Elizabeth Knox's Blog

Why I wrote The Absolute Book

The Absolute Book owes its existence to my sense of coming back to life as time and events intervened between me and some bad years. Years during which my mother was dying of Motor Neuron Disease (ALS) and my brother-in-law was killed in much the same way the novel’s protagonist’s sister. That feeling—of sudden freedom from responsibility, but with indelible memories of the strictures of responsibility—seemed to want me to do something with it. The sense of a freedom of movement that comes with being finally able to leave the worst troubles behind. Or the troubles themselves leave. You keep a vigil, then the one you’re watching over is gone and you get to walk away tired rather than run away scared.

Me and my husband Fergus did a lot of traveling in the ‘afterwards’. I wanted to capture something of that; all our walking through the world. And how, the further we walked, the bigger the world became.

The Absolute Book began directly when I started musing on the kinds of stories I love. Particularly those I’d loved for a very long time.

I was sixteen when I read Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. I can still remember my thump of excitement at the movement from chapter one, ‘Never Talk to Strangers’, to chapter two, ‘Pontius Pilate’. In chapter one a couple of members of the Writers Union are having a conversation by the Patriarch Ponds in Moscow on a hot day sometime in the late 1920s. They are interrupted by a foreign gentleman; a professor of some sort. After a time the men’s conversation turns to theological matters, and the foreigner begins to tell a story. The first lines of his story are the final lines of chapter one, and the first of chapter two:

‘Early in the morning of the spring month of Nisan the Procurator of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, in a white cloak lined with blood-red, emerged with his shuffling cavalryman’s walk into the arcade connecting the two wings of the palace of Herod the Great.’

Chapter two almost entirely concerns the examination of a troublesome and deeply touching rebel by the migraine-stricken Procurator. The whole of the novel, with its witches and night flights, its communist officials and badly behaved poets, its venal Muscovites, vexed theater impresarios, depressed novelists and talking cats was enormously influential for me. It isn’t just the quality of The Master and Margarita’s bookishness that I love (there’s a suppressed and very nearly burned novel manuscript at the center of the story), it is also its humor, its seriousness, artistic and intellectual; its and fearlessness about being farcical, or being grand; its sense of wonder and enchantment; its deep and real feelings. All of those things managing to sit singing with one another in a single book gave me a sense of what it was possible to do. I never forgot the way that book first made me feel. So, when I started to think what to do with the great feeling of freedom that came upon me after having being deeply sad and deathly tired, I thought about The Master and Margarita.

My next thought was that if I was going to try to write something tonally varied, it would be a very good idea if it had a number of fantasy tropes that were familiar, and would help shape the story. I liked and had been musing about the sort of book in which a group of people spend the novel looking for something. A thing. An object. Some of those books were what you might call arcane thrillers. Books like The Da Vinci Code or Shadow of the Wind. Books with a scholarly hero, and peopled by groups with competing or collaborative interests related to the thing they’re trying to find. Books full of reasons for strangers to talk to one another. Reasons for strange bedfellows.

Why Libraries?

Since I was writing a book about what to keep, and how sharing is keeping, I thought ‘libraries express that’. I had things I wanted to say about the worth of libraries. Libraries have always been a refuge to me—and a library and librarian pretty much saved my father’s life when he was a 13 year old removed from his home and sent to work on a farm—and sleep in a tin shack with a dirt floor— in the Wairarapa in the early 1940s. I decided my novel must have a protagonist who has written a book about library fires, a book that is doing well and drawn all kinds of attention. (I’ve always loved books where the main characters have work, where work shapes their lives and the story.) I thought about libraries as treasure houses, as refuges, and centers of community. As hubs—places to come in to and go out from. (There’s a lot of coming in and going out in the novel). But The Absolute Book is also a novel where a group of people central to the story—the sidhe—don’t even have libraries. They don’t have books. They themselves are their only memory-keepers.

As soon as I started writing my writer protagonist, Taryn Cornick, what happened was that all the other things that had been sitting around my mind came out again. So I gave Taryn a sister who was deliberately killed by a man with a motor vehicle, like my husband’s brother. Questions of punishment and revenge and forgiveness came into the book with that. Also, it quickly became obvious to me that Taryn hasn’t got over what had happened to her sister – though it is years later. Mostly she hasn’t because she took revenge, and that alienated her from herself. At the start of the novel Taryn exists in a constant state of doubt about the safety and goodness of the world. Her professional life is sorted, but her personal life is a leafless tree.

So, I was writing a book about being haunted and being unable to forget, and being culpable and needing to remember. Also, very much, about visibility and concealment—lost books, and hidden people, and truths too big or strange to see.

The novel opens with a woman with a grief, a revenge, a crime, a book.

Taryn, her grief at her sister’s death, the crime she committed, and her personal association with an object people are looking for—that’s all the centrifugal force in the novel. Taryn pulls everything towards her. Of course, some of the things she pulls towards her have their own gravities, and are whole other worlds, with green roads to walk.

And, as sure as the foreign gentleman in chapter one of The Master and Margarita is the devil, The Absolute Book was always going to be a full-throttle fantasy. The novel’s other principle character, Shift, a person who calls everyone people—everyone from chickens to demons—has, like the book itself, an egalitarian, even-handed approach to the everyday and the mythical. Shift is the friend Taryn makes. He’s something between Dante’s poet guide and the magical animal that accompanies the hero on a quest.

I wanted to write a novel that seemed to be opening out into an epic as we understand fantasy epics but, like a good mystery, would keep doubling back and deepening the discoveries and the experiences of its characters.

The Sidhe

The Absolute Book isn’t a book about books with fairies in it; the utterly unbookish sidhe are equal to the books of the book.  I wanted to write about a beautiful society founded on theft. Not beautiful as in wealth, private property, astonishing tools. The sidhe are nomadic, communal, and live along broad paths of food forests, gardens that run through wildernesses. They pay for what they have in human souls, though they love and nurture the humans concerned for a long time in happiness and plenty. The reader might think about the expedience and cruelty of late stage capitalism, or our relationship with farm and companion animals. But this isn’t an allegory. The sidhe aren’t something in costume, they are people different than all the people we know, who might also be understood as the people we know.

The Absolute Book is an arcane thriller, a fantasy, an adventure story, and a recovery narrative. Because it started with my desire to share the feeling of coming back to life Taryn does come back to life, she figures out how to live, what to do with herself, how to love those she loves.

I wanted the novel to be transporting and moving. For the person in the novel who has made a terrible wrong-headed error to face up to things, make amends, and get better. And for the almost paradisaical society – but one founded on treachery – to change its ways and begin to move in the right direction. For good things to happen because people learn to see that the interests of very different others are equal to their own.

The Ending

The ending is a happy one, though it allows some uneasiness too. It’s wish-fulfillment, aimed to make readers feel the wish because, though there may be no gods, frost-giants and fairies, we do have governments, and governments have it in their power to save the world and look after their citizens during the process of saving.

This was the opening address of the New Zealand Festival’s Writers’ Week. I was honoured and privileged to be asked to open Writers’ Week.

It’s Saturday not Sunday morning, but let us imagine we’re a congregation. Each of us owes the other, we keep ourselves in check, we look to one another when we’re low, and want not to be shamed in one another’s eyes. We sit together listening, often looking up and out, past the ancestral memorials, to the view beyond the window of slow, heavy clouds on a day when rain is gathering and the wind is low. Some of us are simply watching the weather, some looking for a hidden heaven, some for—or at—God, some at planetary time. Several of those things might be imaginary, but we have to imagine all of them—even the weather now.

Last November in Golden Bay my husband Fergus, sister Sara, and I, went for walk a way we hadn’t taken before, which is unusual since we’re always going to Golden Bay. We saw a South Island black piwakawaka. The little bird wasn’t making its usual sound of someone vigorously washing a little window. The day was hot, and the birds were all subdued, perhaps from a first fine distillation of Australian bushfire smoke staining the sky. The piwakawaka was silent, smaller than the North Island bird, a flitting scrap of shadow. Its tail was crenelated because it had been moulting and its feathers hadn’t filled out again. It was recognisable; and quite different. We hadn’t seen one before.

Novelty in the natural world is something people tend to notice more as they get older, because often they’re seeing things again and the delight is in thinking, “There it is. Still there.” A reaffirmation almost more marvellous than anything seen for the first time.

A month after that walk, and that bird, when the sky in Wellington was orange with smoke—another new thing—I remembered having thought about that: the world’s constant, quiet reaffirmation of itself. And it suddenly seemed far less solidly promised than it had before.

So, it’s a Saturday, but imagine we’re part of a congregation praying for clemency, and our prayer goes, “We know now. We know now.” With a light refrain of, “If only we’d known.”

What was I thinking when, fifteen years ago, I was having a self-congratulatory conversation with someone overseas about the newest find of natural gas in the sea off Taranaki? This, I said happily, will really help with New Zealand’s ongoing energy needs.

I’d failed to make connections, and it was a failure of imagination. The first thing we have to imagine is that there are things we’re missing, that we don’t know, that elude us. We have to imagine the scale of our failures. What we can’t see at all, or can’t see straight. We’re so busy beholding the mote in our brother’s eye that we can’t considered the beam in own own.

Once, in an antique shop, I found a late nineteenth-century display box of botanical samples made for identifying plants. The case contained a labelled collection of “useless grasses”. The grasses that, if you found them in your paddock, you’d pull them out before they seeded and gained a foothold on good pasture. I often think of that sampler of useless grasses. Of the whole idea of uselessness in plants, and all the things that, over time, human beings decide they no longer need, or can’t imagine needing later. I think about it when I worry about the future of libraries. And I think about it when, once again, I come up against the idea that non-realist fiction is childish because it somehow doesn’t represent the world as it is. That idea, that there’s a world as it is—a given, agreed upon, non-negotiable world. As it is.

But what if that world were to disappear? What if it is disappearing? Hastening to change—to turn it spiny, scaled and un-scalable back on us, until it isn’t a world we can climb on and fly away to another world, it won’t let us, it won’t forgive how we failed to imagine it.

I’m going to tell you a story about an ordinary use of childhood imagination, by children—which is also an account of the first time I was aware that I, and another child, were using our troubles to make a fire, a forge, and a story. A story that was believable because its foundational energy was unreasonable trouble and unreasoning rage.

It was in the summer, for me, between primary and high school. A summer we kids spent swimming out to launches moored in Brown’s Bay Paremata, and stretching their protective canvas covers by lying in them, sunbathing, as if they were hammocks. Sometimes Barnes the harbourmaster would row out to chase us off, or sometimes he’d just stand on the beach and scold us through a bullhorn until we slipped into the water like unwelcome seals and swam out to some more distant boat.

Other times we’d walk up to the pine forest on the crest of the hill between the Brown’s Bay houses and the then new subdivision of Whitby. The pines were old and tall, the space between them a vast russet-floored chamber—scented and silent. An enchanting place. But out of magpie nesting season the pushy world wasn’t there at all. There was nothing for us kids to pit ourselves against, no territorial birds or incensed harbourmasters.

We were usually the same group—two Murphys and two Knoxes. Wendy Murphy was near to me in age, but would still be at Paremata School in the new year. I was twelve at the start of my third form. Robbie, Wendy’s brother, was a year older than my sister Sara. And then there was Sara. We Murphy and Knox kids were the children of intellectuals—or, arguably, demoralised and neglectful parents. We were left to drift, often in and out of danger.

If we hadn’t been in the forest for a while we would always walk straight through it to check its shrinking boundary on the Whitby side. Which is how we found ourselves on a day that seemed particularly empty of any entertaining chafing against the world. A soupy grey day with gusty wind of the sort we have more often now. We were sitting in the treeline on the slope above the sweep of a street of empty sections, half built houses, and a few new houses. In the backyard of the house below us were four children. All freckled and fair haired, the youngest a pre-schooler with a wide gait who was stumping from sibling to sibling to stand at the elbow of each watching what they were up to, and waiting to be included. The other girls, maybe seven and ten, were shredding leftover pink batts and attempting—it appeared—to dissolve them in a plastic paddling pool, as if the fibreglass was candy floss. The oldest child was riding his bike in tight circles on the bare clay patch. It was he who looked up at the treeline.

“He seen us,” I said, and grabbed Wendy’s arm and pulled her back into the darkness under the pines.

“We’re not trespassing, and they’re just kids.” Wendy was practical—she didn’t like to play pretend, but she had a dark and deep sense of humour that meant, when encouraged, she might just walk off with any moment that presented itself as portable. And I could always bring it out in her. I said to her, all drama and urgency, “But we have to trust someone!”

The words came from television—you’d walk into the living room and there be some program only parents and older sister watched, and someone on the screen would be saying something television-ordinary, but it would still make you wonder what the problem was. What was to be done about it.

I looked behind me. Robbie was sulking about something and kicking a furrow through the smooth pine needles, while Sara made a pile of small dead branches, as it she meant to build a fire. This provided me with a cue. I told Wendy she must remember we were only allowed out for as long as it took us to gather firewood.

Wendy gave me an assessing look.

“They’ll be back before we know it,” I said, “We’ll be locked up again. We have to trust someone.”

Wendy turned and told Robbie to go further into the trees, but to stop where we could still see him. “You’re keeping a lookout.”

Robbie wanted to know why, and I told him that someone had taken us prisoner and we were only  out in order to collect firewood. Wendy and I were going to try to alert the kids in that house down there to the situation; meanwhile he should keep a lookout.

