360 --> 00:04:06,420
In the dream to do it, which is made up of Dream Hunter and its sequel Dream Quick Not to return home,

37
00:04:06,420 --> 00:04:11,880
but with a difference creating an alternate history South Pacific nation Southland.

38
00:04:11,880 --> 00:04:19,290
It's both like and unlike Real World New Zealand, and it's also the setting for her later novel Muscle Fire.

39
00:04:19,290 --> 00:04:24,000
In her most recent novel, The Absolute Book, New Zealand and France both appear,

40
00:04:24,000 --> 00:04:32,020
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.

41
00:04:32,020 --> 00:04:38,680
Knox's approach to fantasy is varied. She's written about angels, vampires on time travel to name a few,

42
00:04:38,680 --> 00:04:49,330
but three linked things turn up again and again land and place the body on memory, particularly problems with or disruptions off memory.

43
00:04:49,330 --> 00:04:52,660
These themes come together in a particularly interesting way in the dream.

44
00:04:52,660 --> 00:04:56,980
When did you get? I've mentioned already that it sets in alternate history,

45
00:04:56,980 --> 00:05:02,980
roughly in the Edwardian period in a country with very similar geography to Real World New Zealand.

46
00:05:02,980 --> 00:05:09,850
One of the big differences between Southland and the real world is the existence of the place with a capital P.

47
00:05:09,850 --> 00:05:18,370
The place is where dream hunters go to find dreams flying beyond an invisible border in an otherwise unremarkable stretch of countryside.

48
00:05:18,370 --> 00:05:24,900
It's an empty, barren when changing landscape, which only a few people have the gift of entering.

49
00:05:24,900 --> 00:05:29,340
Dreams seem to exist at particular geographical points within it.

50
00:05:29,340 --> 00:05:37,420
There are all kinds of stories immersive sensory experiences that to be called shared and sold.

51
00:05:37,420 --> 00:05:41,440
The story's protagonist, Laura Jane, is the daughter of the first dream hunter,

52
00:05:41,440 --> 00:05:46,350
who discovered the place when it suddenly appeared two years before the narrative begins.

53
00:05:46,350 --> 00:05:54,900
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.

54
00:05:54,900 --> 00:06:01,700
They take unexpected and disturbing turns that seem to be trying to convey a message to the.

55
00:06:01,700 --> 00:06:07,520
In the place, Knox creates a landscape literally filled with fragments of memory and experience,

56
00:06:07,520 --> 00:06:13,550
which continue to speak and have real world effects dreams, and this story can be exciting,

57
00:06:13,550 --> 00:06:19,610
beautiful and powerfully healing experiences, but they can also be silent instruments of power,

58
00:06:19,610 --> 00:06:25,820
keeping the body captive and influencing its behaviour far beyond the single night sleep.

59
00:06:25,820 --> 00:06:30,130
And the land itself emerges as a speaking voice.

60
00:06:30,130 --> 00:06:38,110
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.

61
00:06:38,110 --> 00:06:45,880
Something is speaking. One character says it was the place the place used the Telegraph to try to talk to us.

62
00:06:45,880 --> 00:06:49,600
What is it saying? One of the corruptions reads, Rise up.

63
00:06:49,600 --> 00:06:58,540
I said, rise up. Knox's fiction is full of places where atrocity has happened in the past and continues

64
00:06:58,540 --> 00:07:03,850
to reverberate in the landscape and often supernatural effects in these places,

65
00:07:03,850 --> 00:07:07,540
time and people's memory of it becomes disrupted.

66
00:07:07,540 --> 00:07:16,170
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.

67
00:07:16,170 --> 00:07:20,730
Up in the hills nearby is a house which no one seemed to take any notice of,

68
00:07:20,730 --> 00:07:26,900
their attention is always gently or not so gently turned aside by distractions and delusions.

69
00:07:26,900 --> 00:07:35,680
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.

70
00:07:35,680 --> 00:07:45,850
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.

71
00:07:45,850 --> 00:07:51,520
In the absolute book, the main character, Taron, is driven primarily by the series of disastrous events,

72
00:07:51,520 --> 00:08:00,750
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.

73
00:08:00,750 --> 00:08:07,290
The place where Beatrice Cornick was run down and killed is 20 several times in the narrative.

74
00:08:07,290 --> 00:08:13,740
A crucial instance early in the book is when Taryn brings a man who she thinks of only as a mule Skinner.

75
00:08:13,740 --> 00:08:21,290
He is tacitly offering her revenge on the murderer, who's about to be released after five years on a manslaughter charge.

76
00:08:21,290 --> 00:08:28,700
When they first arrived at the wounded oak, Tarin felt she was sleepwalking into an exceptional state of being is it the leaves

77
00:08:28,700 --> 00:08:34,250
of the trees with the days and days between Beatrice and her in the same place,

78
00:08:34,250 --> 00:08:44,300
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.

