Black Oxen

From The Critics

Knox's latest novel introduces readers to a multitextured world, brimming with intense, poetic language and so many characters that the author supplies readers with a list explaining each of their functions. Set in the year 2022, the book is structured around a series of therapy sessions involving Carme Risk and her therapist, Sean Hart. The main focus of the story is Carme's tentative relationship with her father, Walter, who has repeatedly abandoned her throughout her life. As part of her therapy, Carme is instructed to write a story about her elusive father, in which he takes on the identity of a magical figure whom Carme names Abra Cadaver. The rest of the book concerns Carme's private journals, as well as those of her father. Both diaries, which are read by Carme's therapist, become integral to the colorful story line. Knox adds complexity to her tale by incorporating the therapist's analysis, in chapters with nebulous titles such as "Transference" and "Countertransference." The book spans more than twenty years and shifts between California and Lequama, a fictional Latin American country, full of sorcery and black magic, that's undergoing a revolution. Although confusing at times, the journal entries offer an intimate, firsthand account of these characters' experiences. Knox leaves readers with the feeling that they've lived through a dense and, at times, magical history.
—Ann B. Stephenson

(Excerpted Review)

Library Journal

Knox's second work (after The Vintner's Luck) to be published outside her native New Zealand, this novel confirms her imaginative skill, weaving as it does between various times and places, from a Brigadoon-like island, to a small Central American nation run by black magic-practicing revolutionaries, to a therapist's couch in northern California, well into the 21st century. The story centers around Carmen Risk's search for her elusive, not-quite-human father a healer whose body contains enough phosphorus to kill an ordinary man but which he uses as a fuel, "like coal in the production of steel." Along the way, we meet a surfeit of strange and fascinating characters, including a gay convict with sadistic tendencies, a heart-eating Taoscal Indian chief and revolutionary hero, and a feeble billionaire who wants to live forever. It is a fascinating, albeit tangled, web, topped off by an ending that will surprise all but the most astute readers. A fun read for those who enjoy both the unusual and the intelligent; recommended for public and academic libraries. David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, FL Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Byzantine intrigue and melodramatic excess abound to an almost unprecedented degree in this fascinating, inordinately busy new novel from the New Zealand author (The Vintner's Luck, 1999). Brief summary won't help much, but here goes. In 2022, medical therapist Carme Risk is herself undergoing "narrative therapy," attempting to comprehend the mysterious figure of her father, an apparently ageless and possibly supernatural being known variously as Abra Cadaver, "Ido Idea," and Walter Risk. An extended flashback takes us to Eden (doubtless in new Zealand), where a foundling who's autistic, or a genius, or both ("something between feral child and street kid") is adopted by bachelor loner Carlin Cadaver. The charismatic Abra fathers a daughter, whose later life is chronicled in reports of her therapy sessions and in scenes set (out of chronological order) in Eden, the fictional South American republic of Lequama, and a southern California campus. The restlessness and volatility of Knox's characters find objective correlatives in the complex aftereffects of Lequama's bloody revolution (especially as experienced by its Taoscal ethnic majority, as rebel forces rise to and falls from power), and in the tangled interrelations of a cast of nearly 50 important characters, including an ostensibly reformed prostitute and her rebellious daughter, a bisexual male military hero and an Amazonian woman officer, a martyred poet, a morose Newfoundland dog, and a desiccated billionaire who schemes to live forever. Reading this cheerfully overstuffed novel is rather like watching an insanely lavish "epic" film in which dozens of actors play vividly imagined eccentrics: the spectacle is rousing, but thebrain-weary viewer despairs of connecting logically together everything that keeps flying past him. Nevertheless, clues are provided by Knox's brilliantly chosen title (from Yeats's line "The years like great black oxen tread the world . . . ") and by subtly placed allusions to Patrick White's utterly mad novel of hermaphroditism and psychic transference, The Twyborn Affair. "Why are these people trying to teach the world about Taoscal magic?" The answers to this question, and many others, will be found by the diligent-and patient-reader, somewhere within the sprawling, infuriating pages of Black Oxen.