Books
Book of revelations
by Jolisa Gracewood
Don’t dream, it’s over: Elizabeth Knox brings her Mansfield-meets-Mahy fantasy to an astonishing conclusion in Dreamquake.
In Dreamquake, Elizabeth Knox concludes an audaciously imagined and ingeniously constructed tale that transplants old-world myths into new-world soil to stunning effect. You must read (or re-read) the first book, Dreamhunter, before launching into this sequel. Buried intimations from the earlier instalment bear astonishing fruit, as the land is quite literally shaken by storytelling. Reader, the earth moved.
To recap: the world of the novels is something like the New Zealand of a century ago, but with a twist, in that social life revolves around a traffic in dreams. The “dreamhunters” are gifted individuals who harvest dreams – visions that seduce, amuse, relax or threaten – for commercial broadcast to eager audiences in glamorous theatres, and curative performances in hospitals and prisons. Think early cinema, through a glass darkly.
At the heart of the Mansfield-meets-Mahy story is Laura Hame, a young dreamhunter just coming into full possession of her gifts. Dreamquake begins with the gruesome aftermath of a misguided act of psychological terrorism, orchestrated by Laura in the hope of alerting the public to the plight of the indentured labourers she has glimpsed at the edges of dreams. As bloodied and traumatised patrons stagger from the Rainbow Opera House, the dream industry is suddenly under threat.
Laura’s friends and relatives struggle to understand her violent act. Meanwhile, a powerful civil servant is plotting to stupefy the country with an opium-like dream, several dreamhunters have disappeared, and disturbing voices seem to emanate from the Place, the mysterious region where dreams are mined. Who (or what) is urging what (or whom) to “Rise up and crush them all”? As the narrative threads are steadily drawn together, past, present, and future converge upon a powerful secret that is more all-encompassing, and more intensely personal, than any government conspiracy or prisoner uprising.
Despite the period setting, the characters are vividly modern, especially the spunky young leads; refreshingly, they are taken seriously by the adults in their lives and given free rein to exercise their gifts and their preferences. Knox has a firm grip on a young adult perspective as Laura juggles two very different suitors, navigates a shifting relationship with her close cousin Rose and wrestles with her destiny. The personalities of the older characters are less differentiated, although in a crafty act of tribute a bumptious Dr Michael King has a stage presence out of proportion to his minor role in the story. And it is not giving too much away to say that Nown, the patient golem from the first book, has an even more vital role in this volume.
Knox’s uncanny talent for literalising metaphor and for metaphorising the real world is on full display here: feet of clay, hearts of stone and glass, singing hills, roads and rails to nowhere, burning passions, and everywhere, true grit. Stylistically, Knox favours the plainest verbs in the toolbox and is not much given to scene-setting, but nonetheless constructs a world that is alluring and convincing. We traverse sand, sea and bush; we dwell in mansions and cottages, and visit a camera obscura atop a temple. The Place itself has a haunting specificity: no fertile valley, but a nightmarish and harrowed black-and-white landscape. Its ominous, whispering aridity is effectively counterbalanced by a terrifying urban conflagration later in the book. Who will pounce on the film rights for this cinematic goldmine?
Above all, though, the plotting is staggeringly good. More than once I had to put down the book so I could absorb how thoroughly the latest twist transformed everything that had gone before. Knox not only generates a riveting mystery and a forcefully original myth of place, but raises some challenging questions about power and freedom, artistic licence, the role of the storyteller, and the way that both history and the future are constructed around dreams and fantasies of one sort or another.
On that note, attentive readers may find it intriguing (or disquieting) that, although the people of this parallel Aotearoa are industrious European settlers of only a few generations’ tenure, there is no category for indigeneity in Knox’s “Southland.” But perhaps this allows for a subversive piece of Pakeha myth-making, one that invites us to think anew about the claims that our hearts make on the land and vice versa.
This is a book of revelations, more intelligent and deserving of a far wider readership than its cheesy teen-fantasy-chick-lit cover would suggest (oh, for an image from Colin McCahon, Shane Cotton, Seraphine Pick, anything that better captured the mix of prophecy, darkness and illumination within). “I love being borne up by my big audiences – everyone breathing together, breathing in time with my breathing …” That’s master dreamhunter Grace Tiebold speaking, but it might as well be Knox herself, evoking the community of readers who will sink into this book as into a marvellous reverie and awaken with a magical new sense of Place.
DREAMQUAKE, by Elizabeth Knox (Fourth Estate, $28)
