Black Oxen: A Novel [Hardcover]

Elizabeth Knox (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 5, 2001

A fabulous, richly peopled, otherworldly tale

Black Oxen is the story of Carme Risk's pursuit of her beautiful and not quite human father through two worlds and three changes of identity.In her forties, in the year 2022, Risk has entered narrative therapy. Her memories and her father's journal take her from the Eden of her earliest childhood to dusty, poor Lequama, a Latin American country, where she and her father become involved with the slightly mad young leaders of a recent revolution and where everyone seems to practice black magic. And, finally, to life in northern California, where Risk, still in thrall to her elusive father, is now the widow of Lequama's most notorious torturer.

Black Oxen features romantic intrigue, machete murders, battles, and bacchanals. Full of unforgettable characters -- from an unusually lucky Taoscal chief, to a sexually ferocious therapist, to a frail billionaire who wants to live forever -- it is a deliciously entertaining and beautifully written novel.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A woman's attempt to find her elusive and complicated father lies at the heart of this novel by New Zealand writer Knox. As fans of her previous book (The Vintner's Luck) are aware, Knox's lush, hyperinventive storytelling is anything but traditional, and this time-traveling tale is as exuberantly unorthodox as its predecessor. In the year 2022, Carme Risk lives in northern California and is undergoing narrative therapy to better understand her life and her father's influence. Told through the journal entries of Carme and her father, the story spans 40 years and involves many shifts in time and place. There is the Eden of Carme's father's adolescence (a place reminiscent of the Scottish highlands), where young Carme spent her first years with an extended family and her father's lover, Dev. Then there is the poor Latin American country of Lequama, where Carme's father is a confused revolutionary, unsure of how he became a local legend. The California settings are equally fantastic, depicting the exploits of Carme's half-sister Fidela, a child television star, and Edwin Money, an elderly billionaire who engages their father for some mysterious work. Throughout, Carme must wrestle with an unsettling question: is her father fully human or some species of otherworldly being? With this wealth of creativity and tales spun within tales, it's fortunate that Knox's prose poetic and precise features no indulgent pyrotechnics. And despite the many detailed digressions, the overall themes of family and identity possess an internal logic. This isn't for the unadventurous, but readers eager for total immersion will be delighted by Knox's highly imaginative and entertaining world. (July)Forecast: The understated jacket art a mask on a black background doesn't adequately express the roiling drama within. This is a perfect book for literary readers with a taste for the fantastic, but will require careful handselling.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (July 5, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374114056
• ISBN-13: 978-0374114053
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,230,127 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Episodic Sludge, February 5, 2002

By 

Lee Armstrong (Winterville, NC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Black Oxen: A Novel (Hardcover)

There are some good things about this novel. Specific episodes in the book take off and you find yourself burning 15 pages to find what happened. Some of the characters are interesting and unique. The construction is episodic with story lines cut and pasted like reading a painting from the cubist school. Chunks of the story are cut out and displaced into other parts of the story, creating a disjointed reading experience. This might have been a successful artistic technique if it weren't also weighed down by a huge cast of characters, so large that the publisher had to print a whole listing before you get to the first chapter. To complicate this, some of the characters are known by different names which also change depending on the timeline that is also cut and distributed throughout the story. To comlicate this, characters go from being homosexual to bisexual; so you have to identify who it is, what name they're going by, and whether they like guys or gals at the moment. In short, this book is extremely confusing. Knox needs a new editor; this relationship did not work well. Here are some examples of how the story didn't follow through for me. There is a whole segment on how a girl loves her horse. So, of course, two characters feel it's their mission to find the elusive horse and dismember it. They get naked, hack up the horse, bury it, wash in a stream, one guy tries to seduce the other only to have the other one try to kill himself, then the girl shows up, they get out and a flood comes, the dismembered horse floats by, and the story line is dropped. What's the point? To complicate these matters, there are secret societies whose members are unidentified. At one point, the characters are at a funeral. Rather than being affected by the sorrow in the scene, I was trying to remember who it was that died and what her relationship was to the people at the funeral. At the end, someone tells Carme that she's a mother, but I could never figure out who was speaking. After this book, I felt like I needed a study group to figure out what went on. Unfortunately, for all its promise, the read is not worth the effort.