Robbie came over to eye up the kids. The boy and one sister were obligingly climbing the hill. We hadn’t even had to make urgent signals. For good measure, we made some urgent signals.

Robbie dashed off to his post. I told Sara she was gathering firewood for our kidnappers and, after I cleared up her confusion about how I knew someone was coming to kidnap us and, if so, why was I just standing there, she went on with what she been doing, while somehow making her solid little self in her striped T-shirt and stretchy fawn shorts look peaky and fearful.

Wendy and I kept signalling to the children while backing away into the forest.

Wendy looked the part of a prisoner. She was tipping over from a sleek childhood into a phenomenally oily adolescence. She couldn’t keep her hair clean. And I looked, as my mother liked to say, as though I’d been dragged through a bramble backwards. We acted the part. The kids came up to us and we put our fingers to our lips and drew back, and further back, and they were obliged to follow us as far as Sara’s woodpile.

The story started as a two-hander, Wendy and I glancing at each other now and then. We told them how we had stumbled upon something—consulting between us with looks—some days ago, it was hard to say how many days because we were being kept underground. The men—there were a lot of them—worked in shifts so everyone ate when they got up and when they went to bed, meaning two meals every twenty-four hours at changes of shift. We were fed only every second meal. It was difficult to keep track of time without meal times and daylight, we said.

Sara chimed in to say that she was hungry and it would be great if they could fetch us some food.

I watched the boy’s eyes narrow and quickly said to Sara, “No, you’re just going to have to go hungry. We only want to get a message to our parents.”

“Not to the police?” said the boy. It was the obvious question.

“Only our parents.” Wendy was firm, and grave. “We’ll ask them to reply. We need to know what we should do.”

I thought this was hardly the best excuse for not calling the police, but that I didn’t have a better one. And Wendy was selling it really well. A wish—that you could take a situation of danger to a parent to get a hearing and advice—was pushing itself to the front of our story and I could feel the energy of it, without yet having been directly disappointed by parents myself. It was another year before I knew what Wendy knew, how an everyday expectation—that a parent would do what they should when applied to for help—could turn from an everyday expectation into a lifelong wish. For now, what I was able to think was that it was good for our story, that strange force in Wendy’s feeble excuse for a plot. Force coming from somewhere I didn’t understand. But I did understand that it was a great move to give the kids something to do—to bring us writing paper and pencil, rather than the snack Sara was angling for. Because there was no further business in the snack once it was eaten. We could direct the kids to a letterbox—ours would be best—I’d be able to haunt ours, at least till school started. And if I wrote the letter, then Wendy could write the answer ostensibly from our parents, and we could come back here, to the Whitby side of the forest, so the kids could deliver it.

We explained our plan. And, “Please,” said Wendy.

“Please,” Sara said, then added, “They’ve threatened to beat us.”

“Or at least we think they have,” I said. “They have accents that make them hard to understand.”

“What kind of accents?” asked the boy, still doing his due diligence.

“They only speak English when they’re talking to us,” I said. “We can’t understand what they’re saying when they’re talking among themselves. We don’t know what they’re up to. We don’t know why they here.”

Wendy said that the one who had the best English and spoke to us most often sounded more Czech than Russian. Some years before she and her family had spent nearly a year in Germany, and had taken trips to several other countries. “He’s the one who threatened us,” Wendy said. “He seems to be a bit on the outer with the others.”

“Russia invaded Czechoslovakia,” I said. “He’s probably further down the pecking order. We’re the only ones he can take out his feelings on.”

I don’t know how much geopolitical savvy the boy had, but he’d started nodding.

Robbie drifted back.

“You’re supposed to be keeping watch,” I hissed, and made a gesture at Sara to take his place. Sara scuttled off, pressed her back to the pine trunk and peered around it.

Robbie wanted to know what was going on. Wendy explained the situation to him—how these kids were going to help us get in touch with our parents.

Robbie asked their names and offered his, which wasn’t a thing we’d thought to do. I remember they were mcsomethings—McCartneys, McAndrews.

“Why don’t you just run off?” The boy’s sister asked. “Like now?”

“When they send us out they always keep someone back,” Wendy said. “Our little sister.” She pointed to herself and Robbie. She and Robbie did have a little sister—and a big one, who had run away from home the year before, and disappeared.

“Our big sister,” I said and indicated myself and Sara. So, we were in a thriller with a Russian underground base and an abduction, but hadn’t, for economy of invention, decided to be one family.

“Can you just start by getting us a paper and pencil?” I said.

The girl darted off to the edge of the forest and bellowed at the next girl to get writing stuff and bring it up here.

I wrote the letter. We didn’t have to stretch out the task and our invention, because the kids’ mother appeared below and went off her nut about how they’d left the toddler unattended with the paddling pool.

I pressed my unfinished letter into the boy’s hand and gave him my address. I told him we’d be back for the answer and to watch for us.

They loped off downhill. For another few minutes we made a precautionary show of breaking branches off a fallen pine bough—but the kids had all gone indoors. We realised we’d have to get rid of the piled wood and spent another half an hour wandering in separate directions, and scattering it, before heading home, us Knoxes to start staring at the letterbox.

The McSomething’s did deliver. And they collected Wendy’s concerned fatherly reply, a letter as advised not too full of questions or threats in case it “fell into the wrong hands”. We returned to lurk at the Whitby edge of the forest. We remembered to wear what we’d been wearing that first day, but made our clothes a bit grubby. And Wendy and I got out our coloured pencils and pastels, and I borrowed my older sister Mary’s expensive set of acrylic paints, and we made bruises of pastel and pencil, and scabs from Mary’s acrylics, reddening the surrounding skin with Wendy’s mum’s blusher. The blusher was a risk since it was the only component of our fake injuries that smelled fake. We made Sara a little ghostly with talcum powder and, on our way up the hill, she found a right-sized branch and practised using it as a crutch.

We had to wait till we were spotted, then the kids all came up the hill, the toddler piggyback. They handed us the letter. Wendy opened it. I turned away to wipe my eyes. Sara limped closer, but not too close, because her make-up only really worked in the gloom. We spared some attention from our parents’ precious communication to explain that the men had made good on their threats.

“We didn’t even do anything to provoke them,” Robbie said. Then to Sara, concerned, “Has your ear stopped bleeding?”

I think we met those kids four times altogether. We were flighty and hypervigilant and wouldn’t let them get too near—not wanting to risk them seeing how our plastic paint scabs had come loose and were only attached to our skin by the hairs on our arms. When they were sceptical, which to their credit was often, they’d question us. But the questions were never the ones I expected and dreaded because I couldn’t answer them—like what would an underground base do with firewood anyway? They asked the human questions—what was being done by whom, and for what reason, and how we felt about it. And they carried our messages. Our story made use of their bodies and their time. And eventually they did bring the pale and loitering Sara some biscuits.

This game was a major preoccupation the summer after my last year at primary school. Of the games of my childhood it wasn’t the most intense, or prolonged, or loved—but it was the most extravagant and stagey and outlandish. I should say here—for those who might have read it—that Wendy is Grace in my autobiographical novella Tawa. Tawa tells a dark and terrible story—but the real story is darker and more terrible still.

Wendy and I drove that game, with some star turns from Sara, and Robbie’s presence—a boy with the girls—making it possible for the oldest McSomething to imagine it was okay to talk to us. The conceit of the game worked because of our collective sense of fun—Wendy, Sara, Robbie and I were enjoying ourselves, and so were the other kids who, after all, had just moved in and knew no one and there we were on their doorstep, and all it cost them was some packets of biscuits and a few forays into the old part of their new neighbourhood.

So—a sense of fun on everyone’s part. But it was something else as well for Wendy and me—twelve years old and already burned black at our edges. We were learning how to put the energy of ourselves into invented things, silly things, like letters to parents saying “Help, we’ve been spirited away and shut in the dark”, and letters from parents asking “Tell us what we can do to help you”.

There is a tedious common understanding that works of pure imagination might be said not to be silly only because they take a thing we all agree is real and serious and make of it a differently costumed likeness. All serious works of fantasy and science fiction are really about…and here you can fill in some big-ticket item, some gnawing trouble of society. The imaginative representations are a code, where everything matches up one-to-one.

In this view all fantasies must be allegories—and as allegories at least have dignity of dress and deportment. Because, if they aren’t allegories, and it isn’t a code, where do they get their meaning from?

I think you can sense my exasperation with this mindset, which doesn’t matter, except when it does, like how confident and eager we are to praise Margaret Mahy because she was a beloved writer, rather than because she was a great one. A woman, an author of children’s books, a fantasy writer, a great writer in a culture where, when I was a kid, parents would say, “Are you just going to sit there all day reading that book? Why don’t you go outside and do something?” A culture that has a tendency to think of imagination as something that’s nice to have, especially for young and developing minds, but is something that has its practical limits.

Its practical limits might be the death of us all.

This summer, like that one long ago when, in a rage of invention, I started looking around for somewhere safe to put myself, I’ve been, more consciously, thinking about saving myself which—at the age of sixty and deeply embedded in my life—means saving other people.

My sister Sara, of the piled firewood, lives in Medlow Bath, in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales. Sara is in the neighbourhood support arm of the Rural Volunteer Fire Service, which means she has a locked trailer of firefighting equipment parked at her gate, so that she and her neighbours can fight embers and take responsibility for the late evacuation of animals and people into their “place of last resort”, a brick-walled, asbestos-roofed house a few doors down from Sara.

Twice she’s left Medlow with her cats and chicken to shelter with friends in Sydney, though she hates to leave if anyone else in her community is staying. She’s been awake all night in forty-degree heat unable to open the windows, because the air isn’t breathable. And she’s had tearful conversations with people in her local shops who don’t know how they will manage to keep their livelihoods since the tourists and the holidaymakers are staying away. “I’m not complaining,” Sara says. “It’s the same for everyone.” She speaks quietly, in a voice drained of energy. Her emotions cauterised, which means the burning of the flesh to stop bleeding. Because how are you supposed to feel when the wind changes and the smoke clears and the trees of your garden are full of birds because they’re the birds who managed to fly away from the fire and are now living in a strip of green along the great Western Highway? Sara has gone beyond dread, into exhausted fatalism. “I have cats, not kids,” she says. “I can only imagine how it is for people with kids.” She tells me that all the New Zealanders are talking about coming home. And I say, “Come home.”

One evening during all this Fergus asks me have I seen that terrible video of the cockatoos in the heat wave. The ones who can’t fly anymore and have fallen to the ground. And the ones who can still fly and keep trying to feed them.

“I’m not going to watch that,” I say. And then I can’t stop thinking about it—thinking that, before too long, we’re going to be the cockatoos, those of us who can still fly trying to feed those of us who have fallen.

The summer for me between primary and secondary ended, and we all went back to school, and at Paremata, on the first playtime, Sara spotted the three school-age McSomething’s clustered in the playground. And they saw her. She rushed up to them waving her arms. “We escaped!” she said. “But we’re not allowed to say anything about it. The police are watching that base to see what those people do and we have to keep it a secret. We might never know what happens!”

“They believed me,” she insists when we’re trying to put our memories together. “I’m sure they did. I’m not ashamed of it. We gave them an adventure.”

Because I write fantasy, which is sometimes equated with not putting away childish things, I often feel a need to make an argument for fiction that is full of stuff that is true, while yes less solidly dependent on, I won’t say material facts, because material facts are a whole other thing, or a vast class of things from viruses to black holes. Let’s say the facts of matters, rather than matter. Matters like the political realities that we are always to consider, economic realities that teach us that many things of value have fluctuating values and we have to accept that no matter how necessary those things might be to our well-being the fluctuations have made them, as they say, simply out of our reach, like a house, or a life-saving drug. But what’s simple about that? What’s simple about suffering? The worlds of fiction faithful to this world behave according to the material realities of markets, money, media and the politics of all that, how the people in those worlds see themselves, and behave according to what they see on a sliding scale from knowing complicity to knowing revolt; a sliding scale from “this is how things work” to “this isn’t working.” And that’s all great and fascinating.

But fiction less dependent on the facts of matters might be more able to ask: What if this world as it is—as it has been since the Industrial Revolution—is just now?” What if this world was very different? What if the powerful lost their platforms, but not their lives or dignity. What if the last can be first? Or we can make a melange of firsts, like animals at a waterhole, heads down, only our ears and tongues moving in the temporary accord of a common thirst.

Imagine that. Imagine standing still for a generation. Imagine fixing things and feeding ourselves. Imagine taking care of everything and everybody, and our governments behaving like kind parents who really do know better, rather than corporations mindful of their shareholders. We’ve been encouraged to be jealous and punitive, like the children of the too large family whose parents’ regard is the only regard worth having. Or the children of a small family with a parent parsimonious with love whose regard the children feel they have to constantly fight for. But look around you. Who is looking at you? Perhaps the thrush on the bank within arm’s reach of where you’re walking who looks at you but doesn’t stop tossing the leaf mulch about delving for insects. Even if like me you stop and speak to the thrush, one of those birds—the birds of Wellington—most of them won’t fly away. You can almost see them thinking that that would be an overreaction. Why do the birds of Wellington these days not startle like the birds of my childhood and youth? I think they don’t count us as dangerous in the same way anymore. They don’t know how they are valued—valued and enjoyed—but our changed attitude to them has changed their attitude to us. I’m pretty old now, so that’s generations of birds. If we can change our mutual relationship to beings to whom we can’t offer any explanations, why can’t we do better with ourselves?