79
00:08:44,300 --> 00:08:53,950
Beatrice, this is your Avenger. The fallout from this pact drives the whole rest of the novel sprawling narrative it needs, first and foremost,

80
00:08:53,950 --> 00:09:00,520
veterans possession by a demon which causes memory lapses and terrifying losses of bodily control.

81
00:09:00,520 --> 00:09:07,420
She's only able to heal with the help of the. The fairy ladies and gentlemen of Irish mythology.

82
00:09:07,420 --> 00:09:14,260
But their beauty and generosity, and the beauty and abundance of the land to which they take their abducted humans is darkened

83
00:09:14,260 --> 00:09:20,510
by the revelation that their eternal life is paid for by a tide of human souls to help.

84
00:09:20,510 --> 00:09:23,150
This takes place every century at Hell's Gate,

85
00:09:23,150 --> 00:09:30,980
a beautiful flowering fields filled with the countless graves of people sacrificed for the show's benefit.

86
00:09:30,980 --> 00:09:34,790
The graves were so close together that they had to go single file,

87
00:09:34,790 --> 00:09:40,730
making her way through the reminded terrain of a game she and she would play on flagstone paths and plazas,

88
00:09:40,730 --> 00:09:47,500
walking on the cracks instead of avoiding them, which was a traditional game of step on a crack and area at.

89
00:09:47,500 --> 00:09:56,460
B had walked a zigzag tightrope across various public spaces, shouting, bring on the rats, her little sister bumbling after her.

90
00:09:56,460 --> 00:10:05,190
Bring on the rats. Karen muttered to herself until they were through the patchwork of blooming great mounds and out onto the meadow proper,

91
00:10:05,190 --> 00:10:14,560
where the flowers were thinner, no doubt hundreds of windblown generations when the plants first propagated by these gracefully mourning murderers.

92
00:10:14,560 --> 00:10:22,510
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.

93
00:10:22,510 --> 00:10:27,770
You can see a similar dynamic in not too soft on novels with their supernatural hidden spaces.

94
00:10:27,770 --> 00:10:35,050
Family grief and regret spreads outwards, poisoning memory so that people become trapped in its dysfunctional cycles.

95
00:10:35,050 --> 00:10:41,160
And this pattern then becomes a symbol for wider, deeper systems of exploitation and suffering.

96
00:10:41,160 --> 00:10:46,980
It's worth noting here the complexity of some of Knox's positioning of her fantasy world.

97
00:10:46,980 --> 00:10:52,260
In the duet, Southland is not shown to have any equivalent to the real world Maori,

98
00:10:52,260 --> 00:11:01,290
if at which a few viewers have grappled with and found problematic, particularly as Knox is a non-Indigenous New Zealander herself.

99
00:11:01,290 --> 00:11:07,890
On the other hand, in Mosul, fire NOCs depicts the existence of various specific settler peoples in Southland.

100
00:11:07,890 --> 00:11:09,300
The protagonist, Connie,

101
00:11:09,300 --> 00:11:17,410
has grown up in a mixed household with a mother from the fictional Shackle Islands and a stepfather of apparently European heritage.

102
00:11:17,410 --> 00:11:24,370
Her full name is Ashkenazi, but her white teachers and peers call her Agnes, and multivalent identity is an important,

103
00:11:24,370 --> 00:11:31,210
if somewhat submerged factor in the story in the U.S. to the apparent absence of indigenous

104
00:11:31,210 --> 00:11:36,360
people seems to have symbolic significance is beyond the world building choice.

105
00:11:36,360 --> 00:11:44,740
The emptiness of the place is ambiguous with its ruined buildings and traces of past suggesting a history just out of reach.

106
00:11:44,740 --> 00:11:50,620
As you already seen, it's an unexpectedly vocal and one from which suppressed voices are trying to break out.

107
00:11:50,620 --> 00:11:55,390
It's very Earth is trying to discourage what has been buried within its.

108
00:11:55,390 --> 00:12:03,430
So mainstream is in Southland, the characters in the dreams are just ciphers, background colours, a safe, controlled experience of the dream.

109
00:12:03,430 --> 00:12:12,500
In Laura's experience, however, they begin to exhibit the disturbing reality becoming not revellers and friends, but prisoners and victims.

110
00:12:12,500 --> 00:12:15,440
Here's an extract from another dream from the first book in the duet.

111
00:12:15,440 --> 00:12:21,540
It starts out as a romance narrative with a heroine running after her departing lover.

112
00:12:21,540 --> 00:12:27,850
She had to run. She must get to him before he was gone. She must have him touch her cheek again.

113
00:12:27,850 --> 00:12:32,420
She looked to one side and noticed that someone was building a new garden wall.

114
00:12:32,420 --> 00:12:38,380
She saw labourers and shapeless great clothes, their trouser legs gathered at the ankles.

115
00:12:38,380 --> 00:12:48,790
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.

116
00:12:48,790 --> 00:12:52,150
The wind's blowing and the garden was silent.

