https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3834524.html

What's it about? Our protagonist, another moody young woman, has started therapy, in the year 2022, to process the peculiarities of her childhood and young adulthood; she seems to have moved between parallel worlds, her father has a strange relationship with reality, and her late husband was a notorious torturer in a fictional South American country where ancient magics are sill practiced.

Is 2022 really going to be like that? Therapy will certainly exist in 2022. Most of the books is set before that, and the specifics of magic as part of a structure of governance have probably not been realised anywhere. (But what do we know?)

Is it any good? I found it frankly difficult to follow, but I see from elsewhere online that it has its diehard fans. ( )

Inventive & has good writing - but somehow the finished product doesn't live up to expectations.
Read Jun 2004 ( )

http://tamaranth.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/201520-black-oxen-elizabeth-knox.html
https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2019/09/2019109-black-oxen-elizabeth-knox.html ( )

In the mid-70s, former RAF pilot Carlin Cadaver adopts a 15-year-old boy he catches trying to burgle his house. In the mid 1980s, a man finds himself standing in a cathedral in the South American republic of Lequama with no memory of how he came there, and is recognised as ‘Ido Idea’, an apparition that had materialised in the former regime’s torture chamber and rescued one of the country’s revolutionary leaders. Later, Ido regains his memory, returns home to collect his young daughter, and settles down to life in the new republic. And, finally, in 2022, that daughter, now the widow of the old regime’s head torturer, enters ‘narrative therapy’ in the hope of tracking down her vanished father, and the three stories finally knit themselves together.

A bold shot at Latin American magical realism by a New Zealand author, this can be a little hit or miss, and is often gory, but is always enthralling. There is a land named Eden that doesn’t quite exist in our own world; Lequama is a country where magic of all kinds flourishes; blood flows, hearts are eaten, no fewer than three characters change their sexual orientation along the way, and we end with a twist - and many questions unaswered. A fascinating book.

A side note: it's highly unlikely that a British child would be nicknamed 'Freddo' because of his addiction to Freddo Frogs! ( )

This book was all twists and turns, and at so many points I didn't know where I was in the story, what was going on, or what the characters were up to. And yet, it was enjoyable. Knox's writing itself has little jewels throughout her very complicated novel, and those small sparks were good surprises that kept me reading. For example, "Strings of light were twined about every projection in the stonework so that the cathedral bristled with light" (297). Combined with an intriguing plot and large cast of characters, it meant that I did not have the complaint that i often have with contemporary writing, that it is all style with little new to say. ( )