BILLIE’S KISS

New Zealander Knox, an energetic magical-realist with a vibrant comic imagination, scores strongly again with this densely plotted tale of a waiflike shipwreck survivor’s bizarre life and loves.

In 1903, the Gustav Edda, en route to the twin Scottish islands of Kissack and Skilling, unaccountably “explodes” upon reaching port, killing most of its crew and passengers. An exception is 20-year-old Wilhelmina “Billie” Paxton, who had jumped into the water seconds before the catastrophe. The reader knows why, but fellow survivor Murdo Hesketh does not—and he soon undertakes to discover why Billie had committed “sabotage.” The progress of this central plot strand is interrupted, and complicated, by the parallel “investigation” performed by a butler named (Geordie) Betler, who travels to the islands’ primary settlement, Stolsnay, to learn about the disaster that had claimed the life of his younger brother. As Knox subtly reveals the connections among Billie’s inchoate maturity (she’s mildly retarded: a kind of Dostoevskyan “innocent”), savant-like musical gift, and constantly changing relationship with the driven Murdo, she also layers in increasingly crucial information about the ambitious plans contrived by Murdo’s wealthy cousin Lord Hallowhulme (the de facto “lord” of this kingdom), a murder buried in Stolsnay’s past, Sir Francis Galton’s theory of eugenics and the minutiae of “pisciculture,” and the plays of George Bernard Shaw and Shakespeare. This arguably overcrowded melodrama (which echoes the replete symbolic novels of both Patrick White and John Cowper Powys) alternately frustrates and fascinates, but Knox somehow pulls most of its unruly parts together, rewarding the bedazzled reader with a stunning climactic confrontation between Murdo and the Prospero-like Lord Hallowhulme, and a deus ex machina topper that the late Richard Condon might have concocted.

Knox’s wild and wooly fictions (Black Oxen, 2001, etc.) aren’t for everybody, but if minimalism doesn’t satisfy your appetite for narrative, she may just be the writer for you.