117
00:12:52,150 --> 00:12:59,530
But for the insects taking like a cooling engine, Laura went to look at the wall the labourers were building.

118
00:12:59,530 --> 00:13:08,890
The men were making bricks. She watched a man stamping the drying and fired bricks, marking each with the flat of an arrow head.

119
00:13:08,890 --> 00:13:13,750
She saw that while the clothes the men wore were grey and stained with brick dust.

120
00:13:13,750 --> 00:13:23,540
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.

121
00:13:23,540 --> 00:13:29,930
Knox's is the pharmacy conceits of the dreams he depicts what we might call the return of the subaltern.

122
00:13:29,930 --> 00:13:37,100
This is a term in postcolonial theory for the way in which certain social groups displace to the margins of a colonial society,

123
00:13:37,100 --> 00:13:43,360
rise up and make themselves heard by breaking the conventional narratives of that society.

124
00:13:43,360 --> 00:13:46,930
It's certainly debateable whether it's appropriate for Knox to exclude from her

125
00:13:46,930 --> 00:13:51,950
world building the actual people who are evoked by such narrative devices.

126
00:13:51,950 --> 00:14:00,850
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.

127
00:14:00,850 --> 00:14:03,820
Similar frameworks are at play in much of Knox's work.

128
00:14:03,820 --> 00:14:10,600
She describes herself as interested in stories about the others of mythology, folklore, fantasy and science fiction.

129
00:14:10,600 --> 00:14:17,050
This kind of figure is everywhere in her novels, an eclectic range of vampires, angels, fairies and gods.

130
00:14:17,050 --> 00:14:19,180
But the other is never just that.

131
00:14:19,180 --> 00:14:28,180
Knox depicts complex, messy relationships between human and non-human characters, and they often bring into question the line between the two.

132
00:14:28,180 --> 00:14:36,100
The witness look, for example, traces the relationship between a French wine maker, suburban brown shadow and an angel sauce.

133
00:14:36,100 --> 00:14:41,860
The angel agrees with the groom to meet him in the same place once a year for the rest of his life.

134
00:14:41,860 --> 00:14:49,300
Zach is obviously uncomfortably inhuman, but his bond with Sobrang grows and deepens throughout the latter's life.

135
00:14:49,300 --> 00:14:53,380
It becomes something difficult to categorise contentious, co-dependent,

136
00:14:53,380 --> 00:14:59,930
romantic and intense in a way the people around the ground cannot fully understand.

137
00:14:59,930 --> 00:15:06,050
In the absolute box in the society of the UK is both inviting nomadic culture that one with the

138
00:15:06,050 --> 00:15:11,480
landscape and disturbing as their possessive glamour allows them to gather groups of enchanted,

139
00:15:11,480 --> 00:15:19,170
docile humans. It's very unlike the brutal, shattering, demonic possession which Tarrant experiences elsewhere in the narrative,

140
00:15:19,170 --> 00:15:27,720
but it's no less an expression of control. The only exception is the half shame on shift to whose household time becomes attached.

141
00:15:27,720 --> 00:15:33,230
We're told more than once that he counts everyone as people.

142
00:15:33,230 --> 00:15:38,870
In this novels, World of God's Angels, Demons and Fairies, and in her various different fantasy worlds,

143
00:15:38,870 --> 00:15:43,610
not is always concerned with people of whatever kind and their relationships to each other,

144
00:15:43,610 --> 00:15:48,560
particularly their responsibilities to each other in a duet, for example.

145
00:15:48,560 --> 00:15:56,880
An important moral crux of the narrative is Laura's creation of a sandman inspired by the columns of Eastern European Jewish folklore.

146
00:15:56,880 --> 00:16:03,420
Through the story, she struggles with what it means to create command and eventually set him free.

147
00:16:03,420 --> 00:16:10,680
But just as important is her closest bond with her cousin, Rose, and indeed any realistic depiction of female friendship,

148
00:16:10,680 --> 00:16:16,580
which finds a tragic echo in times loss of Beatrice in the absolute book.

149
00:16:16,580 --> 00:16:21,230
So there's a lot more I could say in connexion with the various things I touched on in the last few minutes.

150
00:16:21,230 --> 00:16:26,510
The line between fantasy and horror and not as work, particularly body horror and the body in pain,

151
00:16:26,510 --> 00:16:31,370
the eclecticism of resources and influences her explorations of time,

152
00:16:31,370 --> 00:16:39,320
whether to do with personal memory and experiences in the duet or with more explicit focus on mathematics and physics as in mortal fire.

153
00:16:39,320 --> 00:16:45,140
But I was inspired to explore her fiction also recently out in this podcast series,

154
00:16:45,140 --> 00:16:50,970
in an interview with Knox herself by Caroline Laurenson of the Oxford English faculty, discussing the absolute book.

155
00:16:50,970 --> 00:16:57,360
Did you check that out? Thanks to Emily Lavallade for providing the extra voicing on this podcast.

156
00:16:57,360 --> 00:16:59,331
Thank you for listening.