Meeting Elizabeth Knox

Author Elizabeth Knox. Photo / Richard Robinson

Someone said, before I went to see her, "how old is Elizabeth Knox?" "Oh," I said, airily, "about 40".

I met a tiny woman with longish, curly, grey hair. I thought: "Grey! At her age."

We went to a little bar that serves high tea and shared cucumber sandwiches and scones and what I called an old-bag moment: a moan about how loud the music was. "It's only for them," she said, meaning those young people, the staff. We both cackled away, like crones. She said, "I'm being all reactionary." She is allowed to be reactionary, at 50.

I think I know why I thought she was younger. She writes fantasy: a kind of play which evokes youthfulness. And she is a playful person. She invites fanciful notions. I remember a Jane Ussher portrait taken years ago, of the author as a sort of pre-Raphaelite angel, with ringlets and a little girlish dress. She, obviously, remembers that image too.

"I got so told off by other people out there and I just thought I was being a good sport. A serious Dunedin critic said, 'how could she not have taken herself seriously?' And, 'what signals to give about being a serious author'. Whatever a serious author is."

She said, "I'm kind of letting it sink in that I'm 50. I say, 'Oh, I haven't got time for this nonsense. I'm 50 now, you know'." She does a very good impersonation of a brisk, no-nonsense 50-year-old lady.

Anyway, she looks lovely with her longish, curly grey hair and her young face, which is a very nice sort of face. We had a literary sort of chat, about her hair. "After I hurt my back, [rushing to pick up a child about to step on broken glass] it started going grey a little bit so I dyed it for about two years ... brown again. And then I had some streaks because, you know, everyone had streaks at some point and then I thought, damn it! I'm going to cut it all off and it was grey then."

She says, later, that after a while of being photographed, she starts worrying a bit about what she looks like. I don't think she does, really. She spends most of her time in her pyjamas. A question of tremendous literary importance: Does she have flash pyjamas? "Not fancy ones. Isn't it terrible? And then the terrible rug-like dressing gown made of the artificial stuff, so that when the cat sits on you and you suddenly have contact with a wet living nose, you both get an electric shock. It's like when you kiss someone on an escalator."

I said I had never kissed anyone on an escalator. "You should try it some time because it's very, very electrifying!"

We were supposed to be talking about her new book, The Angel's Cut, the sequel to her award-winning, money-spinning book The Vintner's Luck. (The Niki Caro film adaptation with Keisha Castle-Hughes and Gaspard Ulliel is released later this year.)

The Angel's Cut is again about the gay angel, Xas, who has had his wings cut off. He turns up in Los Angeles, in 1929, to work as a pilot, and becomes involved in Hollywood and with a bloke based on Howard Hughes. Knox has wanted to write a sequel for years but got "stage fright", as you might at the idea of writing a sequel to such a successful novel.

She had a mild moan, in her book of personal essays, The Love School, about how a journalist once spent days with her and kept asking how much money she'd made from the book. Then, when she finally provided an answer, made that answer the introduction: "As if I'd boastfully blurted out the answer on first opening the door to her!"

Still, it must have made her oodles of money? "Yeah it did, didn't it!"

When I asked how much she got paid for the rights to the book she smiled primly through tightly pursed lips. She can play at prim as well as she can at brisk old ladies.

But so can I.

I said: "Rough, gay, angel sex! Thanks for that. Why is the angel, Xas, gay?"

Elizabeth: "That's not really a question, is it?"

Me: "He's an angel."

Elizabeth: "But if angels represent what human beings could be like, wouldn't some of them be gay? Also, isn't it suggested by Lucifer - and who knows whether he's telling the truth or not? - that Xas is actually the only angel who has any genitals."

Me: "Does he? I skimmed through the angel sex scenes, being far too prudish to read them."

Elizabeth: "If you write about disease and death, and I do, why can't I write about sex? And actually, there's not a lot of it."

Me: "No, but it's fairly memorable. An image that's hard to get rid of."

Elizabeth: "Oh, it's not that bad. You don't have to identify."

Me: "Yes, well, it does rather stick in the mind. So, thanks very much."

Elizabeth: "You're welcome, I'm sure."

This was a strange conversation to be having over high tea, but she does write unusual books. That is one way of saying that many people say she writes difficult books.

I was thinking of one book in particular, Black Oxen, which is like a very long, complex puzzle. "It was fiendishly difficult," she says. "It was throw-out-the-window difficult," I say.

She seemed to take that as a compliment. "Ha! But look, it has these people who love it." Her mad cult following?

She didn't mind that either. "Yeah, the Black Oxen maniacs and I love those people. I always say, 'well, it's actually the one I really love, so you're like me. So if I say they're mad, I'm saying I'm mad ... and I wrote it. Damn it!"

She has a strange readership: the nuns who would line up at signings of The Vintner's Luck to tell her the book had renewed their faith. She is an atheist; there is gay angel sex in her book. What does she think about this? "Well, apart from being able to report what was said, it's very, very hard for me to know."

She had an unusual childhood - the oddest bit of which might be that she and her two sisters spent years and years playing something called The Game, in which imaginary, fantastic worlds were built and inhabited by thousands of characters. Her father drank. He was "like a whirlwind and painful".

So I wondered whether The Game might have been a sort of retreat.

"Yes. And no. It was really fun. But it was also a safe [place]. Well, I mean, you got not to be yourself when being yourself was difficult because you were helpless. Dad was drunk, you couldn't leave home yet, school was awful so ..."

I wanted to know whether she had been a strange child. She said: "I think it would have been very difficult for me not to have been a strange child."

Because? "My older sister was very, very unusual and she was the biggest influence on my childhood life."

She has written a lot about her family. "Because they're interesting," she said.

Yes, and also unusual, I say. I'm trying to find out whether she's unusual - or just a very good observer. "Umm. I don't know. Sometimes I just feel I came into a family culture of unusualness ... The only people we experience from the inside are ourselves. How can I know?"

She is better at writing about herself and her family than she is at talking about these things. But, as she points out, talking to people about yourself is an unusual thing to do, required of writers to publicise books.

"You wouldn't normally sit there going on and on about yourself. I think when you spend your life writing books... on the one hand, you're being asked to make things up. And on the other you're being asked to examine what's going on around you in order to understand why you want to write about the things that you want to write about. So that's an unusual luxury: that you get to think and for a long time, about things that you're obsessed about."

I said, "You seem to be more obsessed than is usual," meaning, with even stranger things than most writers.

"Am I? Oh dear," she said, airily. Well, doesn't she think she has strange obsessions? "Yeah. I don't know. I write fantasy so that's a sort of default thing. But then, on the other hand, there's a lot of fantasy writers. As a breed I'm not an endangered species. Perhaps in the way in which I do it: because it's literary fiction and fantasy."

Perhaps she's actually just a very hard-working, sensible person who happens to write fantasy. "My son has straight teeth and is in reasonable health and is still at school. Does that qualify me?"

We had a scone break and she put her jam on top of the cream. Is that the correct way?"No, probably the other way. But I'm unusual!" She giggled, beguilingly, and somehow managed to look, with her grey hair and sensible specs, like a serious author and an unusually playful one.