A Wild Setting Where Grief and Anger Lead to Love

BILLIE’S KISS

A Novel

By Elizabeth Knox

Ballantine

336 pages; $24

When the Gustav Edda explodes moments after it pulls into port on a remote Scottish island, Billie Paxton loses her last remaining blood relative, her beloved sister Edith.

Bright, but illiterate, Billie must face the world on her own, beginning with the demanding task of helping her brother-in-law cope with the loss of his wife, who was about to deliver their first child.

And so begins Elizabeth Knox’s broodingly atmospheric romance, “Billie’s Kiss,” set in 1903, mostly on the divided Scottish island of Kissack and Skilling. Knox ushers in the 20th century with a literal and figurative boom, as the novel introduces many of the explosive controversies that would come to characterize the century. Eugenics and the advance of technology with its monstrous possibilities figure prominently in “Billie’s Kiss,” yet the tale never buckles under the weight of its ideas.

Knox’s descriptions bring the story into vivid display, beginning with the Gustav Edda’s explosion as witnessed by Billie, seconds after she had left the ship:

“Through the steam Billie glimpsed an impossibility--the ship drifting backwards from the wharf propelled by the water boiling in its stack. She saw a mooring line snap at the pier and recoil to flick a figure off the perpendicular starboard deck. The port deck was underwater, the ship rolling over at its berth, water boiling around it and flooded with jets of fire. There were people in the sea. And there were people hoisting themselves over the starboard rail and onto the gleaming side of the ship.”

Murdo Hesketh, one of the few survivors with Billie and her brother-in-law Henry, had observed Billie fleeing the ship and was convinced the young woman was somehow involved in its explosion. A fiery and fiercely determined man, Hesketh begins his own investigation once the trio reaches their final destination, the island’s Kiss Castle, the residence of Hesketh’s cousin, Lord Hallow- hulme.

Hesketh presses on with the investigation, alienating Billie. The notion that she could have forced her own sister’s death seems sheer madness to Billie.

Knox does an especially fine job of depicting the tension between Billie and Hesketh, building a push-and-pull magnetism in convincing detail. Despite her inability to read (Billie suffers from dyslexia, a recognized though unnamed disorder at the time), the young woman stands up for herself with spirited force. Billie reveals herself as a complex character, insecure and proud, fragile and possessed of deep reserves of strength.

Knox’s depiction of her wild intuitiveness calls to mind the character of Catherine in Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights,” and Hesketh resembles something of a mature and bolder version of Heathcliff. Their relationship sets off an intensifying flurry of sparks.

While suspicion and fury dominate their initial rapport, the prickles ultimately soften. When Hesketh finds his life endangered on the brambly heath of the island, Billie arrives and helps the man she has considered her enemy. The mutual hostility between the characters fades as, bit by bit, they reveal their sorrows and passions to one another:

“His pity was like a light passing through her, their atoms intermingled.

“He had all these griefs, it turned out; he wasn’t only strong and striking but a man of substance, solid with suffering ... Murdo Hesketh was as sad as she was. Since Edith’s death Billie had been shown goodwill and sympathy, but this was a sadness that sang along to hers, another soul with perfect pitch.” Knox’s narrative style draws much from the 19th century romance, with its lush writing and darkly wild settings. Yet Knox brings her own slant to the genre, allowing some of her characters to find solid placement in their frighteningly changing world. But romance isn’t Knox’s only concern.

When the novel resolves the mystery of the Gustav Edda’s explosion, readers are bound to feel the effects of its prophetic chill, as we are shown technology’s horrors close-up. Knox show us the budding inventions that would soon be used in the modern world to achieve mass destruction, like the “earthmoving machines” that “paved the way for tanks,” which would eventually leave “men trapped and crushed in their trenches.” Perhaps even more chilling are the devices that would permit men to cause destruction at a chosen future time and from great distance.

Physical and emotional removal, a loss of intimacy’s mercies, these are the most profoundly tragic losses that have engaged Knox’s imagination in “Billie’s Kiss.” Her portrait of a world bound for modernity, and utterly heedless of the implications of its plunge seems all too convincing.