Angela Radford reports that Mortal
Fire was launched last night by Kirsten McDougall and her lovely speech.is below
It
was a fabulous launch, very well attended, very well-organised in Unity's usual
stylish way, lots of book sales and signing and there were quite a whos-who,
with Fergus Barrowman of course, Lloyd Jones, Emily Perkins, Barbara and Chris Else, Kate
de Goldi.
Elizabeth is impressive, she spoke generously, warmly and did a
wonderful reading to finish it off.
"Mortal Fire takes its title from a
phrase in William Blake’s ‘Song’, two stanzas of which form the epigraph for
this uncanny new novel by Elizabeth Knox. It seems to me that Blake is the
perfect literary spirit to invoke – an inventor of mythologies, a poet whose
work dealt in the visionary and grappled with the idea of the soul, which is
perhaps an old fashioned way of figuring out how we might weave our sense of an
immaterial world into the fabric of our daily, grinding lives. Elizabeth Knox’s
books brim over with a sense of the immaterial, of worlds and things beyond
that which we can touch. It is also true that her books contain living
breathing characters that keep us firmly rooted in their worlds, characters
that call out to us to keep up with their smart, fast-turning stories. Elizabeth
is a writer concerned with the mythologies we make about our origins and
ourselves; she is a writer who dares to create her own.
Mortal Fire is a book full of the
elemental – of bees and golden honey, of apples and rain, wax and fire and, of
magic, which is embedded deep within the fictional republic of Southland. The
book is a return to Southland, a country that the readers of the Dreamhunter novels know well. Southland
is a place where Elizabeth Knox’s mythologies – those that her and her sister
Sara have been working on together since they were young – take shape and are
borne out on the page. With the addition of Mortal
Fire to the mythologies of Southland, Elizabeth shows us that there is
space for a great many stories within its boundaries.
The action takes
place in the enchanted rural idyll of the Zarene Valley, home of three strange
Zarene elders and a horde of young children who have rhyming names and tattoos
on the inside of their forearms. The people in the nearby town are wary of the
Zarenes and the Zarenes are wary of visitors. When our heroine Canny, her
brother Sholto and his girlfriend Susan arrive, they are questioned about their
lineage and reluctantly allowed to stay on as guests. Thus unravels the
terrible secret the Zarenes have been hiding for years.
Mortal Fire’s heroine, Canny, is a
practical and determined person, a sixteen year old girl whose thick black hair
splays out like smoke when she’s thinking hard, a mathematical genius who is
‘always surprised at the many more steps it takes other people to do things
just because they didn’t think it through first’. Because of her genius with
numbers, because she has spent her sixteen years living in the shadow of her fierce
mother’s heroic deeds, because of her brown skin and the uncertainty of who her
father is, Canny is an outsider who is told she must try harder to fit in. But
Canny cannot ‘fit in’. It is not simply a matter of her Pacifica heritage; she
senses something that other people don’t – the Uncanny butting up against the
material world. She is a character who holds our attention right from the start.
It is the smart, frustrating, funny, quick-witted Canny who holds our hand as
we turn the page, shouts Keep Up! as she figures out how the magic of the
Zarene Valley works, and what indeed that magic is.
There is at the
heart of this book a big idea, a concept that is complex and formed in 3D. I
imagined Elizabeth taking the idea of magic, suspending it in her mind and
examining it from every angle – does it
work if this happens, or if I make the characters do that? In Mortal Fire magic is not a borrowed
idea, something that witches and wizards wave a wand at and command, but
something wholly formed from what I think of as an ‘Elizabeth’ point of view –
a complex, detailed, knotty, and intensely satisfying idea that somehow feels of
the earth, so that you might almost believe it is real, an idea that keeps you trying
to unravel it alongside Canny until the novel’s final page. Like breadcrumbs to
the hungry, those readers who venture alongside Canny into the forest of the
Zarene Valley and up into the hidden house on Terminal Hill are fed pieces of a
grand puzzle to put together.
Mortal Fire is a book about families – the
Zarenes are a family being slowly ruined by their own power and by their
inability to forgive; Canny’s family constantly miscommunicate with each other,
misunderstand each other and sometimes, actively mislead each other. The book
treads some complex moral ground – how long should we make the guilty pay for
their ill deeds, how do we forgive those that kill?
So there’s magic
and morality, but it is also a love story. Plain and simple and satisfying on
one level in the way we like a love story to be, love is also the glue that binds
the elemental, the immaterial magic to the real people and objects of Mortal Fire’s world, it is the true
magic of this story. It is, in Blake’s words, ‘more than mortal fire’, and
while love might not be able to save everyone in the book it makes it possible for
some to carry on living.
I’m very excited
to launch Elizabeth’s latest fiction and I’d like to congratulate her on making
another fine addition to her body of work, and to the Southland mythologies.
I’d also like to mention and thank Gecko Press for daring to take on their
first young adult book. It’s an exciting book, an immersive reading experience,
and I’m launching Mortal Fire certain
that it will find a hungry readership among both teenagers and adults, among
people who love magic and a damn fine yarn."
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