Kings Speech

Kings of This World Launch Speech

by Damien Wilkins

Yes, we’re here with a new Elizabeth Knox novel! Definitely time to celebrate. Kings of this World – we’re triumphantly back in Elizabeth’s imagined Southland, that place both ordinary and enchanted, a place of special powers and a story which asks all the great moral questions which arrive with magic. How to use it? How to live with it? How to cheat at school sports with it? How to think of others when we have the means to move against their interests? Maybe that last one—the question of others—is the burning one since above all this is a high school story which lives in the tumbling flow of teenage friendship, the torment of shifting allegiances and the difficult blink-and-you-miss-it blossoming of young love. What more could a middle-aged reader want? Well, Elizabeth’s YA has always trended older, smarter, sneakier than normal genre expectations might dictate.

Of course because we’re in Knoxville, the coordinates of ‘normal’ are utterly and beautifully scrambled. At this high school, many of the pupils have versions of what’s known as P. Not drugs. No one needs illicit substances in this world. People get high on themselves or rather they can thank the High Concept their creator gives them in Kings of This World and it’s a doozy: the P characters can bend other people’s wills to their design, stop them in their tracks, make them lie down, walk away and worse. These pupils are said to be able to Push with their minds. If Jane Austen hadn’t got there first, maybe Elizabeth might have been tempted to call this novel Persuasion.

There are variations on pushing too; one of the characters has this thing called Phantasmagoric P – the ability to make their reality overpower everyone else’s reality—which sounds a bit like what a good novel might do to us; and other characters have the special power to block this force. It turns out that all of this blocking and persuading is a rather glorious way to give material form to the abstraction of ‘growing up’.

And, again, because this is Elizabeth at work, the young people’s world is not caught in isolation. Beyond the school world, politics is happening too. These kids have parents who have political roles in Southland. Soon their young lives are crunched by the larger realms of power and money and injustice.

In the sort of narrative lurch which is one of Elizabeth’s signature moves, the core cast of friends is suddenly, shockingly kidnapped. (That’s on the back of the book so it’s not a spoiler.) Still it arrives with a real thump. The high school is called Bold but it’s a good descriptor of the entire novel.

Now readers will find their own fascinations within this audacious book but a central one for me is the feeling of being caught inside a series of arguments. Is there a more ‘argumentative’ novelist alive than Elizabeth? Arguing with herself, arguing with perceived wisdom, the status quo, with authority. If I think of a Knox novel as a room, it’s the debating chamber I picture. It’s a world of opinions. It’s figures insisting on being heard, even if—especially if—the wider world wants their voices turned down or off.

Yes, Elizabeth loves adventure and big stakes action and cliff-hangers—there’s literally a cliff in this novel and a character who indeed hangs on to its edge! Her plots are cauldrons of cause and effect. But nothing goes into the cauldron without deep inspection and hard reflection. I wonder if this is connected with the fact that this novel has its distant origins in the imaginary game Elizabeth has played with her sister Sara for decades since that storytelling proceeds not from the fiat of a written sentence but the negotiation of speech, conversation and—yes—argument. Anyway, cause and effect, in a Knox novel, is never a set of dominoes falling easily. Her characters must lift each domino up to the light of their powerful intelligences and then it goes back into the sequence. In Kings of This World, everything feels like it happens at least twice. Once in real time, in the heart-in-mouth way Elizabeth has made her own over many books for adults and their younger selves, and then in the intense playback her characters insist on. Because this is not just the what of story but the why of human behaviour. Here Elizabeth is the happy love-child of George Eliot and Stephen King. She’s always tapping into fantasy’s generous sense of possibility, its constant alertness to alternatives. If not that, what about this?

It’s always seemed funny to me that there’s this thing in fantasy and speculative fiction called world-building, which seems very orderly—you build from the ground up, you establish solidity through detailing—and yet for me there’s always been this improvised quality in Elizabeth’s fiction, which gives it its strange liveliness. A kind of wildness. As if we’re listening in as the whole thing is being made up. Spontaneity then.

Kings of this World also gives us another in the great line of three-lettered heroes – Lex in the autobiographical novels, Xas of course most famously, and now Vex. It’s a brilliant invention that name—so close to Hex, but also carrying the verb to ‘vex’ within it. She has a vexing past, this damaged Vex—the sole survivor of the mass death of her father’s cult—and a vexacious mind. Here she is when she finds out her new friend Ari is a skilled gymnast and ‘is interested in a lot of other things’. ‘Vex thought being interested in a lot of things was one of the few virtues she counted as virtuous.’

Ha – I love the 19th century in that sentence. That aphoristic charge circulates thoughout this witty book. There are a lot of P jokes, a sort of cleansing silliness that can sit alongside the earnestness. And the action is earnest . . . it’s literally life and death for Vex and her friends—not once but twice in the action of the plot, they face their ends, they’re lost, doomed—and you’ll have to buy the book to find out their fates . . . just to say that it’s also psychological peril (the P squared which is this writer’s other home) which they face. And it’s such a treat to see how the writing reinstates the traumatised characters’ appetite for noticing and advancing and finding each other and to see how it’s through their little jokes, puns, teases, flirtations, arguments that they connect and reconnect, bringing themselves and us close again. A hymn to friendship then.

I want to finally just point you to one part of the book. It’s when Vex, here called by her proper name Victoria, is thinking back to her time as a young girl in the Crucible, her father’s cult, and how the games the children played began to shift from forts and chasing to games with stories. Suddenly things are different, better. For Victoria/Vex, the novel says ‘those games were the first things from which she couldn’t be swayed.’ She starts to live only for the games. Here’s Elizabeth’s amazing and packed sentences about what it means and how it works:

‘Victoria’s exultant setting-aside of even her made-up self was the best thing about the game. She went so far out of herself that she’d come back to the Crux and her lessons and her everyday life changed—a peaceful, purged, heroic self—someone she wanted to be forever.’

Vex loves the game more than anyone else loves it. She thinks of the power of being inside story as self-hypnosis and self-creating. The most vital changed version of herself emerges. That game returns late in the novel—and I won’t spoil things by going further—but it does seem to me that one of the novel’s most involving arguments is about the riskiness of that kind of self-hypnosis—why are all the stories about YOU, asks Vex’s doubting, unhypnotised classmate. Storytelling is P after all—it’s persuasion and pushing. It’s sometimes good to resist it, right?

And, coming back to what I said right at the beginning . . . you won’t remember because it was a long time ago . . . where are the others in our stories? How can I move from ‘me’ to ‘we’?

Kings of this World with brilliance and boldness stages a drama strong enough in its action and its thrills to bewitch us—‘yes, I believe all this, I feel its pulse’. But it has another level. Because the novel is also rich enough in its thinking to make us study that bewitching for its missteps, its overreach and its secret agenda. I think that’s what these young people are doing. How do we distinguish the good story, the good for us story, from a dodgy bit of P? How do we let others in to our own stories and remain peaceful, purged and heroic? How do we tell a new story about ourselves? Elizabeth’s fiction has always put in play enormous imaginative sweep and a deep questioning spirit. The dopamine of P for plot and then another buzz from a different P again, let’s call it Philosophy. It’s all here so marvellously in Kings of this World.

Now infected, pushed at by this questioning book, as good students in this school called Bold, we readers, emboldened, we should study the names and see how the name Elizabeth chimes against the name Vex until we end up with . . . Elizavex Knox! Yes, we live in vexing times; now here’s our hexing hero!