Maggie Rainey-Smith looks at a first novel by an already accomplished writer

Steeplechase

By Krissy Kneen

Text Publishing, 2013

RRP NZ$37.00

This is a first novel by an already accomplished writer.  She was short-listed for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award in 2010 for her sexual memoir “Affection”.   Interestingly, she is best known as a writer of literary erotica.    The cover of this novel features a horse engulfed in flames.   I have to say that had I been cruising a bookshop and seen the cover, read the title and noted the author was best known for erotica, I suspect I wouldn’t have bothered with it.    But that would have been my loss, because Krissy Kneen is an astonishingly good writer.  

                “Steeplechase” is a beautifully sensual novel.   The writing is superb and I was captured from the start.   The prose is spare and yet also luxurious.    It is the story of two sisters, Bec and Emily Reich both of them artists. The sisters have been separated for twenty years.  Bec lives in Brisbane and is recovering from surgery when she gets a phone call from Emily who is living in Beijing.   Emily is a world famous artist and a schizophrenic. Bec is an art teacher having an affair with one of her much younger students and she’s recently held her own successful art exhibition.  The sisters share a dark, sensual, and disturbing past, tinged with madness.  I was at times confused, uncertain but never bored. 

                Part one of the novel develops the narrative around Bec Reich and her inappropriate love affair with her student, interspersed with flashbacks to the childhood of Bec and Emily, the strange power Emily exerts over her sister, their unusual childhood.   It is beautifully paced and an absolute page-turner.   Part Two actually begins two thirds of the way through the book and the pace and tone changes becoming more sinister and surreal.  Near the end of the novel, I wasn’t even certain there were two sisters, so surreal and extraordinary is the narrative, the theme of folie a deux.    

                When Bec travels to Beijing to meet up with her sister Emily after having not seen her for many years, the author juxtaposes their fraught reunion with keen observations of Beijing, the hutong in which Emily lives, the contrasts between life in Brisbane, the disconnection a traveller feels after hours on a long flight and the immersion in a totally different culture.  This is Bec, on seeing her sister for the first time after twenty years…

                “I am shocked to see her this way, blown out and hidden under her own flesh, and this meeting is so many things: a death, a revelation, a gift that shrugs off its festive wrapping only to disappoint. This moment is also a mirror and I am reflected: I am this size, this weight.  I am this same embodiment of jetlagged exhaustion.  In her eyes I find my own loneliness and insecurities.”

Add to this the background of mental illness, and you have a sinister canvas, suspense, sensuality, confusion and to boot a quite horrifying denouement.   Kneen doesn’t hold back when it comes to detail, she doesn’t spare the reader, she writes as if painting a scene, bold carnal brushstrokes. 

                How often do we laugh at the bad sex awards when they come out – amazed that some of the very best writers can write so badly?    Let me tell you, that Krissy Kneen could be nominated for the best sex award and yet that would be to diminish her talent to speak so glibly.     She seems fearless as a writer but that’s because she has command of her prose, control of her story.  The love story between the art teacher and her student is beautifully observed.   I will confess that I wanted the story to be less disturbing and that I was happy with Bec in Brisbane and her unsuitable lover and just hints of the strange Emily.   Part two was more confronting and confusing and for a while I felt disconnected – Beijing took over for a moment as a character, distancing me from the narrative, and like Bec, I was for a time, lost.

                I recommend this book, but also with a warning about the sometimes graphic nature of some of the prose.   I waxed lyrical about ‘The Slap’ one of my favourite novels a year or so ago and some people took me to task because of the ‘sex’.   I hardly noticed it, so absorbed was I in the characters.   Whereas, with this novel, sensuality and the carnal is at the heart of the story, so if you’re not up for it, then fair enough – but you will be missing a very interesting read.

Footnote:

Maggie Rainey-Smith (right) is a Wellington writer and regular reviewer on Beattie's Book Blog. She is also Chair of the Wellington branch of the NZ Society of Authors.    

www.maggieraineysmith.com