A fabulous and richly peopled otherworldly tale with echoes of Borges and Marquez, Black Oxen is the story of Carme Risk's pursuit of her beautiful and not quite human father through two worlds and three changes of identity. In her forties, in the year 2022, Risk has entered narrative therapy. Her memories and her father's journal take her from the Eden of her earliest childhood to dusty, poor, Lequama, a Latin American country, where she and her father become involved with the slightly mad young leaders of the recent revolution and where everyone seems to practice black magic. And finally to Risk's life in northern California, still in thrall to her elusive father and now the widow of Lequama's most notorious torturer. BLACK OXEN features intrigue, machete murders, battles and bacchanals. Full of unforgettable characters, from the Taoscal chief, who is chosen because he is the luckiest person in the tribe, to a sexually ferocious therapist, and a frail billionaire who wants to live forever, it is a provocative, disturbing, ingenious and beautifully written novel where reality, fantasy and imagination dissolve and clash.
Industry Reviews
Knox's follow-up novel to her celebrated The Vintner's Luck opens with a cast-list spanning three worlds. Here is the first warning that the reader will have to pay attention in order to unravel the many twists and turns of this complex story. The plot follows Carme Risk through a course of narrative therapy, exploring her father's past through his journals and her own. Emerging from an otherworldly Eden into rural England as a boy, through revolutionary South America and then to northern California, Abra Cadaver, aka Ido Idea, aka WalterRisk, is a difficult man to trace, particularly as his own memory is unreliable. But the story is only the icing on the cake. The real theme of this novel is narratology. In both form and content, the author plays with the conventions of narrative structure. Knox looks at the concept of culture specific narratives, possible only in a specific time and place, and decodable only by readers with particular knowledge or framed within a wider narrative. There is also a nod to modern paranoia about manipulation of events by the press, in order to construct politically or artistically convenient narratives. One journalist suggests that mud-covered soldiers look more credible and a documentary crew promise to find the narrative for 'their' story in the editing suite. Meaning is communicated not through events but through the sequence of their presentation. The ability to form concrete interpretations is undermined in a number of way: memories are unreliable, people lie, magic shifts the goalposts of what is possible and the whole world of the book is prone to shifting to the world on the other side of the river, a world which is only accessible at certain but irregular intervals. In a reversal of conventional logic, 'people behave predictably, but circumstances misbehave'. Black Oxen has strong themes and intriguing ideas galore. One problem with the long cast list is that too many characters remain only names on a page and add to the confusion where closer identity would have driven the reader forward. But overall, the book is intelligent and ingenious and will reward the inquisitive reader. (Kirkus UK)