I keep going back to animals. I do because, while we so-called ‘writers of imagination’ were using myths and monsters to think how we might be different, they—animals—were always there; there so that we might look at them and imagine how we might be different or, whenever they come to us for help, how little difference there is between us and them.

Thomas Carlyle wrote, “Not our logical faculty but our imaginative one is king over us.”*

So, sisters and brothers, imagine the last being first, and the lion lying down with the lamb. Or us lying down as lions and lambs in some ceremony of the future commemorating lions. A ceremony with stories about lions, to which our great-grandchildren will listen and then imagine lions. There was the life, and after that, the resurrection, which is the life imagined.

*

I used another Carlyle quote in my speech, but misremembered it, which is funny, since it’s the epigraph of my next book!

For about ten years between when their daughters left home and Dad lost his licence and confidence after a couple of accidents while reversing in the supermarket car park, he and Mum would go on long late summer, exploratory driving holidays. Dad with his two Canons, photographing landscape – the sun-blistered jarrah waterwheel at Mount White Station where Mum’s father had spent the first twenty-one years of his life; or terns on the glistening sand of the estuary at Pakawau.

Mum would collect stones. Not the geologists’ pink quartz, or olivines, or Separation Point granite, but stones for which she had her own names – honeycomb or ice cream. One year in Jackson’s Bay Mum left her whole holiday’s stash on the porch of their motel – and it vanished overnight.

There had been a friendly weka that evening eyeing up their plates of boxed chicken chow mien. The weka was Mum’s prime suspect. “Blow me down, my stones were all gone,” Mum wrote me on a postcard. “Bother him, the jolly nuisance” and “I’m miffed.”

When I’m writing. I often think of Mum’s words – the way her time sits inside them, as time sits inside all words. And I think of her weka.

There are things I summon to mind whenever I sit down to write something difficult – either painful and knotty, or some scene on which a whole novel depends – and there are a lot of those. Some days I’m loading a revolver, thumbing the brass cases of bullets into the chamber of a gun. More often I’m Mum’s thieving weka, patiently and illicitly moving valuables from one place to another, porch to page in my case. But even though I’m alone and any writing room is the dark depths of night, unlike the weka I’m shifting things from hidden to visible.

The writing life is like that – it isn’t the movie montage of a writer peering at a screen and biting their thumbnail, a wastepaper basket overflowing with balled up pages beside them. It isn’t the other gigs, though they’re part of it – being the teacher who motivates and illuminates, or the speaker who moves people with sermons or showmanship. The writing life is quiet and wild, and covert, and I’m very grateful to all the people who, over the years, have enabled me. For the confidence and goodwill of Creative New Zealand and the Arts Foundation of New Zealand; for the ongoing energy of the International Institute of Modern Letters, of bookshops and libraries and writers festivals; for the kind support of friends; for the valiant support of publishers, particularly Victoria University Press; and for the brave and sustained support of my family, my sister Sara, my son Jack, and always, always Fergus. And, in the end, my readers who, whenever they climb into bed and crack the spine of any of my books are the same as me – quiet and wild and private. Their attention and interest is the life of books, and the afterlife of writers.

Elizabeth Knox and PM Jacinda Ardern

This essay appears in The Fuse Box: Essays on Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters

At some point in every writer’s life they’ll find themselves facing the question, ‘Why write?’ Because it can be a lonely slog, and you have to like it. Because it’s always been difficult to make any money, and it’s even more difficult now.

Young writers, those with fire in their bellies, never think, ‘Why write?’ What they think, and should, is, ‘Why not?’ I used to think, ‘Why not?’ Mostly in response to the surprisingly many people confidently prepared to ask, ‘Who are you to think you can do this?’ I got into the healthy, bloody-minded habit of asking, ‘Why not me?’ And the thing is, that however difficult the lonely slog, it becomes normal. I’m aware that mine isn’t a life a lot of writers have. Lots of them have jobs teaching writing. Or have jobs in order to supplement their writing. I’ve been lucky. Also I’ve been sequestered. And that has been for the most part wonderful. But it isn’t easy, and eventually that defiant but joyful, ‘Why not?’ turns into, ‘Why? Why write?’

When I was younger I used to write things down in my journal as if doing so would make some difference. I had an idea of myself as a witness, and that there was something intrinsically useful in my going about the world noticing things. Processing them, and making a record.

When I first read King Lear in the seventh form, I was struck by Lear’s proposal to Cordelia that they be like God’s spies. He is so happy to have found the daughter who loves him. So happy to be with her, that the prospect of being tossed in a jail cell with her only means with her. Sharing the same air with Cordelia is now more precious to Lear than his kingdom, than being a King and having the gift of the kingship, of power; those things he had and failed to use wisely. But this moment in the play is not just a straightforward portrait of a man reunited with his daughter, two people for whom the society of each is sufficient. It is also that, somehow, they’ve been elevated to a position where they belong more to God. If they can’t judge like God judges, they can at least witness like God. Like God and for God. At least until, ‘He who parts us shall bring a brand from heaven / And fire us hence like foxes.’

So, about writing I always thought, ‘At least there’s this being one of God’s spies.’ But when you put pen to paper, even in a journal, you have to imagine that someone might read what you’re writing. You don’t have to imagine they’ll be interested; it’s just being heard, whispering into the box of a book, closing the lid, and leaving it lying around for a very long time in the hope that someone will pick it up, open it, and hear you confiding.

I had the idea that the private act of seeing things and thinking about them was somehow useful to the good order of the universe, and that maybe my small understandings might help facilitate the tendency to things being understood. As if to be unheard, and to not have faith that you can be heard, is entropy. I believed, for a start, in writing my story, or the way I saw things, and then just stories, whatever was in my gift – which is to say, in my power to give.

But time goes on, and things happen that are ordinary, because they happen to pretty much 51 per cent of the population. You become invisible. The first several times that you order a cup of coffee in a cafe and the waitstaff forget your order it’s a great surprise. And then it happens again, and again. And you think, ‘Ah well, I’ve become invisible.’ Now, invisibility has an upside as well as a downside, but that’s a whole other story. But if that commonplace occurrence coincides with an ever shrinking pool of readers, not just for you, but for everybody; with reading being, every year, less a natural activity, then things feel a bit more acute.

*

I wasn’t a reader till I was eight. My older sister told me stories and we played games – often lying in bed in the dark – so, games made solely of words. Later I was a keen but slow reader who couldn’t write. I kept playing imaginary games, ferociously and voraciously, and holding everything in my head. Persuading people with my voice, and being persuaded by their voices.

My first relationship with story was as spoken narrative, and then as written. I fell from speaking into books. Later, with almost everyone else, I fell out of books into movies and television. And, like many others, I lost some faith in the necessary supremacy of that old wonderful thing of looking at a page, and interpreting the black marks on the white, and creating in my head the world that the words convey. But throughout my fall I retained my faith that reading books, particularly fiction, is better for us. The way a novel makes space inside us because the words have to be turned into a garden, a haunted house, a street, a wasteland; into people, and animals wild and domestic; into weather. The words only do some of the work of making the world. It’s a collaboration: the reader makes the world out of what the words have summoned in them, and that world makes room for itself inside the reader. The reader’s interior grows. And that is good for us. It doesn’t just feel good because it’s pleasurable, it also feels good because it’s exercise at the cellular level. And we do know now that there is such a thing as exercise at the cellular level. Reading fiction is health-giving; it makes you calm and orderly, and a person with fluent feelings. So, I believe in books and reading. But because I’m a pessimist I don’t believe that enough other people do, or can be made to.

My imagination and my faith can’t keep on fighting the good fight. What good is it for me to write books? Well, as my father used to say, ‘Art is inner order.’ And I think that every time I get myself into a state of grace where I stop being a believer who has faith in writing and start being a mystic who has communion with it, then delightful things are possible.

For the past eight or so years I’ve had a fascination with my own ready-to-hand. Stories whose basic world-building, or problematic premise, are derived from episodes of my imaginary game, the game I share with my younger sister, Sara, and for many years shared with a friend. That double ownership is significant. My two most recently published novels, Mortal Fire and Wake, have plots derived from episodes of the game, two each, played with my friend and with my sister. It worked like this: Sara and I were stuck for an idea we could agree on, and I reached for a plot that was tried-and-true because I’d already played it with my friend. I reused the setup. The thing about the games that became Mortal Fire and Wake was that, because I did them twice, I was able to see with greater clarity what possibilities might be produced by the same setup.

The story that became Mortal Fire, in its first iteration, was entirely peopled by adult characters. It was set in an isolated snowbound place. There was a house like the Beast’s castle, without invisible servants, but where the house cleaned and maintained itself and its chattels by mending everything at midnight, and where time, folding back on itself this way, had slowed to a crawl. All the Beast’s castle stuff ended up in the book. There was a magician deemed too powerful to be permitted freedom, who was trapped by a spell that governed both him and the house. Much of that ended up in the book. In its second iteration – the one played with Sara – the story centred much more around a juvenile magic user who, as it turned out, was the only person who could release the magician from the house. The house was situated in an isolated valley, a pastoral paradise. The magician’s jailers were his cousins, now much older than him, and they were keeping him prisoner not just because they were afraid of him, but to punish him for something that happened in a local coal mining disaster decades before. The second story is much closer to the plot of Mortal Fire. However, the novitiate was male, not female, and not a Pacific Islander, and the setting wasn’t my invented South Pacific island continent, Southland, and it wasn’t 1959.

I have no record of either of these games. Even the second one with Sara was before we began recording ourselves; before 2004, when we discovered Skype. Sara has been living in Australia since 1992, so we must have been playing while she was on holiday with me, Fergus and Jack in Golden Bay.

My experiences with Wake and Mortal Fire encouraged me to think that the stories which had excited me, when I first collaboratively made them, might be used like nets to catch the bait running in the river, tasty sustaining ideas I wanted to chew on. Though the stories are collaborative, Sara and I share them out; we get to call dibs on what we think we might use in our writing. Sara currently has a novel with an agent in the States, a fantasy with Mafiosi using demons as muscle. Very Minor Demons is substantially based on an episode of our game. I have a nearly finished young adult book called Kings of this World, a school story and speculative fiction set in Southland. It’s also based on a game, but is much further from its source. With these setups Sara and I have a record of how the whole thing played out, our voices on Skype, making up the stories together.

The trick of making use of these My Food Bag narratives is to recognise what will work in a novel as opposed to an imaginary game. Imaginary games have heat and immediacy, their worlds have to be solid enough for their characters to inhabit them, and their plots can’t have gaping holes. Their plots evolve, and don’t tend to tidy themselves as they go. We’re very good at remembering who knows what, but can be a little extravagant with psychology if it’s more productive of drama. What we can pull off in the heat of a played moment won’t necessarily work in a novel. So using a game as the basis for a novel means you have to have the judgement to go ‘this’ but not ‘that’.

Writing Kings of this World I was very grateful for the play of ideas in the original game. Ideas articulated in conversations between the characters, which were naturally spirited because Sara and I were also arguing things out – principally whether or not people are inherently good. But the plot was a dog’s breakfast, so I had to start again from the ground up. I had to ask myself, ‘What are these kids doing when they’re getting to know each other? Having Jane Austen’s Emma-like assumptions about what’s going on around them, and nurturing each other’s willingness to interfere in people’s lives?’ I had all that, so was it possible to germinate a plot out of misunderstandings, accidents and mischances. But if I did that I’d be writing a comedy, and it wasn’t enough for me to be writing a comedy when I wanted to write a thriller. A thriller with a speculative fiction plot which was also a Southland book. I had to come up with a thriller plot that wouldn’t just accommodate the comedy, but somehow rise out of it, out of gossip and conniving, and youthful high spirits. I was doing pretty well, but then I made an injurious decision that Kings needed to be a short book, and the first of two, so that I could get a sale quickly and help pay for the new garage and terrace and deck we were building.

Then, as soon as I’d declared that the book was part one of two, I realised that the material I had for a second book wasn’t going to shape itself into a novel-like entity. Shortly I’ll take Kings apart, put it back together again and finish it, as book one of one.

Anyway, I can’t help but think that apart from mistakes fostered by pressing financial concerns most of my difficulties were produced by my being like a frugal home handyman who tells himself that, since he got the demolition windows for next to nothing, the kitchen he’s trying to build must shape itself around them. And then, once his extension is well underway, the home handyman finds he has insoluble difficulties with his indoor–outdoor flow.

What happened to me is what happens to the person who starts with a given, and then has to shape the whole thing, and its needs, around something they already have. My method might have worked with Wake and Mortal Fire, but with those novels I didn’t have enchanting pre-existing voices whispering their jokes and arguments in my ear.

So – with the demolition windows problem, the having-a-record problem, it is still possible to figure out what bits of lively business you can use, and what reject. But that’s far less of a challenge than establishing the integrity of the whole picture. Your characters may be delightfully alive, but characters appear in what happens, and if you change what you must of what happens, you are inevitably going to alter the way in which those characters reveal themselves.

I have a lot of sympathy for the scriptwriters of rebooted franchises, and admiration for those who do it well. Take Marvel’s Luke Cage on Netflix. How do you make sense of the manly man in Harlem in the 21st-century, whose standard curse is ‘Sweet Christmas!’? Well – you have him trained mercilessly by his friend the barber’s adherence to a swear jar in an effort to keep the language of the street out of his establishment. It’s fascinating to witness the ingenuity of writers coping with their own famous franchise’s demolition windows.

