A Mystery-Filled Pursuit of a Father

In 2022, a therapist in Marin County takes on a new patient: a beautiful woman in her 40s named Carme Risk, who looks disturbingly like him and has a strange, convoluted tale to tell. She claims to be trying to learn more about her father, who appeared and disappeared throughout her life and who, medical evidence suggests, may not have been quite human.

Risk provides the therapist with various documents, which he will help her sort through as he seeks some answers about her father. She writes a story about her father as an orphaned London street kid who is adopted by Carlin Cadaver, a retired RAF pilot. Whimsically renamed Abra Cadaver, the boy goes fishing in a nearby river and discovers an island that comes and goes in mysterious cycles. It’s where a medieval realm called Eden interfaces with 1970s England, like a shuttle docking with a space station, enabling people to pass back and forth.

Next come journals written by the father in the 1980s in a Latin American country called Lequama, where he is recovering from amnesia in the company of a colorful assortment of revolutionaries, poets, shamans and lovers. Then come Risk’s own accounts of her childhood in Eden and her adolescence in Lequama, where her father is admired for his beauty, intelligence and healing powers but also displays a knack for violence.

New Zealand novelist Elizabeth Knox gives the imaginary Lequama a history that resembles Nicaragua’s: dictatorship, socialist revolution, incursions by U.S.-backed Contras. Risk digs through microfilm libraries to pinpoint her father’s role in all this before the amnesia struck him. He appears to have been an “apparition” known as Ido Idea, credited with neutralizing the power of a “Black Room” in the presidential palace, where the dictatorship tortured political prisoners and experimented with sorcery.

Two more mysteries: Risk’s revolutionary friends can’t understand why she married the killer who ran the Black Room, now a casino mogul. And Risk wants to know why her father disappeared in Washington, D.C., in 1995 after attending a literary conference sponsored by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, meeting a U.S. intelligence officer once held captive in Lequama and encountering what may have been fellow nonhumans in the trench of the Vietnam Memorial.

It’s a lot to pack into one novel, especially a novel that’s told backward. We can’t understand much of the behavior of Knox’s characters without reference to events that we either learn about only at the end or must piece together from fragmentary clues.

While we’re waiting for enlightenment, long stretches of “Black Oxen” feel arbitrary. Does the story, we wonder, need these particular people, these aspects of fantasy, to tell itself, or could others do as well? The Eden sections, in particular, never come alive, though Lequama certainly does--both the landscape and its passionate, quarreling inhabitants.

At her best, Knox is a splendidly physical writer. Whether describing a battle, a party, a flood, a family meal or a sexual encounter, she delivers both impact and nuance. She’s good, too, with the tangle of human relationships. When dealing with the world we know, she’s witty and insightful: “The (Contra) war fizzled out ... around the same time that it became impossible to sell the protection of U.S. financial interests by military means as ‘the struggle to prevent the spread of communism.”’

So what does Knox gain by relying so much on mumbo-jumbo, grafting fantasy worlds onto the real one? It’s where her interests lie, as we know from her last novel, “The Vintner’s Luck,” in which a 19th century French rationalist succeeds in his rational pursuits with the aid of an angel.

In “Black Oxen,” it lets her create mysteries and spring a surprise in the last chapter. But we can’t help wishing that she’d told the story less trickily and trusted more in the realism she does so well.