Black Oxen, by Elizabeth Knox

To begin with, there's the invented South American country, the group of soap-operatic revolutionary heroes, the three fictional First Nations, and the haunting in the presidential palace. It's a strange book where I have to put those things into the first line of the review, because they don't enter naturally into anything else I want to talk about.

Black Oxen has a quality of concentrated unexpectedness which is most familiar to me from cinema, from Mulholland Drive or Belle de Jour, where what is surprising may not be the next turn of the plot so much as the next choice of shot, or word, or tone, and where skilled use of incongruity makes parts of it positively hilarious -- while some of the tones involved are very dark indeed. I find it delightful in its density. This is not a book like The Dragon Waiting, where half the cleverness is unstated, in what's taken out of the structure without making it fall. Black Oxen is thick with itself. It has a wide reference with which to be unexpected; the physical world it's set in is textured and busy -- in the way that I can glance out my window right now and see, oh, a slightly rusty corrugated tin roof with two rustier nails popped up out of it, and, for some reason, a loose door hinge lying off to one side. The book has reference to a complicated world, whenever it wants what's outside the window to be realer than 'the tin roof', or wants one of its characters to be working a job not listed in a top twenty of common jobs in fiction. It also has a breadth of reference in that its characters, when they quote, are as likely to quote the Moomin books as Yeats.

It's a genre book without the usual genre tags. There's a story by Elizabeth Knox in the Small Beer Press Steampunk! collection, which made me think about the definition of steampunk, because, though it had anachronistic blimps and geothermal power, it did not feel fabulous. One of my expectations of steampunk is that it should walk a fine line between feeling possible and impossible, that it should not just have genre tags but wave them enthusiastically about its head in the parade. The story in question did not feel like steampunk to me because it felt too possible. Knox describes the real and the unreal with the same kind of telling sensory detail, which you wouldn't think would be hard to do, but it's a rare feeling for writing to give me, the feeling that it's not fantasy being written but naturalistic fiction about magic. (My usual association with those words would be, "Oh dear, someone scornful is trying to reinvent the elf," but this is a case of extreme familiarity with both elves and wheels). In this book, going to another world might be a minor backstory detail, and is anyway subordinated to the fact that whatever world you're in you have to live there, in the same kind of reality as everyone else does.

It is worth mentioning also that the book is very long, that it has enough plot to take it right through into a state of near plotlessness, and that the character list at the beginning is also printed on a handy bookmark so that readers can refer to it throughout without flipping back to the beginning. This is a book where there'll be a character who is actually named Abra Cadaver, and then his father will explain that he chose such a terrible pun in order to draw people's mockery away from crueler and more obvious corpse jokes (but also partly on a dare), and then the fact that the main character is named after both a corpse and a spell will end up having significant resonance. There is a character who the cast list describes as 'Edwin Money, a frail and elderly billionaire,' and your mileage may vary, but I love the book's determination to have its cake and eat it too. The characters all talk in a voice very like Knox's, with the same wordplay, wordplay that's willing to be slightly ungainly to get across complicated significances. And then they refer to the fact sideways and dare you to complain.

I sometimes want to complain. I come in and out of sympathy with this book.

One of the specific bits of it I come in and out of sympathy with is the main character. Knox has written him several times -- something she does is have the same characters occur at different points along the sliding scales of who they might be, in different books. (This book is closest to their source, I think, because it's the one most closely based on her childhood-and-after imaginary game, where the characters were first played -- which probably accounts for something of this book's strangeness, being something which was first improvised collaboratively and then shaped and polished individually). The spectrum of Abras is frustrating, though interesting, to read multiple books about. Abra is a genius, he has enough physical charisma to make lovers the way some people make acquaintances, he may alter the entire world when he gets around to it, but has such a complicated passivity that I sometimes want to shout at him to just do something in a straight line for once, he cares for others extremely well when it comes to domestic detail of all kinds, and sometimes very well but sometimes screamingly badly when it comes to macro-level choices. His possibilities are summed up fairly well by a point in this book when he says to someone that he'd set out to be good, but now found he was only well behaved. If you're less interested in Abra than the book is, there's still much to enjoy in it, but it will also be fundamentally irritating.

There is no instance, in this book structured around therapy, of therapy succeeding. There aren't any stable therapist/client relationships in which the therapist actually helps in the way one might expect a therapist to. (Contributing to this is the fact that Abra subverts most attempts by therapists to understand him by seducing them -- passively, of course. And there's something uncomfortable also about the dynamic of passive seduction in institutional contexts, lying close as it does to victim-blaming. I'm entirely satisfied that it makes sense for Abra, but I feel the tendrils of that discomfort in the rest of the book. Something about the way abusers are always allowed to present their justifications, even though not sided with). There's a character who says at one point (in what I am tempted to read as the book's voice, though that is dangerous) that therapy is reductive, replacing the complexity of possible human motivations with a slim textbook's worth of standard diagnoses. I'm sure there is therapy done that way, but it corresponds so little to my feelings about the nature and value of therapy that it was one of a number of pieces of grit in my reading experience, things I looked at sideways and went, "...not exactly?" about, even while saying "That does work for Abra, doesn't it? He isn't someone who'd be understood by the usual methods, especially not in that decade." I wonder if I'll feel that grit rereading other books of Knox's, or if the disagreements are between me and this particular one, or me and 2001-Knox. (2019-me and 2001-Knox, for none of this troubled me last time).

The book's structural device -- a series of narrative therapy sessions in which diaries and stories are discussed -- doesn't do much for me. There is too little in what it's supposed to be to cover the fact that it is a device. But in another way, the book's structural concern with therapy is very interesting; I don't think I've read another book where the past so often has new information layered back into it, new motives found or theorised, new details given, new perspectives seen. It is a book all out of order, full of people writing down memories of people narrating memories of things the reader might have expected to find out a hundred pages ago if they were ever going to find them out at all, and it works very well, making a texture I haven't met elsewhere. Though it's completely different, I think of Hexwood: it is like human memory. And it is also about walking forward onto sharp points of pain in order to take up responsibility.

My most fundamental problem with the book, the reason it is not one of my favourite books but only a book I love, is a feeling that the characters have been stretched to fit. Not stretched much, but the structure has reached out and tugged them towards it. And that is a problem, in a book whose epigraph reads, "like diamonds we are cut with our own dust." I almost believe in Abra's choices. I almost believe in the ship which spins in the convection current of its own burning. I will be very happy if I can find out how to believe in them completely, but at the moment I don't.