In the end I think the major problem I had in using a given, even one with verve, and sturdy story legs, is that doing so didn’t leave any room for other things that would have turned up if I wasn’t so wrapped up in the problem of having the whole room look right with the house.

Fortunately for the plus column of the ‘Why write?’ ledger I’m having a very different experience with the adult novel I’m now near to finishing.

The Absolute Book turned up, like Dreamhunter and The Vintner’s Luck, out of the ether, and is using me to get itself written.

*

In his 1993 Listener review of my second novel Treasure Brian Boyd says: ‘Knox seems a realist by nature but a metaphysician by inclination, a magpie who can swoop on glittering detail but would prefer to be a Phoenix.’ Later he kindly and privately qualified his remark: ‘The magpie and Phoenix was an image with a semi-private echo of Isaiah Berlin on the hedgehog (who knows one big thing), and the fox (who knows many little things): Berlin compared Tolstoy to a brilliant fox who thought it was more important to be a hedgehog. Not bad company for you.’

Perhaps what I know as a writer – after many novels – is that the one big thing can only appear as a dark place in the sky, discernible because of the otherwise – the myriad visible stars.

Besides, it seems to me that, in order to write many novels it might be useful to be a bird of the Corvidae family – that is, a magpie, a crow, a jay, a rook, a jackdaw. Or a raven. Each novel has a different thing it wants, and needs to do. It’s a centrifuge that mixes. It’s a centrifuge that separates. It’s a spinning body creating its own gravity.

There’s a lot of talk about ‘finding your own fictional voice’, because so many of our ideas about writing fiction are shaped by the kindly pedagogical concerns of creative writing classes. But you don’t find your voice, you find the voice of that particular book, of a first book, a second book, a fourth, a tenth and a thirteenth. Each has its own tone it wants to take. And if I was trying to be helpful I could talk about tone. But beyond tone and voice there’s a quality that feels more telling to me when I’m trying to define the virtues of books that I’m really excited by, or when I recognise in my own work a necessity to the creation that isn’t coming out of my interest in the characters, or the plot, or the kind of language I’m using, but is more simply a property of the book’s vibe of being alive. By that I mean not just how Elizabeth Knox the writer feels about human existence, but how the untethered, reactive, feeling entity, who is making it all up, feels at that particular moment, the moment of beginning the book, the moments of continuing the book. The book that is not a calibration of existence, but one day with a certain kind of weather, a memorable whole, like the interval between waking up and going to sleep. What I think I find in the novels I’m most excited by, and what I’m after in my own work, is a vibe of being alive that belongs generally to – well – I want to say each writer, but of course not all writers have one. Perhaps each considerable writer has one. And by considerable I don’t mean literary, I mean a writer whose vitality has been transmitted to their work. I can make compelling arguments for the vibe of life of Lee Child, or Georgette Heyer, just as I can for Hillary Mantel, Elizabeth Gaskell or Margaret Mahy. This vibe of life is one of the reasons we choose to be constant readers of certain writers. We like what they do, but we also like the way they make us see the world, or feel about it. We like how they make us feel when we are in their world, and therefore how we feel once we’ve finished the book, and are returned to our everyday, with something about our sensibilities, our thought processes, our grit and appetite, altered. That’s my explanation of why we love and cleave to particular authors: their vibe of life. But it isn’t a satisfactory explanation of what, if you’re a novelist, you’re looking for in each of your own books as it yields its purpose is to you. I think of that thing as the book’s aura: borrowing from the new-age. A glow coming off something, which belongs to its life and its character, and tells us something about where it’s been, even if it’s never been anywhere. A book begins, and it hasn’t been anywhere. Sometimes a book begins whose degree of never having been anywhere before its appearance feels as if it’s in the territory of Annunciation and Nativity.

I am reminded of the afternoon when our son Jack finally appeared in my hospital room at Wellington Women’s. He’d been in neonatal for two days, and because of blood loss and my healing caesarean incision, I’d only visited him to breastfeed. He turned up very suddenly, at dinner-time, because, while eating her dinner, his mother had begun sobbing that she wanted her baby. And then his father started crying too. I figure we must have been overheard. Jack appeared twenty minutes later, in his plastic cradle. They put him between my bed and Fergus’s chair, and we proceeded to get cricks in our necks just staring at him. One thing we couldn’t take our eyes off was his quizzical and daunting single eyebrow lift. His left eyebrow would go up as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was being presented with. And Fergus remarked that he thought he had cultivated that expression himself over many years. But Jack was born with it. And perhaps Fergus had been too, and might that not mean that his character was shaped by his facial expression rather than the other way around?

There is the idea that a soul comes into the world with the body, that the soul is unstained, but somehow perfectly formed, although the child still has to grow as a person in the world. That idea may be a bit of Western dualism, but at least to some extent it rises out of observation: the marvel of being surprised by a grandparent’s expression on a toddler’s face. Not just the shadow of an expression, but a thing so powerfully reminiscent that it is as if the expression has arrived containing the whole texture of the grandparent’s life and experience.

There are books that, when you’re their author, seem to appear in the same way, stainless and finished, rather than formed in the forge of writing, as if you, the writer, hadn’t sat there with all the hard labour and hard thinking of making the book’s body. No – the book arrives trailing clouds of glory as if pencil on paper have summoned hitherto invisible realities that want to organise themselves out of nothing, using a writer’s own character and experience.

*

From very early in my life I had a delight in how things were connected. Connected in the world by use and influence, and how I was able to connect them myself in my head. I think my delight had something to do with my puzzlement at my stupidity when it came to writing – that is, writing as opposed to reading. I’m certain now that I had dysgraphia of the dyslexic type. I could read, and comprehend what I’d read, and verbally answer questions about what I’d read, and I could read out loud, but I could scarcely write. It was natural for all my too many primary schools to assume that, since I could read, my writing could only be laboured and abysmal because I was lazy, stubborn and uncooperative. It was the 1960s, and I was a girl, so pains were never taken. For example, when in standard two I was asked to produce two pages on the life cycle of a butterfly, I produced two pages of two words per line, in columns down the left and right hand side of the page, the teacher decided I was being either insolent or indolent. But it was like this: whenever I had a pen my hand, I also had a great glass wall in front of me. I was all in and no out so, although I was reading and thinking and making connections, whatever I learned I had to hold in my head, like water in cupped hands, waiting on the cup, the bucket, the lakebed.

My mind now pretty much works like every one else’s, but is shaped by this early intense practice of recognising how information connected up so that it might support itself instead of requiring me to support it by recording all its facets as they revolved in empty space. My mind has a very strong habit of seeing patterns, because a pattern is easier to hold in your head than its pieces.

Stories have legacies in our limbic systems. Something that is there for any storyteller to use. The audience doesn’t need to know about earlier appearances and interpretations of a particular story – of an invisible monster, a human-shaped monster, a charming human-shaped heart-usurping monster, a monster made by an ambitious scientist, a monstrous God who never answers prayers, or the animal who talks and still curls up beside you like an ordinary cat, but who isn’t there the moment it’s most wanted. Of course it’s nice for the audience to know – to have the deep, nuanced, textured experience of the story because of all the connections it makes. Constant readers, or watchers, people with a degree of appetite and experience and a good memory, get stuff when you give it to them. Those people know that they haven’t learned most of what they know in order of its appearance in the world. They understand they might have met the monster in a joke, before meeting it in its myth.

The great and ancient beast we encounter in a television programme might owe much to H G Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, but the energy of that creature is also the inheritance of all people in a house or a landscape with older occupants. It’s our sense of how recently we’ve been the pinnacle predator, and how tenuously we are a pinnacle predator whenever we’re by ourselves. It’s our short period of remove from the time when we had no news of what was on the other side of the river, or why the mountain in whose shadow we lived would sometimes growl and glow. We may have left much of that behind us – or at least know what’s choking us when the wall of ash washes over us. Yet as surely as being in fear and uncertainty can leave its mark on a developing child’s DNA so that child’s children will inherit a poorly extinguished anxiety, then our stories, and our response to them, have been shaped by all those years of not knowing what it was we could hear at night, behind the wind.

I first met one of my favourite monsters in a joke. At Christmas when I was nine someone gave my mother a card with the three wise men on it, two of them pink with anger and embarrassment, saying to the third, who was holding one end of a rope: ‘We said frankincense . . .’ Then, when the card opened, there on the end of the rope was a louring, greenish monster with bolts in his neck.

I didn’t get the joke. But I knew it was a joke, and a story. Seeing my intrigue Mum explained Frankenstein’s monster. And, since she liked her facts straight, and was the kind of mother who took pains to make sure they were, she also explained how Frankenstein was the man who made the monster, not the monster, who had no name, and how lots of people got that wrong. I’d already realised there was some connection between the monster and the Gruesome Twosome of the Hanna-Barbera Wacky Races, a cartoon about a cross-country race, where the Gruesome Twosome drove a car that looked like a haunted house. One of the Twosome was a massive, monster-like individual with a bowl haircut and a turtleneck sweater – a kind of 60s hipster Frankenstein’s monster. I made that connection. I began to build up a concordance of the story. A concordance which in time assembled itself in order of provenance – in this case Mary Shelley’s book, a product of a ghost story challenge at the Villa Diodati with Shelley and Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron and Dr Polidori. First there was the book, and then later appearances, canon and otherwise and, as with all my concordances, the information was also in order of what mattered most to me. I did that throughout my childhood and teens, and retained my habit of accepting the premises of an invention, or at least waiting to see how things might fit together. It was clear to me that there were no lame ideas. If an idea was limping its shoes might arrive at any moment. Its shoes, its horse and carriage, its rocket ship, its wings. Which isn’t to say that the adult me hasn’t thrown up her hands in disgust when faced with a story that is half-baked or inconsistent or derivative – derivative rather than open to influence – or, worst of all, a story that stacks its dice.

An acceptance of premises is the absolutely necessary prerequisite of the willing suspension of disbelief, that which lets us enjoy stories and not be those people who like to say, with an uneasy superiority, that they only read non-fiction. Because they ‘want to learn something’.

It’s the existence of all my concordances that have determined my mode of operation as a writer, how I like to take a thing, or more often several things, with the charge of a mythical legacy, and use them to my own purposes. Because they are attractive to me and I want to pick them up and handle them. Because they are meaningful to me and I want to get into conversation with them. Because they are comforting to me and I want to slip them under my pillow when I sleep.

*

So. Why write? When it’s often very difficult?

Because if you’re lucky, and you keep at it long enough, and honestly, if you stay by the sundial, and don’t chase any of the things beckoning you from the ends of the avenues – like your own insufficient idea of fame; or money; or the approval of your family and admiration of your friends; or the admiration of your community, or arts funding bodies, or the public, whoever they are – if you stay by the sundial, the sun will come, will show you your shadow, and give you the time. Then, if you’re very lucky, it might give you your Absolute Book.

image Jack Barrowman

A conversation between Elizabeth & Sara Knox



This conversation took place in March of 2007. It’s a planning session, on Skype, between me and my sister Sara; she in her flat in a western suburb of Sydney, me in Wellington; both of us lying in bed in the dark, with cats. The planning was for a session of the surviving episodic version of the imaginary game that we had been playing for 34 years.

The continuous saga version of the game came to an end in 1994. In the episodic version we’d use our characters in a new story, with one-time-only histories and names. I want to say that we’d reuse their souls, as if this is transmigration. But perhaps it’s more helpful to remind you of Blackadder, each season set in a different period, but having characters with the same faces, doing different things, but being recognisably like their ancestors.

Each of our people has a continuum to their character. So, for example, Fernando is at one end of his continuum pretty much an Iago, and at the other a charming, self-loving, competent man, with a bit of an attitude problem. These malleable and multifaceted characters people our game. This conversation is Sara and I coming up with a story to play. What we came up with took up around 40 hours of playing, on nine nights, over two and a half months.

Here we discuss what kind of story might entertain us enough for a sustained period of play. But we also consider what makes a good story, and what kinds of stories we like and dislike — referring to books, television, our own fiction. It’s a mad private conversation with public connections and some cultural savvy.

And how did I come to have this recording?

When Sara went to live in Australia in 1992 the game had gone on only when she was at home on holiday. Then in 2004 Skype arrived, and we assumed playing regularly. About a year later I found a software that could record Skype conversations and I started taping our playing and, later, our planning too. I have hundreds of hours of recordings. I made and kept them just for us — or, as I imagine it, for me, bed-bound in the hospital wing of a rest home, as my mother was for the last 18 months of her life. I’ll have audiobooks to entertain me, and my recordings of our younger selves, and of them, our people, speaking and acting, thinking and feeling. And alive. All accompanied by asides about friends, family, work, books, TV, politics; by Fergus coming in with a cup of tea, or Jack warning me he’s about to reboot the modem; plus Sara untangling her cat from the Venetians, or going out to put her chickens in their coops; and noises off: Wellington gales and Sydney rainstorms.

I transcribed this planning session so I could use it for a World Building workshop I taught at the Auckland Writers Festival in 2014. I used it as a guideline to explain my process. This is pretty much what we said, minus breathless repetitions, and cackling.

[cackles]

*

Elizabeth: Family plots and non-family plots. Plots where people already know each other and are obliged to pay attention to one another, and plots where they just meet and have to work one another out.

Sara: I thought something about the war. We haven’t done the war yet this time around.

E: Wars are difficult. Easier to write than to play. And I avoid them in writing.

