Review: Mortal Fire

Okay, listen up people because I have one heck of a recommendation for you.

As I’ve already prattled on about extensively, I attended the Christchurch Writer’s Festival last weekend, and (among plenty of other authors) attended two seminars featuring New Zealand writer Elizabeth Knox.

Since the tickets were booked well in advance, I had the opportunity to rectify the fact that I’d never actually read any of Knox’s books. I knew that her Dreamhunter duology (comprised of Dreamhunter and Dreamquake) had been showered with accolades, and was surprised to realize that she was the author of The Vintner’s Luck (adapted into a film a few years ago), but I eventually settled on her most recent novel Mortal Fire, assuming that would be the one she’d most want to discuss.

It turns out that it’s set in the same continuity as the Dreamhunter duology, and that those previous books establish some of the historical backdrop that plays a part in Mortal Fire. Otherwise, the setting is a world so similar to our own that only a few name changes and the presence of hidden magic differentiates the two (and for the record, I had no problems reading them out-of-order).

The story is set in 1950s Southland, a large island republic in the South Pacific, and our protagonist is Canny Mochrie, a sixteen year old math genius who is forced to accompany her stepbrother Sholto and his girlfriend Susan on a research project to the town of Massenfer. Sholto has been instructed by his father (a writer and professor) to collect testimonies from witnesses concerning a somewhat strange mining accident that took place there thirty years earlier.

Canny has to go because her mother Sisema is returning to her home of the Shackle Islands where she’s to receive a medal for her actions during WWII (she paddled a canoe carrying two wounded soldiers from the Islands to Southland, saving their lives from Japanese occupiers), though she’s reluctant to accompany her stepbrother as it means leaving her best friend Marli in hospital, slowly succumbing to polio.

But once she reaches Zarene Valley, other things begin to monopolize her attention. Not least is the strange Zarene family, which seems to be composed of the very old and the very young, with no adults in between. Canny also realizes that what she calls the “Extra”, a type of magic that for most of her life has been only visible to herself, is being used by the Zarenes to keep hikers, wanderers, and other curiosity seekers from venturing too close to a strange house on the hill.

What is inside the house that the Zarenes seem so determined to protect and contain?

Canny makes it her business to find out, and when Knox spoke on the subject at the Writer’s Festival, I was amused to hear her describe Canny as “a female Odysseus” who uses cunning and trickery to achieve her goals. Her name is a clear indicator of the type of person she is: Canny (short for Akanesi, but clearly an allusion to her shrewdness) and Mochrie (which sounds too much like “mockery” to be a coincidence).

She’s certainly not above lying to and manipulating her long-suffering stepbrother Sholto – but it’s important to note that her motive in all of this is pure, for the reason she wants to master magic is so she can use it to heal her friend Marli. Canny is also an incredibly intelligent teenager, and Knox is equally clever enough to show rather than tell us this. A reader has to pay close attention to what Canny thinks, says and does if they want to keep up with her, which makes it all the more satisfying when we realize what she’s been up to the whole time. 

Knox’s grasp of language is glorious. Often it’s not so much the story as how you tell that story which takes a book from good to great, and there were passages throughout Mortal Fire that made me sigh with gleeful envy at how beautifully they conveyed ideas and descriptions, such as:

A silence came into the room and, like a cat, turned in a circle a few times, trampling down all arguments to make itself comfortable before settling.

Or:

When her dark fingers flashed, the bees calmed and time itself seemed to slow till the late afternoon sunlight was as thick, lucent, and golden as honey.

Or:

The path continued beside the river, passing between willows with fronds hanging in the water- drowned leaves, yellowing and furred with algae – and gentle slope covered in young birches and elderflower bushes.

Furthermore, Knox has a wonderful grasp of how to use the supernatural to shape her story and characterization. It’s not just something that informs the world-building, but is an intrinsic part of who these characters are and how they behave. If you’re a fan of Margaret Mahy (especially The Changeover, The Haunting and The Tricksters) you’ll love the way that Knox infuses the strange and wonderful into everyday life, conveying magic with a matter-of-fact tone that does nothing to rob it of its beauty and mystery. By keeping a sense of psychological realism to her characters and their reactions, Knox can meld the supernatural into the plot in a way that feels totally organic.

Also worth mentioning is that the book contains subtle moments of insight into gender and race, such as how Canny is forced to downplay her mathematic skills by pretending to consult with her male companions at math competitions (even though she’s doing all the work), or how her skin tone influences the way other characters respond to her, whether it be the curiosity of children or the vague suspicion of certain adults. Consider this great sentence, slipped almost casually into Canny’s pondering that the magic no longer exclusively belongs to her:

The sadness Canny felt was similar to the feeling she had when her teachers talked about 'our European Heritage,' and she went on for a time, head down, scuffing her feet, and whispering, 'Not mine, not mine’.

In short, Mortal Fire is a fascinating story, beautifully told, with a unique heroine and an engrossing plot. It’s also quite a thick book, so you can be assured of a few days’ worth of reading. Though it takes a couple of chapters to get cracking, I can honestly say that my first impulse on finishing was to flick straight back to the beginning and start it all over again. Do you know how many times that happens? Not very often.

And if you REALLY want to make your reading experience complete, then be sure to read Knox’s short story A Visit to the House on Terminal Hill. It serves not only as a prologue but a wonderful taste of what’s to come. It’s right here.