In the intervening 20 years, local reader expectations have relaxed, and the generic conventions of magic realism and fantasy in local writing have become, if not common, then not uncommon, not least thanks to Knox’s successive works of adult and young-adult fiction. Yet The Vintner’s Luck, reissued by Victoria University Press, still stuns with the manner in which it confidently and casually sets out a narrative which, inventively collapses heaven and earth, human time and earthly time.
One of the characters was an angel, for heaven’s sake. A novel, authored by a New Zealander, not set in New Zealand? Wasn’t there a rule against such fancifulness? Wasn’t it a category error of an inexplicable kind? What did Knox think she was doing? And, second, counter to the often grim realism which had been the local literary voice since the 1930s, Knox’s novel contained elements of things that were not, could not, be real. First, it was set in nineteenth-century France.
When Elizabeth Knox’s The Vintner’s Luck was first published in 1998, it was seen as having two outstanding features. Jane Stafford is wowed by the latest novel by Elizabeth Knox - and a reissue of her classic novel, The Vintner's Luck. ReadingRoom Books of the Week: Elizabeth Knox, fantastically
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