S: You don’t avoid them. You lie. There’s the war in Glamour and the Sea.

E: But it’s the home front, New Zealand. There’s After Z-Hour with actual warfare. But that’s it. No more wars.

S: I might be having a few battles in my next one. But they’ll all be nineteenth-century. The siege of Omdurman.

E: Well, I do have internment camps in Texas at the end of my Vintner sequel. So that’s the war. Damn. Only because it would happen, since the idiot has a German passport. Is the idiot going to think: ‘I, Xas, the angel without wings, must get US citizenship’? Is he going to think that? Nah.

S: Why were you thinking of werewolves?

E: That’s just one of my lines. I always run it past you, and you go, ‘I’m not really into werewolves.’

S: I wouldn’t say I was categorically against werewolves.

E: I had my werewolf-on-death-row plot. You know, the person who tore their whole family apart, and they’re a trauma-triggered werewolf rather than a lunar cycle one. That was an idea. But you said you can’t do death row.

S: You can’t because there are no interactions on death row. Not really.

E: Right. So no werewolves.

S: Werewolves aren’t an idea in themselves. If you’re going to do them then it’s better to go traditional, with the forest clearing and gypsy wagons and the this and the that. The ‘I am happening with werewolves.’

E: Like the ‘I was bitten by a werewolf and now I’m a werewolf’? Nah.

S: See? You’re not sure about werewolves yourself. I was actually thinking of a speculative fiction kind of plot where there are tour guides who take people like . . .

E: You’re going to say time travel.

S: Kind of like Christmas Past Christmas Present and Christmas Future. Trained people who take you back into your life, or someone else’s, an ancestor’s, or something inter-dimensional. I didn’t really think what.

E: So, a skilled practitioners story.

S: Yeah. A little bit like Dreamhunters really.

E: Okay. Tour guides in time. That’s a possible. Madeline and I once did a stupid one where — for some strange reason — people from different time periods ended up rocketing through the ages, collecting one another as they went. So they’d just appear in someone’s life, and when they moved on again the someone would go with them, helplessly. They couldn’t work out why they were together. They all disapproved of one another because of different social mores. So there was a Southern belle and a flapper who couldn’t see eye to eye. There was a cyborg law enforcer and a hippy — that kind of thing.

S: That sounds kind of strange.

E: I can’t remember whether I came up with a reason they were loose in each other’s slipstream. I might have. Can’t remember what it was. We also did a good one with a group of ordinary people who were chosen to decide the fate of humankind — shut in a room while the world slowly disappeared.

S: We don’t want to be shut in a room while the world disappears. That’s too much like that one we’ve done already.

E: What? The one about the royal family?

S: No, not the royal family, the one with the invisible creature and trapped people.

E: Oh yeah. The Wake.

S: Already done that.

E: And it had an alien. So we’ve had aliens, though all aliens have different permutations.

S: We’ve had aliens, we’ve had vampires, we’ve had fairies — we always have these things. The food groups.

E: Okay — how about a Galactica type thing. Though I don’t know how far you want to go with some cylon-like threat. How about if we do a fleet that has escaped from the destruction of their planet who actually get to earth. So — do it from the arrival. Do the refugees, asylum seekers. Do their mortal enemies in pursuit and still trying to wipe them out — or the threat of the enemy’s arrival. Does earth want to inherit other people’s enemies?

S: Or not.

E: Too grand? I wonder what Galactica is going to do with that final five. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. And is Baltar going to get saner or madder.

S: When he appears to Six he’s never very nice to her. When she appears to him he’s often much nicer.

E: So her version of him is nastier. Poor Six.

S: Poor all of them

E: Yeah. Except Adama who needs a smack for being so mean to Apollo.

S: He was particularly mean in the last one.

E: What is his problem? He’s probably a cylon.

S: I’m wondering is my cat a cylon? . . .

E: Okay, so, if a bunch of aliens turned up in our Solar System, the latest asylum seekers . . .

S: Nah. It really doesn’t do it for me.

E: Okay. So. All right.

S: Tribes. Native Americans.

E: Tribes that aren’t Native Americans.

S: Anthropologists. Pueblos.

E: Human anthropologists with aliens. I always like the whole Star Trek thing where the starship crew has to deal with, and be diplomatic to, badly behaved aliens. Be terribly polite to people who like to wear necklaces made out of their enemies’ teeth and ears.

S: But there are enough people who do that kind of thing in real life.

E: But if you do those people you get into real politics. There is a reason I write fantasy you know!

S: Because you don’t want to do real politics?

E: I don’t mind doing real politics in a sequence. I don’t mind exploring, it’s just . . .

S: Yeah. Writing novels is great for all sorts of things. But there’s a whole set of things I don’t want to do.

E: I don’t like crisis fiction. I hate it intensely. That’s what I want to avoid.

S: What’s crisis fiction?

E: Books that get their dignity and importance from discussing the atrocities of the past, or foreign parts. Some comfortable bloke writer writing a novel about some brave soul playing a stringed instrument in the ruins of Sarajevo. The stakes are built in. High stakes and high-mindedness. There’s all these readymade claims to seriousness.

S: So — like someone contemporary writing a novel from the point of view of a holocaust survivor? Like (title redacted by author redacted). That was a pernicious piece of shit. God I hated that so much.

E: And I had to watch people oozing all over her at a festival. And she was so leaden as a human being. Leaden, self-regarding.

S: There’s the whimsical crisis books. Like Augustin Burroughs’ Running With Scissors.

E: But isn’t that autobiographical? Like Angela’s Ashes. I think that’s not so bad. Anything done well isn’t bad.

S: Yeah, I guess. And I liked Mary Karr’s The Liars Club.

E: That’s kind of a personal crisis story. I liked that too. But there’s always a danger when so much of the book’s dignity comes from the claims of suffering. It’s a real balancing act.

S: So Crisis Fiction is fiction with borrowed gravitas.

E: Yes. And there’s so much of it around. Which is one reason I write fantasy. I go, ‘I’m going over here and doing this’. Because, boy, fantasy does not have gravitas. Even when it has gravity.

S: There are people doing that. Like Beyond Black, Hilary Mantel.

E: Literature and non-realist.

S: But it’s realist fantasy.

E: The real world and the supernatural, a bit like Vintner. But she’s in her own class. She can do anything.

S: She’s a great writer.

E: And she is anti-bullshit.

S: I like writing historical fiction because it gets away from so much. You can use the tools of real invention. But, anyway, we need an idea. Anthropologists.

E: I don’t know enough about anthropology.

S: Trained ghost squads.

E: Okay . . .

S: What say you had a highly trained, engineered, secret . . .

E: Troop of ghost-hunting ghosts? Or dead, the corporal and incorporeal dead.

S: Ghosts who bust ghosts.

E: They’re the Thin Dead Line.

S: They are a Pentagon innovation because there’s some ghostly threat.

E: But how would the Pentagon have recruited them? Did the Pentagon create them by killing people under special ghost-creating conditions?

S: Maybe they created some and recruited others.

E: So are they put in play against dead demonic forces? This is a good plot. I smell good plot all over it.

S: If maybe the conditions of existence were so bad that the world’s population has been seriously reduced and the only way you can up your fighting corps is to raise bodies.

E: Corpse Corps. So this is like Garth Nix. You’re talking about necromancy. You resurrect bodies. That’s also the Welsh myth of the black cauldron that Lloyd Alexander uses. An army of the dead.

S: I wasn’t so much thinking of resurrected bodies. I was thinking that part of the thing of how they fight would have to be to do with their ghostliness. Resurrected soldiers is boring.

E: So we’re not talking about a small secret group that battles evil forces. We’re talking about a whole system and armies.

S: You could still have the elite shock troops. Because maybe some people are better at being dead than others.

E: That goes without saying if some people are better at being alive. So — I was just wondering if we could work in reanimated corpses too, because that’s always good and gross.

S: Well, that could be the lowest grade. The grunts. This has to be a situation of total war.

E: But would it be total war? I’m worried about the scope.

S: Well, you have societies that are totally opposed to one another but can’t raise an army anymore.

E: But does society let that happen? Do mothers let their dead children be recycled to fight? It would only work if all the living were an elite, who live so long and in such good conditions that they’re like gods of ego. There’s plenty for everyone, but because the people are horrid they still settle conflicts of interest by combat — at no risk to themselves.

S: Or, alternately, you have an off-world alien threat and the only way you can fight them is by using people who are dead. Ghosts.

E: Ghosts fighting a bodiless enemy? But then we’ve got three things, the living, the dead, and the enemy. Tricky dispersal of story.

S: If you’ve got a minority of living people and a majority of purpose-built . . .

E: But if someone really worked out the technology of raising the dead to fight, how would you get them to? This is why the soldier thing is hard. The police thing is easier. There’s more motivation. Because why would the dead fight? What would you offer them? And if they’re compelled, how are we going to do the dead characters? Characters with no volition?

S: Well, there’s heaven and hell of course. What can you reward the dead with? The company of other dead they’ve lost?

E: Politically this is too difficult. If almost everyone your dead super soldier loves is alive and you’re rewarding them only with the company of their own kind, they’re going to start killing their families and friends.

S: Yeah. We need a small elite corps.

E: A secret government small elite force combating a spirit problem. An elite corps made up of ghosts and living people. That’s a great idea. So you could start with your special forces type who’s proved himself and is recruited into the inner sanctum and suddenly discovers that some of his colleagues aren’t alive. An elite is more manageable as a story.

S: And we can start without deciding too much about the threat — because they’re still working it out. There’s a terrorist cult of the dead.

E: Who’ve decided to take the living down. A cult with a leader who has motivated a lot of the dead. Maybe a necromancer.

S: [Liverpool accent] He’s dead motivated. [Cackles] Okay so—we need to thrash out some details. Like how long has the death threat been going on?

E: How could they contain the dead? People would be dying every day and could be recruited.

S: It won’t work if everyone can be recruited. So, think of a terrorist group. Small numbers, efficient, dispersed, hard to identify.

E: What do they want? What are they pissed off about?

S: Maybe they hate religion. Their charismatic leader hates religion. He’s got a beef. He’s an angry ghost. He hates religious belief. So those who believe in an afterlife are attacked. So all kinds of religions. Though the Buddhists would be okay. Maybe they’d be the last to be targeted. So — mosques, temples, synagogues, churches.

E: Maybe it took the powers-that-be ages to work out that it wasn’t extremists from the mosques and synagogues and churches attacking each other.

S: That’s right. Also there were key religious figures being assassinated, and in situations like locked-room mysteries — the deaths were violent but mysterious and didn’t make sense.

E: Yeah. Cool.

S: It would have to be an intergovernmental initiative because of the appearance of sectarian violence.

E: They’d have to all be working together, the governments, to keep a lid on things. They’d put out some kind of cover story and misinformation.

S: So perhaps the governments were clued into what was really going on by someone who knew. There can be like Death Adepts and necromancers who can demonstrate the ‘something funny’, and that’s what got the governments on board.

E: Yes. Okay. We are coming up with details. Personnel. Necromancers. Living people who are necromancers. Okay. Who is what?

S: What does it mean to be Death Adept?

E: A Death Adept can talk to the dead. They’re mediums. And there could be different grades of ghosts. Ghosts, spirits . . .

S: They should call them Spooks, to be like, a secret governmental agency.

E: So how about if we have ghasts, which are vestigial and can be put into bodies by necromancers and have weak identities and can be ruled. And Spirits, and Spooks.

S: Spirits have the capacity to communicate with Death Adepts but are invisible to people. Spooks can be seen by anyone.

E: They can open doors and pick things up. They are like poltergeists. And the villain, the charismatic leader, he’s a necromancer, known only as ‘The Necromancer’.

S: Oh, you mean the main guy on the other side?

E: The guy on [eerie voice] The Other Side, yes.

S: But are the elite corps ghosts in grades?

E: Some can move things. Hold a cup. Open a door. Their footsteps make sound. And they’re called Spooks because they’re the ones that non-Death Adept government bods have more to do with. It’s kind of a domestic name. They’re domesticated in the official imagination even though they’re more scary.

S: Maybe there should be an even higher grade that pass as human.

E: They seem to be human till you try to grab hold of them and they feel distinctly strange. Only Spooks can be seen by everyone. Death Adepts know when spirits and ghasts are present. Yeah. Now I’m just trying to think who is what.

S: Can ghosts identify other ghosts? The terrorists could have plants.

E: Do you mean are ghosts able to say, ‘This is a good ghost and this is a bad ghost’?

S: How would they if they don’t even know who is a ghost?

E: They have to know. The dead have to be able to tell the dead from the living. Otherwise it wouldn’t mean anything that they didn’t know whose side anyone was on. Better to have a whole class of persons—dead ones—being looked at suspiciously by those who know they’re there at all. That would be better. You’d only have the ghosts you trusted and any ghost else might be the enemy. Or just any old wandering spirit. So — who is going to be what.

S: Okay. Carlin is ex-special forces and Death Adept and he’s just been recruited.

E: Yeah. He’s been Death Adept his whole life and he’s been hiding it, but he got knocked on the head and he’s become more Adept. He’s now got a ghost problem.

S: Roadside mine in combat. And he says things at a Veterans’ hospital that raise flags and he’s recruited. He’s a marine or something, rather than special forces. That would be better.

E: Yeah. Just a marine.

S: How about Ido. He’d be more of a necromancer.

E: Living Necromancer.

S: Vlad could be a dead necromancer.

E: Better if they’re on the same side, unless you want Vlad to be secretly The Necromancer.

