A Time Traveler on Imagination's Wings
With faith and fantasy, a New Zealander transports readers
around the globe
By
MICHAEL FITZGERALD
In an early
scene in elizabeth Knox's novel The Vintner's Luck, 19th century
Burgundy wine grower Sobran Jodeau shares a bottle of friand
with an angel, who will return each midsummer for the rest
of Sobran's life to advise him on matters of love, God and
viticulture: "'A young wine,' the angel said. 'Reserve a bottle
and we can drink it together when it's old.'"
Knox is
a writer worth cellaring. With four novels and three novellas
over the past 14 years, she has flirted with fame in her New
Zealand homeland, traveling to France as the 1999 Katherine
Mansfield Fellow and selling over 20,000 copies of The Vintner's
Luck since its December 1998 release. But at 42, Knox is maturing
into a sought-after literary export. Last week she brushed
past Australia's reigning Miles Franklin Award-winners Thea
Astley and Kim Scott to win the inaugural $A40,000 Tasmania
Pacific Region Prize in Hobart.
Where previous
New Zealand literary heroines such as Mansfield and Janet
Frame journeyed to Europe to find themselves, Knox travels
mostly in her imagination-and via the Internet (next month
sees the launch of her website). For Vintner she never set
foot in Burgundy; instead, she says, a fevered dream set the
story in motion: "I was having a conversation with this being
who was hidden in the shadows of the trees and the shadows
were like wings, and the angel was telling me the story of
this life-long friendship he had with a French vintner." Her
forthcoming two novels leap from South America to the Outer
Hebrides. In an age when authors sweat over research and authenticity,
Knox's flights of fantasy are (to quote Vintner) "as invigorating
as the air immediately over a wild sea."
It's an
image that conjures up the Brontė sisters, whose literary
games Knox and her two sisters emulated while growing up near
Wellington. In one game, paper dolls "turned into people,
and then we stopped using the dolls and just started telling
stories," she recalls. Her unleashed imagination was honed
by a creative writing course at Victoria University. Knox's
early novels After Z-Hour (1987) and Treasure (1992) abounded
with ghosts and faith healers, jumping through time. In serious
British and American fiction, she says, "there's a politeness,
a decorum." In New Zealand, "there's all that freedom and
scope."
Knox shrugs
off constraints of form as well as style: she recently delivered
her latest manuscript to her English editor-and to Working
Title, producers of Four Weddings and a Funeral. A romantic
mystery set on a Scottish island in 1903, Kissack and Skilling
"will sell more than Vintner, I know it will," says Knox.
"It's irresistible."
If self-belief
drives her career, wavering spiritual faith keeps her art
agile. Raised an atheist by her late journalist father, "I
think that human consciousness is the most marvelous thing
and the world is a beautiful place that walks over us and
goes on without us," says Knox. "I believe God doesn't exist
but I feel that God does-it's a strange quandary."
Her work
explores this quandary feelingly. Due for release in New Zealand
in May, Black Oxen is set in South America and peopled with
"aliens and sorcerers," she says. Its title is taken from
Yeats: "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." Vintner Sobran Jodeau, too, must trudge
on-through the Napoleonic wars, the invention of the railway,
the discoveries of Darwin. But measured by the beat of an
angel's wing, his otherwise ordinary life becomes as precious
as his vin de cru-and something worth savoring. Like Knox's
unfurling career.
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April 16, 2001 | No.
15
COVER
STORIES
The
City Of God
No other city is as venerated as Jerusalem, a source of conflict but the
hope of pilgrims from Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Archaeologists
are reconstructing the way the city appeared to Jesus when he entered
it on his way to martyrdom
SOUTH
PACIFIC
HIGH
SEAS : City Afloat...
The length of three football fields, the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Constellation
is a floating fortress, with more than 5,000 men and 72 planes. Time tours
America's flagship
THE
ARTS
ART: In Paris, Picasso's erotica doesn't
quite excite...
SHOW BUSINESS: The action heroines
MUSIC: A silenced Iranian sings again
TRAVELERS
ADVISORY
PEOPLE
TO WATCH: Novelist Elizabeth Knox...
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