Title:
Black Oxen
Author:
Elizabeth Knox
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001
ISBN
1-891620-39-8

I wasn't really looking for Elizabeth Knox, nor for the sort of story that Black Oxen was. I had walked into the library to return some other stuff, and checked the "new books" shelves out of habit. Black Oxen, with its plain black cover and peculiar title design sort of jumped out at me. When I checked the jacket blurb about the author, she was from New Zealand. That was interesting. What does it take for a young woman to get her books published half a world away?

Black Oxen concerns the life of a mysterious man. The main narrator is the man's daughter, who presents the story in the form of narrative therapy and extracts from her and her father's memoirs.

The story takes us into another Earth-like world, into the magic rituals of South American Indians, and into the turbulent domain of South American revolutionary politics. For a while there seems to be a mystery, and I found myself wondering if that would be the point of the story, but Knox abandons it after almost casually giving its solution. This is, after all, not a story about murder or magic, though murder and magic figure in it, but about the identity of one man, and how we don't know his name. Names and magic are closely intertwined, we find out, but in the end neither names nor magic tell us who we are.

Knox employs a narrative style that would be called "train of consciousness," though it isn't as disjointed as, for example, Richard Brautigan or William S. Burroughs, and Knox's stylistic renderings are inevitably less harsh, giving the impression of careful consideration rather than willful imposition.

I suppose it's called post modernism: the story isn't driven by plot, or at least the plot isn't a simple linear arc, the characters are revealed bit by bit instead of presented at the outset, and you don't really know who the main character is, nor what the point of the story is. Frequently I found myself going back to see if I've missed a bit, because the expected convention of story telling isn't followed. I don't think it's a particularly clever way of writing, and most authors that try it produce laundry lists or badly edited diaries, not stuff that I'd want to bother reading. Few authors who write speculative fiction bother with these stylistic conceits, probably because they understand that their audience isn't interested in the latest literary fad: they buy books to be entertained. And post modernism is entertaining mostly to the literati, those lofty souls who can carry on at length about "The Use of the First Person in Huckleberry Finn."

But in spite of Knox's unconventional style, I found Black Oxen riveting. It's sort of like a walk in a park, or a stroll through an unfamiliar downtown, where every bend in the road reveals new sights. I wanted to keep going, just to see where the road would lead, and I wasn't too worried about the final destination because the journey was so pleasant.