S: That would be a bit unfortunate for everybody involved.

E: Better if there’s an evil villain out there who we can figure out later.

S: Vlad could be a Catholic priest killed in a Church attack. Then he ascended into his dark powers. He’s using them to protect the living.

E: He could always have been Death Adept. A medium.

S: Not if he was a priest he wouldn’t. That’s just not allowed. He could have been an exorcist, mind you. He never really clued into the basis of his powers — why he was such a good exorcist.

E: Those weren’t demons, they were just dead people.

S: Malevolent. In fact they do kind of manifest as demons and do all kinds of weird shit.

E: But he’s been dead for some time and is used to it. Ten years or something. Long enough to get used to the lifestyle. The lifestyle!

S: Elezebet can be a spook.

E: And I better make Fernando living. Though he’d make a good dead person. A baddie? But that would just be sticking him in a box. Oppositional. Isolated.

S: Hardly ever works.

E: He could be on his way to being a spook. He could be a ghast, newly dead and floating about in a state of desperate, fading confusion, then a necromancer puts him in a body for some reason and he won’t leave it. [cackles] It’s getting ickier by the hour and he’s not letting it go. Or, no, maybe the body is his newly dead twin brother and he’s a long dead twin spirit who has been floating near at hand and so is ready-to-hand for some necromancer. And he’s grief-stricken and pissed off and won’t leave.

S: So how does a necromancer stop the body decaying?

E: They don’t. This can be the problem we start with. For the secret organisation. They can be having a bit of a conundrum with this ghost who won’t vacate a corpse. Normally, when the body isn’t needed anymore, The Necromancer gets the ghost to let it go. This is a good plot.

S: It is. But Fernando doesn’t exactly sound like asset material.

E: No. But they are going to have to cope with him. He’s strong. They have to persuade him that if he’s strong enough to cling to his brother’s body he’s strong enough to go full spook. Or maybe both souls are in the dead body. The ghast twin fixing on the grown-up twin’s supposed to be departed soul. Then the elite can call them ‘The Twins’, something like ‘The Jackson twins’.

S: Better if they were quintuplets. The Jackson five. [cackles]

E: Ha! It’s better if it’s a deceased 15-year-old in his grown-up twin’s dead body. He’s having a crisis and causing everyone else one.

S: Yup yup yup. But we need some kind of Senior Officer. Hmm, Miklos. Could he be a Commanding Officer? The Government would want the high-ups to be living. For reasons of the chauvinism of life. The not-entirely-trusting the dead.

E: Because the dead started this nonsense.

S: There could be a bit of agitation in the organisation. Maybe Carlin. He could say: ‘What about their rights, eh? When do the dead get to rotate out? Where’s their R&R?’

E: Blank looks. Okay. So Carlin is a Death Adept . . . [writing]

S: And his name is Doug Blakely. Captain Blakely. And Elezebet is a spook. A lawyer in life.

E: She could have died fairly gently. Electrocuted by a faulty spa bath. Didn’t realise she was dead. Walked into her firm the next day and terrified everyone.

S: There would have to be a recruiting arm for these people.

E: And cover-ups. Lots of disinformation. There’s a rationality movement in the media — but the movement was started and funded by officialdom. Because the public does not need to know it is under attack by the dead.

S: But the organisation also has to have a recruiting arm. The ones who respond to reports. Dead lawyer turns up at work. Walking corpse. We should be doing them — the recruiting arm, not the whole organisation.

E: Yeah. That’s it. And I’m just wondering if this necromancer Ido has been among them already or if he’s just been on his own doing a bit of necromancy down in New Orleans or something.

S: Oh, probably. I would say. DIY necromancer.

E: Maybe he’s the one who DIYed the problem. The Fernando problem. The stuck twin problem. So I’m going to have several necromancers. Because they are rare and they need them for, like, bomb disposal squads — corpse bomb disposal squads. So maybe they were even using them before the death terror cult . . .

S: They could call them The Voodoo Crew.

E: I think I’ll use Ricardo as another Necromancer who’s been on the Voodoo Crew since the start.

S: Miklos can be a Death Adept recruiter.

E: And Cassandra. Maybe she’s part of the team but can’t see ghosts. Which would mean she needs an adept interpreter and people can lie to her about what ghosts say and do.

S: But what is she.

E: Scientist? Their Q?

S: Maybe she makes ghost traps. Like the Ghostbuster ghost-snatching machine.

E: She could have been working on force fields for the DOD and she got recruited to adapt force fields into force vortices for sucking in ghosts.

S: Why were the DOD making force fields? And does it have to be the DOD? Cassandra’s not the type to work for the armed forces.

E: Maybe it was NASA. Asteroid defense.

S: Yes!

E: I’m going to call her Loretta Jackson. Got to use Jackson. [writing]

S: I’m calling Miklos Anton ‘Ant’ Kreutzer. He’s South African.

E: Ido comes from a family in New Orleans who practise Voodoo. Second-sighted Santeria worshippers.

S: It’s not Santeria. That’s south of the border. It’s — there’s a respectable word. O something. French.

E: I only know Santeria. But their gods are Loa.

[Sara starts googling respectable name] [and muttering]

E: So he’s a Louisiana Creole from a family of Voodoo practitioners. He’s going to think The Necromancer is a Loa. Baron Samedi. All that stuff. We don’t need to know all this.

S: Oh poop! Too fucking hard. I can’t find anything.

E: I’m calling him Remy Lazar, which is a good name for a person who raises the dead.

S: My priest is . . .

E. [Irish accent] Father Michael.

S: He’s not father anymore. He’s in a new trade. Francis. Francis Le Jest.

E: Frank the Joke. How do you spell it?

S: L-E-J-E-S-T. Two words. Elezebet’s name is Tom. Thomasina. Tom Brown.

E: We could start with Remy and the stuck ghost. Remy has got to the stage where he can reanimate corpses. Independently. Family witchery. He can have a grandma with second-sight. Still alive. Youngish grandma — late sixties. And she has a Voodoo shop. So she’s been watched for years. Suddenly she’s digging for old bones in a graveyard to make spells — and that raises a flag. They get her to take them to Remy, who is holed up with a groaning corpse.

S: Why did he do it?

E: A sense of his own overweening power?

S: Bad to start from that.

E. His secret thing could be that he’s crazy. Dodgy. Has no barriers. No squeamishness.

S: Maybe when he was a tiny kid he was shut in with a dead parent.

E: That would work. Necromancers should have odd psychology anyway. Too tender and too fearless and too proprietorial towards corpses.

S: So necrophilia — except he just likes to date. [cackles]

E: But why did he think of trying to raise this person?

S: Because he missed him?

E: No, the guy is a stranger. Because if he knew him he wouldn’t have tried, since he’s going to dismiss him again. He’s only raising the body — not the real person.

S: Maybe he hasn’t done it much.

E: Or — maybe he doesn’t even know what he’s doing. Maybe he’s been occasionally trying to resurrect the dead, and it doesn’t take. Because the ghosts don’t stay anyway because he hasn’t got sufficient control. So he doesn’t know he’s calling a ghast into a body. He thinks he’s failing at a resurrection.

S: So he was just passing by when someone carked it?

E: Or, he was out for a drive with friends and they ran a guy down in some lonely place. He got out to help. The other guys drove off. It was a hit and run. And the first thing he does is try to raise the guy because he’s dead. But he can’t resurrect anyone because no one can, and all he does is call the nearest ghast into the body, and the nearest ghast is the guy’s twin, who has been following him for over 15 years. So suddenly Remy has this body that is following him around, croaking accusingly, and getting all nasty as time goes on.

S: And the flag comes up on Grandma who’s trying to help and has Remy and body hidden. There are items that raise flags.

E: She’s out at midnight grave-robbing for a spell and no one ever bothers her ’cos she’s scary. And she knows her grandson is wrongheaded.

S: He’s tried raising people. People he knows who’ve died.

E: Who he thinks don’t want to speak to him. So he’s having a hard time and needs to be recruited before he goes nuts. The Ricardo character can know all about the madness of necromancers. He studied it maybe. He can be a creepy former Satanist—the kind of guy who read Crowley and Mircea Eliade. I’m going to call him Carlton. Carlton . . .

S: Lager. [cackles]

E: Vye. Carlton Vye. [writing]

S: You’re writing these names down and you aren’t going to lose them, are you? And there should be a name for the whole operation. Like Overlord. But not Overlord because that’s D-Day. Something to do with the raising of the dead.

E: Operation Rapture.

S: Yeah. That’s the code name.

E: Op rap. ‘I’m an operative from op rap.’ ‘This is an op-rap op.’

S: Are you recording? Should we start?

[End of file]

Image Jack Barrowman

I wrote this essay in 2002 for an exhibition of Tracey Moffat’s work at the City Gallery. My subject was Moffat’s Fourth series. Now seems a good time to put this essay up here. I couldn’t find all the images I talk about in it, but I’m sure you get the picture.

Cast Down

In 2000, the artist Tracey Moffat sat through hours of Olympic Games coverage in order to select a few telling shots of competitors who came fourth in their events.

The men and women of Fourth are like the children and adolescents of Scarred For Life – the girl whose mother has just handed her a copy of her birth certificate; the boy caught giving birth to a doll, his friend as midwife. Scarred For Life’s terrible, formative moments appear as though remembered by the people they happened to – the adopted girl, or the boy suspected of strange inclinations. What Scarred For Life and Fourth share is a sense that their subjects are recreating a moment, looking back and reflecting on something that changed them, something they have to learn to live with. The children and adolescents of Scarred For Life seem to muse on the meaning of the moment they are in. Scarred For Life tells us that to remember is to realise again, and to feel a stain sink deeper in. Although the images of Scarred For Life are acted and art directed, and those of Fourth are found then processed, they are alike. Fourth’s people too are simultaneously living their moment, and remembering it.

The background of each image is whited out. The world behind the fourths is ghostly, dissolving or receding, though the subjects themselves are sharply solid. Perhaps this is the way these people will recall their moment – the spectators’ attention has gone elsewhere, but they are caught, self-conscious, and solid with shame.

These faces and bodies, are, for the most part, bleak and exhausted. These people have been selected by something other than that they went looking for – singled-out, not by success, or even by anything as unequivocal as failure, but by an almost that they are alone with.

Here is a young man in the pool. The loose straps of his goggles dangle, seeming to suspend the heavy lids of his half-closed eyes. The men beside him – happy, triumphant – are like a newspaper photo; they have faded into document, a documented moment. The fourth will soon be cropped out of this congratulatory group. They are rearing up out of the water, their arms free and in motion. He is submerged to his chin. He is sinking – sinking out of the public moment into the private, a moment already beginning to play itself again, a defining moment, the stain of disappointment.

Now that his race is over, the runner closes on himself, though he accepts the touch of a hand that goes out to meet his. The winner’s body is still expanding into his moment, he is reaching out to the world, to the other runners. But the fourth’s hand scarcely leaves his side, it is as if he feels he has less right to occupy the space, no right to throw his arms open and gather in the air. He is contracting, retrenching, conserving his energy. He has run the race and gone the distance. But he has to do it all again to get what he desired. Triumph is still so close that it seems possible. But he has to do it all again.

The runner stands beside her team-mate, the place-getter. Perhaps they are being interviewed. The winner glows, like history, like an old news-reel ghost. She is smiling. Both women have their eyes cast down – the winner modestly. But the fourth is herself cast down. She shares her team-mate’s moment of glory, she breathes the air of excellence, because of her almost, her fine effort – but she is thinking, considering her shortcomings, considering what to do next. We can see her thinking, and beginning to learn to live with it.

Two divers enter the water like inverted trophies, like statuettes plunged back into the smelter, their figures melting, perhaps to be re-cast as something more ordinary. (Even when you can’t see these people thinking, deciding how to feel, it appears that decisions are being made for them by the strange incandescent material world with which the artist has surrounded them.)

In the group shot the team-mates won’t meet each other’s eyes, they are inclined away from one another – alone with it – each thinking that he’s let the others down. (The backgrounds of all these pictures have become heroic murals, against which the fourths are posed, not fallen, and not ascended either – only cast down and doomed to keep on looking up at all the raised arms.)

The diver is holding his breath behind the barrier of his stiff lips – he might need it later, for though he has and completed his dive, it was a wasted effort, and he can’t yet come up for air.

Surrounded by the jubilant, the sprinter isn’t entitled to wave, he’s not entitled to take a big scoop of the white air. What has he to share? How can you share “almost”, its uncertainty, its indecision – the banal drag of “not quite”? “Yes” and “no” are something. What is “not quite”? How do you digest it?

There are good-natured, game acknowledgements of effort. The runner waves, his hand at the level of his head. He is polite and dignified. People have supported him – his gesture is for those who cheered while he ran.

The team, sitting together like refugees, are stopped, no longer expectant, only enduring together, mute and apparently attentive to their surroundings, not making a fuss, and not fussed over. They are there, there with the winners, but not quite. They all wear masks of learning to live with it.

These fourths could be anybody from anywhere. Gender and nationality and race have been distilled out of them by their situation, their condition of “not quite”. Where is the logic in it? Why first, second, and third? Why only three? But we have all agreed on three – so here are the fourths, at end of their events, and the end of their expectations – and the beginnings of their journeys, asking themselves: “How will I learn to live with this?”

“Ah, there he was, standing in the blue, making a dome with his song.”

Skylark Lounge is my favourite of Nigel Cox’s books, though it is a close run thing with both Responsibility and his posthumous collection of essays, Phone Home Berlin.

Skylark Lounge appeared after a long gap in publication – Dirty Work, Nigel’s second novel, was published in 1987, Skylark Lounge in 2000. Between these novels are several abandoned works, (a tantalising excerpt of Academy can be found in the first issue of Sport).

Several things interest me about the bits of those abandoned books I was lucky enough to have read, and how I remember Nigel speaking about them. One thing is their relation to work by Ian Wedde appearing around that time. Nigel particularly admired Ian’s fiction. They both seemed interested in representing a cosmopolitan, down-at-heel, urban New Zealand, writing sensation and information dense depictions of our country as a place in which people lived in cities, inventing and enjoying themselves as human particles in the substance of neighbourhoods, as the regulars of pool halls, people with plausible street identities and monikers like Jimmy Ronk, Hairy John, and The Crazy Jap. The boarding house in Nigel’s Dirty Work is a microcosm of this New Zealand, and the novels between Dirty Work and Skylark Lounge seemed to want to try to widen the focus from that gritty urban outpost, to a whole city, or at least the citizens in one silo of a city.

I don’t know why those novels were abandoned. But what I have often suspected is that Nigel’s imagination was stymied or stifled by his determination to consider what would belong in the Kiwi gritty urban. In that kind of novel. And I feel that Nigel’s plans for those books may have demanded he set aside many of the things that went on to form the heart Skylight Lounge.

Skylark Lounge is a book by someone who didn’t want to write a “kind” of book; a book with a defensible territory. It is not coincidental that its protagonist’s name is Jack Grout. Grout isn’t what sticks tiles to a wall, it’s what joins the tiles, and seals those joins. Skylark Lounge doesn’t have a single setting – these mean streets – or a milieu. It has irises that open on its many scenes, a pool hall, a marriage bed, a back porch, a kitchen table in the Grout house, a tennis court, the surface of the moon, a Waiouru Motel. The novel’s gritty urban backs onto waste lots, and the waste lots abut wildernesses. The novel captures how, here, we can take very short steps from habitation to wilderness. It captures how short the distances are between dark places where we might be able to view all the visible stars. It is concerned with littleness, and immensity. With contingency and destiny. With the feeling that the things that happen to us were meant, that someone must have meant them, because they are so meaningful to us. It’s concerned with small places that are big enough for someone to have sufficiency of things to see and do to last a lifetime.

Skylark Lounge is a short novel, but an expansive one. It tackles time and space as both astronomical and anthropocentric. It has the long time in which feeling beings can lose their bodies, and the memories of their bodies, but also the slow time and contained space of a single human existence.

We are told that, as a child, Jack Grout nearly drowned in a river. And that, at the last moment, he was pulled out by a woman. He only remembers his unknown rescuer’s hand. It is typical of this book that the anonymous hand isn’t the subject of a novelistic plot. The story will not find and identify this woman. Jack only remembers. And remembering is the story. These sorts of moments are cumulative. And one of the climaxes to which the book builds is its protagonist’s episode of hallucinatory whole remembering, when Jack’s entire life is available to him – a life looked over and kept.

“I mean, I imagine you’ve gathered by now what I’m talking about. I’ve hinted around enough, I’ve been preparing you. It’s going to be an anticlimax now, you’re going to say, yeah, absolutely, Jack, you’re going to tell us you were abducted by aliens.”

One summer holiday in Pukerua Bay, on an unspecified number of nights, but often enough so that he came to expect it, nine-year-old Jack was abducted by aliens. Taken up, then put safely back in his bed in the bach his parents have borrowed. Returned happy and intact. And then it stopped, as if the aliens were no longer able find him when he wasn’t at Pukerua Bay. That is, until the novel’s present, when Jack is forty-six, and some months after he’s given up his salaried job and bought a pool hall, and also several months after completing a course of chemotherapy for the melanoma of which the doctors only ever found the secondary, but not the primary site. Jack’s aliens return, and this time he’s determined to examine them right back, to make sense of them, since the mystery of their attention has made nonsense of too much of his life—coming and going as they did, leaving him with memories and experiences for which he had no factual framework, nor a respectable cultural one either. Jack sets out to explain his history with the aliens, to himself, and whoever else might one day demand an explanation, like his worried and exasperated partner, Shelley, and their kids. The novel is, ostensibly, Jack Grout’s notes on aliens. His testimony, should something happen to him. Also, necessarily, it is an exploration of what these aliens might be interested in. “Why me?” Jack and the novel ask. It’s the “why me?” that, if we’re never moved to ask, in either complaint or wonder, means we haven’t yet suffered much, or that we’ve never felt blessed, chosen, singled out for a revelation.

What is great about this novel – and this is a novel with greatness – is that it takes Jack Grout’s solipsistic sense of singularity, and makes that sense serve a tender meditation on the beauty of human consciousness. And if that makes the novel sound esoteric, it is, it aims bravely at the big stuff, but always by getting close up to the particular, the mundane material world and it’s odd appearances, its contradictions, mind-blowing strangeness, and logic. For instance, Jack thinks about playing tennis, and what is means to him. His thinking is a hymn of praise.

“The squeaking of the shoes, and the sweating, the swearing, and the speaking of the scores. Fifteen love, thirty fifteen, thirty, forty, deuce – it’s a it’s such a mantra. Game set and match. The scoring system in tennis is a frame you can live within. There’s such certainty there, such logical progression. It’s the same with the court. Those beautiful white lines, the fat confidence of them. The regularity. Every court the same, with lines the same distance apart, the earth measured into identical plots all over the planet.”

Look at that. “Plots” as in stories, and graves. And that move from a particular court, to a world parcelled out into tennis courts.

There is Jack’s meditation on the top forty, his memory of how, during the week he spent painting a fence one summer of this teens, it seemed there was a connection between the laying of paint on a board, and a set of songs: “The next board produced ‘Kites’ by Simon Dupree and The Big Sound.” Nigel gets that sense of our living in the moment when we’re young, the moment and our bodies, and how that means that while we might know all kinds of people are listening to the same count down to number one, what is shared is also for us alone. We have been communicated with, formed, nourished, given a gift by the universe. The universe—all of it ours.

Jack’s aliens are often the occasion of these patient, pattern-and-meaning making musings. They came early to him and planted a seed of a way of seeing that had to be nurtured by silence and isolation, and a view from a very high place. But then they withdrew, and the plant they’d propagated grew into lostness and longing, leaving Jack to wonder; had the experience been psychotic rather than revelatory? Was he just a crazy person?

The novel imagines very well what being privy to the invisible feels like. It also does a bloody good job of making the all-seeing, disembodied, beneficent but withholding aliens seem completely believable. Its alien scenes take the reader step by natural step through extraordinary descriptions of exactingly rendered extraterrestrial encounters. Pop culture aliens are available to Jack – and often useful when he wants to describe what his aliens are not like, and what they don’t do. The novel doesn’t bother to pretend pop culture aliens don’t exist, it acknowledges all the things its readers know, then writes its own rules of invention.

Skylark Lounge is a novel about a middle-aged man having a crisis because the alien abductors of the most ecstatic period of his childhood return, bringing their alienating ecstasies. And it is about that. With gusto, and without coyness, the novel is about that. The reader squirms with Jack as he tries to avoid telling his family why he’s off – off by himself, off at odd hours, off in his behaviour. And it cleverly incorporates into the story why Jack’s family at first offers him such latitude with his crisis. He’s recently had a brush with cancer, fruitless scans, and a course of chemo. By putting the cancer alongside the aliens as what might be going on with Jack, Nigel avoids the possibility that the metaphorical scope of his book will be reduced to the aliens representing cancer. I have heard Skylark Lounge discussed that way, and I remember that the first time I read it, with Nigel’s melanoma’s first appearance so fresh in my mind, I was happy to accept the idea that the aliens were a metaphor for cancer (as well as being real science fiction) and that this was a way Nigel had found to write about his illness – as if he wasn’t actually in parts of the book straightforwardly writing about his illness. As if cancer was at the heart of the book, rather than being just one of the book’s occasions of contemplation.

I didn’t however, in my early reading, reduce the book to this interpretation. I loved how the aliens and their passionate curiosity threw their human subject into a storm of memory and reverie. I thought, “This author has had a brush with mortality and is mapping the great constellations of his emotional life, the river, the rescuer’s hand, the fence boards, the songs, the tennis courts, and pool tables and back steps and twisting scoria gullies of the desert road.”

Reading the novel now, at fifty-seven, a year older than Nigel was when he died, I can still see the aliens as aliens – as character and plot. And I can still see them is something of a metaphor for cancer. Or for the interruption of life by fear of death, which throws us back on life.

But now I can see whole new strata of meanings, and a book I always admired and considered intellectually and emotionally deep has flowered further in my understanding.

It seems to me now that Skylark Lounge is also a book written by someone who had, at some points in his life, a very real fear of losing his mind. I recognise this partly because between 2000, when I first read the novel, and 2006 when he died, I learned a lot more about Nigel. I also recognise this from my own life, from observing and thinking about my older sister’s difficulties, and from some sketchy times I experienced (and determinedly ignored). These things pass, thank goodness. Coincidences stop communicating insights specially to us. All the patterns return to being simply pleasing, not significant. The world won’t be saved by any one of us working it out in their mind. That isn’t something we have to do. Phew. A person can relax just have thoughts and dreams – and stop doing the world’s or God’s work, late at night, with the river of our whole lives streaming through our heads, in a channel the full moon has made. Phew. But, then again, we are no longer ecstatic, no longer taken up and shown the whole world. We not chosen, nothing is made specially for us, and there is nothing that we alone can do.

Skylark Lounge captures both the terror of that state of mind, and the grief at its passing. It manages to do this with more care and deliberation, and more spirit, than anything else I’ve read.

Another thought I had about Jack Grout’s having been press-ganged into the job of revealing human life to aliens, and his pressing need to understand what all that actually means, is that this is the writing life. The fiction-writing life. Jack’s aliens make him go off on his own, make him secretive, vague and cold to his friends and family. Jack’s aliens are an enemy of family life, and the reliably ticking-over everyday. They put thoughts into Jack’s head that no one else can see or hear. They torture him with immanence, with things that have to be solved, with the tantalising, unsettled shimmer of a great pattern. Jack Grout’s aliens are isolating and marvellous, and they do his head in. They are the writing life. They pass through – like novels – leaving him to say, “I’m back. Sorry I was absent. I’ve had enough out, please take me back in.”

I found a hand written draft of this in a filing cabinet. Any electronic version has long since vanished (it would be on a 2 inch disk!) I was in the habit then of presenting essays and talks with these subheadings – thanks to the titanic influence of Anne Carson on my work at that time. This is a portrait of the author before The Vintner’s Luck. I hadn’t even begun Glamour and the Sea (though my thinking about that novel is all over this). I was 34 when I wrote this. My son was 1. These notes were, I believe, my contribution to a panel at a PEN conference (the NZ Society of Authors as was). 

October 1993

Having decided that all I can talk about in any focused way for this panel are my feelings about romance in my own writing, I thought I should do that by sorting out a few subheadings. I’m all about the illusion of organisation, these days. (And I’m digressing already – the illusion of organisation it’s pretty unromantic, it isn’t Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”.)

Pacification

My first year tutor in English Lit at Vic marked me down in early essays for “sounding too sure of myself”. Subsequently I was – I hope – just as emphatic, colourful, rhetorical, but I adopted the habit of starting at least one sentence in every paragraph, “Perhaps…”, “Maybe…”. “I will attempt to demonstrate,” I’d write – and my marks improved markedly.

Too sure

The teething, chickenpoxy baby is asleep. I’m at my desk and, according to tradition recent and respectable, I’m now supposed to fight my way up to some still space free from thoughts of the shopping not put away, and how I’ve left Fergus to do the dishes, the blood in Jack’s spit, tomorrow’s lousy forecast, and the inexplicable petrol smell in the downstairs toilet. And I’m not free of any of it. The future looks like the present to me. I’m always starting again, trying to do something differently, something that will work out better for me than After Z-Hour and Treasure. I think of my pleasure writing those novels and my past pleasure is now a hard place to land. Something I can’t launch from; like a sprung diving board. I can’t trust my pleasure, because I know I never quite feel what I should.

Party-pooper culture

When you meet someone and they ask “How are you?” what is the suitable reply? “Fine” and “Can’t complain” are good. Even “buggered” is acceptable, since it’s never indecent to be tired. “On top of the world” is pretty suspect however, since it asks to be asked for the story – of good news, a triumph, a happy holiday, of somehow having things sorted. “No comment” and “next question” are far too droll, and also sound like fishing to be asked the story.

What exactly is it that is uncouth about the exceptional answer? Not its honesty. More likely a lack of reserve. Enthusiasm. A need to tell the story.

Fergus says I have a heroic world view. Sometimes he says it in exasperation, sometimes in dismissal, sometimes almost in envy, and often just like: “The wind is from the north and Elizabeth has a heroic worldview.”

My heroic world view

Why is my fiction romantic in a general sense?

My heroic worldview doesn’t so much influence what I notice about the world, as the way in which I notice it. Here I am, 14 years out of my teens, and still being gripped by excitements, and totally taken up by things.

Here is a mundane example of the sort of thing I mean: The sound of a collection of exhausted matchsticks blowing about on the pavement. This observation appears in After Z-Hour. Kelfie hears the sound. “And” he tells us, “I forgot everything I knew.” I wrote that in 1984. I stood listening to the melody of matchsticks on Porirua station in 1978. Fifty or more same-sized wands stirred on the rusty bitumen by one of those winds that comes, and tries to clean the corners of any room open to the weather.

Rooms open to the weather

There’s a wonderful essay by WH Auden on sacred moments and sacred beings. My world is swarming, it seems, with sacred beings. And this has an effect on my fiction. The world my characters inhabit is as likely to make meaningful and dramatic gestures as they are – demonstrations of animation, vitality, physical beauty, desirousness even.

The thing about my heroic world view is that I didn’t decide to adopt it. I didn’t catch it from my culture (fat chance) or learn it from my family. It’s brain chemistry I suppose, which is terribly unromantic – all that loveliness and significance simply pathology.

I will attempt to demonstrate

So – to address the topic of the panel – is romance dead?

What I feel when I write is desire. And that’s what I want my readers to feel. I want to pump up their dreams with mine.

I have a number of letters from readers of Treasure who wrote that for a few days after finishing the novel they were “in love” with Mayhew. That was my intention. I like to try to beguile. I like to contaminate other people with a sense of the sacred beings and sacred moments that leap up in my face on an almost daily basis. And desire is desirable. Desiring, you know you’re alive – alive and desiring despite endless banal inducements to buy stuff, to pay heed, move forward …

Is romance alive in my work? Yes, because my work is a concentration of my feelings about my world. And because it reflects my amorous intentions towards my audience.

Three weeks without rain. The motels have had a water tanker in, but all the locals are toughing it out. The air at sea level is hazy with evaporation and the black grid-work of the oil rig they’re building in the shelter of the Bay has disappeared completely. I’m on the beach with David MacDonald, my same age cousin, who didn’t do well in School C and is going into the army next year. We can only spend time together now if we have an occupation of some sort. A project. We’re building a trap. David’s done all the digging. We’ve covered the pit with criss-crossed sticks, then newspaper, and a layer of sand. My job has been to imagine what’ll it’ll be like when our older sisters Mary and Steph come back from their walk and fall into it.

Mum appears and says, ‘Don’t wander off, Elizabeth. Auntie Thel will need another pair of hands.’ Then she wades into the waist high grass of the empty lot and lies down. We wait for a bit, and then go over. Mum looks comfortable, if incongruous. She says, ‘I won’t take sides.’ Then, ‘Let’s see if anyone misses me.’ David and I understand that we’re party to an experiment and mustn’t spoil it for her. We go back and check the beach. No Steph and Mary. David is sick of waiting and tells me to go get our little sisters. ‘Lure them in’. He demonstrates by walking towards the trap, more upright than he ever is, like he’s practicing for the army. I hurry off.

Dad, Uncle Jim and Uncle Colin have been out in the trailer sailer. They must be back because there’s an eel on the lawn in front of the old bach, cut up into big segments, which are still twitching as if trying to swim away into the shade under the lemon tree.

The kids are in the bach. They’re playing a game with toys. I climb up on the top bunk to watch. One of the girls’ dolls has been murdered, and the teddy and golly are taking turns having sex with the body. I ask, ‘Where do you get this stuff?’ and Sara says, ‘Its called necrophilia. Mary read me a bit out of a book.’ This is an answer, but really I want to know something else, that can’t be explained just by tracing it back to a book. Margaret is only going along with her friend. But Sara’s been shocked and is trying to outstrip her shock by fearlessly flaunting the most preposterously horrible thing she can think of, to be big and electric, like a little cat with all its fur standing on end. It worries me so I say, ‘Let’s go down to the beach and build a trap to catch Steph and Mary!’ The trap is built already and I want one of them to fall into it, but my insincere invitation has got to be better than these made-up atrocities. But they just shake their heads. Because they have a witness the game is getting worse, so I leave them to it.

I gravitate to the house we’re renting. I still have the habit of going to Dad for reassurance. The day isn’t exactly riddled with darkness but there was necrophilia, and a too-lively dead eel, and a human voice among the cicadas saying ‘Let’s see if anyone misses me.’

Dad’s lying down. His back is sore. He says he was stupid. When they got to Ururoa he jumped out into the shallows with the anchor in his arms. I test how bad he is by trying to worry him. ‘Mary and Steph have been out since before breakfast.’ Dad doesn’t even look interested, so I let him be.

Auntie Thel sends me along the road to Auntie Joan’s to borrow another steamer. Auntie Joan and uncle Jim Campbell came to Tata about a year ago after several happy summer holidays. Joan doesn’t have to clean schools any more. ‘I’m a lady of leisure now,’ she says as she fixes me a G & T, my first. She lets me search her bookcase. ‘Your mother was always a reader. She used to make us keep the light on till she’d finished her book.’  ‘By force of will?’ I ask, since that would be a story about my mother with a good forecast for me in it. ‘Oh no,’ says Joan, ‘Her bed was beside the light switch.’

Auntie Joan tells me my oldest cousin Andrew got badly sunburned hitching home from at a rock concert up north. ‘You should pop your head around his door and say hello.’

Andrew is lying very still, like Dad. He speaks softly and slowly. His adventures aren’t spilling, only seeping out of him. I listen to some stories about Black Sabbath, and then I take the steamer, and my gin buzz, and a book, The Egg and I, and go back along the road.

Uncle Colin is in the driveway. ‘Have you seen your mother?’

I shake my head and try to think what I can ask that will get him to say something she’ll overhear. If she’s even still there. She might have brushed her self off and gone back to our house, where she’ll be standing at the sink filling a hot water bottle for Dad’s back.

But Dad is up, shucking paua in the MacDonald’s kitchen. Thel says, ‘I have another job for you, Elizabeth.’ Mary would say, ‘What if I don’t want a job?’ Clever and quizzical. Or, if it was Mum asking, ‘Oh, a job. Anyone think you were giving me a present!’ According to Mary making fussy preparations is conventional–something women only do to show off to each other.

Thel sends me down to the garage where there’s a moulie clamped to the workbench. I spend to next hour feeding Paua and onion into the hopper, and winding the handle, to make a glistening black rope. The bowl is full of minced paua when Joan arrives and tells me to wash my hands and fetch my grandmother.

Grandma is living in a bach at the very top of the lagoon. There’s a sand track between the water and people’s gardens. On my way there I see a weka, and a weasel. Grandma is ready. She smoothes her Osti Frock and says that she’s put on her ‘plumb gown’ for ‘the festivities’. She tells me she likes my hair tied back. I don’t want to be complimented. I hate having dirty hair.

Almost everyone is gathered under the young birches. Sara and Margaret squeaking excitedly about how David fell into someone’s s trap. He winks at me over their heads. Mary and Steph are back. They were trapped by the tide and their clothes are covered in brown gorse prickes. Andrew is sitting with David. They’re both boys but Andrew doesn’t have any idea what to ask about motorbikes, and David can’t get a handle on the rock festival Ngaruawahia. They settle on discussing whether Andrew should pop his sunburn blisters. The aunts are whispering. This is odd. They haven’t been completely comfortable with each other since Joan moved to the beach. Dad likes to say that the Campbell’s and MacDonalds are feuding, which is a sophisticated history joke. Grandma remarks on Margaret’s stringy hair. Mary says ‘We all have stringy hair but only Elizabeth minds’. There’s a gap where Mum might say, ‘Elizabeth likes to take care of her appearance.’ The gap is very strange.

Then Uncle Colin pipes up to promise that we’ll all go to the Takaka river tomorrow to wash.

Once I’ve polished off two sausages and a fritter I go to fetch Mum. But where she was lying there’s a goat. It’s tethered by a long chain to a metal stake. It looks at me with eyes like coin slots in a phone box. One of those eyes should be a coin return button, since the phone is ringing and no one is picking up.

Then I spot Mum walking along the tideline, beach-combing. When I reach her she tips a handful of cats-eyes into my shirt pocket. She comes with me, only pausing to pull all the sticks out of the slumped trap and kick the sand back till it’s not a hole, only a hollow, and no one will step into it and hurt themselves.

On New Years Day, 1975 we take all the cars and drive to the river, in our togs, and with our bathroom bags. I go upstream of everyone so that I can rinse in the cleanest water. And that’s how come I can look up now to follow my floating lather and see them all, in the river and on the riverbank, everyone washing, except the kids, who are swimming but who will stay in longer and be clean enough. There they all are, still, the three families, downstream.

St Jerome in his study by A Durer

I began writing this in October in response to one ‘storm on twitter’ and finished it today, prompted by another.

I’ve been wondering whether, in most people, the instinct for agreement is stronger than the one for self-expression. When people agree they belong. And belonging doesn’t necessarily mean feeling yourself part of a larger society. Quite often it can mean defining yourself in opposition to something that you perceive to be the large society – ‘mainstream’ this or that. How do we agree? Not by discussion so much as quickly letting other people know what we think, or by a kind of rushed

calibration where we can discover what it is we should think, what our position should be. Agreements are established through the tone taken and the language used. Particular words and phrases. Saying things in a correct and unexceptional way. Each agreement has its own personality, its way of talking – its creep or swagger.

That urge to agree, to find out what the group thinks, to pacify and calm the most emotional individuals, to stand in the tree tops and shake our fists and make enough noise so that the lions, those lazy, maybe hungry lions out there, won’t come too close – these instincts are all deeply human, and calculated for survival. I never have any quarrel with what’s deeply human. But these behaviours and instincts, the twitches and fends, the loving gestures, don’t necessarily add up to a total unifying good.

What we have now with the Internet is, I think, a much more heightened tendency to agreement, disguised as self-expression. Pure self-expression doesn’t look like agreement. Not that it’s oppositional, it just has a different voice. Someone you can hear maybe from further off, at the other side of the room, a little out of the light, further from the fire and lamps, closer to the light of the window – like Jane Eyre hiding behind the curtains and reading a book about British birds. Maybe that someone one has their back to you, perhaps they’re walking away. But is walking away necessarily dissent or opposition? Maybe they’re just going for a walk, and doing a bit of thinking.

When we read deeply, openly, we are always meeting our fates on paper. I am sitting on a train reading an essay in a journal, or a book. I’m partaking of someone else’s world view or wily seduction. And when I lay the book down, bent over my knee, I don’t do anything else but think. Reading is like walking with wind and birdsong brushing my ears. I know I’m myself because the moment has made a bowl for me to curl up in; cool and sheltered. I’m reflecting on what I’ve read and that’s somehow an equivalent to physical exercise, to walking along the tideline, swinging my arms. Sensation, movement, timeliness.

We used to walk to the train, the field, the village, the market, the foundry. We used to walk to visit the invalids of our father’s parish, or to the shady stone laverie to wash our clothes. At some point we were all natural athletes. We were in our bodies and they were in space. We were natural readers too: fit, patient, habitual. (Although my ‘we’ never included everybody, since even when things were near their best, and the horizons of possibility for human life the farthest away they ever got, there were people without books or learning, or jobs, shelter, sustenance.) But we weren’t always logged in and checking to see whether we still exist. Its like we’re in a bar, morning, noon and night, with only bottles between ourselves and the mirror behind the bar. The lights are low and the mirror makes the room look big, but it’s only an illusion of scale. Don’t you long to lose sight of yourself?

The storm on the Internet

If they’re feeling alarmed, what is it that’s alarming them: the situation, or the talk about the situation? The story they heard. The scary story they heard, and the other frightened people. Or are they enjoying their fear? Is their fear making them feel alive? Are they enjoying their anger? Is their anger (indignation, disapproval) making them feel large and consequential?

When I feel threatened or angered by something I read on the Internet, I try to wait for that moment when I feel something apart from all the voices; something apart from myself, the aggregation of my history and hopes and desires for the future, and all the things I cling to to protect my ego, the face in the mirror behind the bar. I believe that if we hold ourselves in an undecided and even contradictory state, then there sometimes comes a moment that can teach us a truer relation to the world.

One thing that comes back to me as I write is a sound, the stumbling buzz of an invisible bumblebee in the lavender bush by our front door, just before dawn, summer, the 12th of January 2001. My mother, my sister Sara, and I were returning from the hospital after Dad had died. The silence of the street, the silence of the house, Jack asleep, Fergus up waiting, and then a first sign of life after death, the stumbling buzz of an invisible early bumblebee in the lavender bush. When I think about that I am like one of those saints in the old paintings where the saint is his study, and on his desk is a human skull, a memento mori, a reminder of death.

We should be reminded of death. But usually we’re only being reminded of danger. Somebody has it in for us, somebody is going to kill us, there are those out there who hate us or what we hold dear. We get that all the time. We get what we can do to disguise the appearance that our lives are short. But what we need is the quiet study and the skull on the desk. We need to know that we will die, and that we owe something to our lives, and it must be something vital. Those lovely villains in old movies, the articulate Machiavellian ones, might say to the queasy heroine that ‘Hate is vital and warming’ – but the spectacle of people agreeing to hate isn’t of life, it’s the already bony thing, it’s the same words being used, having to be used, like a catechism; the same phrases, as if that’s self-expression.

Go back into the quiet room, the room empty of everyone but yourself. Go for a walk. Stand still and stare at something inhuman and alive, or inanimate and kinetic, like a river. Be with yourself and think, ‘Who am I apart from all this? What is the world to me? What is my life to me?’ Put out your hand and touch the top of the skull and think about life, what a short time there is in which to be yourself – your good self – and do good.

St Jerome in his study by Caravaggio