Elizabeth Knox: Daylight

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

A new novel from the empress of local lit is always a big deal, made more so by Knox's unpredictability. While a common thread of magical realism - and theology - runs through many of her titles, she still loves to play with genres or, rather, parodies of stereotypes: ghost stories, romance and, this time, horror. Vampires, actually, who dwell in the caves and dark corners around the French Italian border, feasting on those who find themselves vulnerable in the night, and occasionally infecting others with their dreaded affliction.

Bad is a New Zealander on holiday, a bomb disposal expert and a keen caver - a lover of those dangerously dark places. A body found floating in a bay lends both mystery and meaning to two experiences in his past, and he sets out to investigate.

Meanwhile, a Jesuit priest, Daniel Octave, begins to suspect all was not as it seemed in the life of a woman sainted by the Catholic Church, the Blessed Martine Raimondi, and he too sets out to investigate the provenance of her "miracles".

Their trails lead them, as if along tunnels in a cave, towards the same point of light, and they independently circle around the same unusual group of people: in particular, the sisters Eve and Dawn, the pale, corpse-like Ila and the evil Tom.

As usual, one has the sense of the novelist's boiling, bubbling mind: every detail of vampire culture is fantastically well imagined - their nesting, "making", ethical concerns, addiction, terror. Knox reveals every technical detail of caving, the topology of the landscape, the architecture of churches, the furnishing of a 17th-century chateau, the timetabling of trains. Knox has a fever for information, for nailing things down, naming them, describing them using the correct words and, while one utterly admires her foaming intelligence and boundless imagination, frankly I quickly tired, got bogged down, reading at a most plodding pace.

A large part of the problem for me lies in the emotional distance her narrative style creates. She chooses self-consciously emblematic names that inhibit your ability to believe in them in the usual novelistic way and her use of indirect speech has a distancing effect as if we're reading a report.

Even the horror is oblique. The victims, drugged, experience no fear, and so we don't either, apart from one or two over-the-top, bulimic-style episodes. In fact, the only terror is the vampires' own - a sophisticated touch.

Knox has many fans who will welcome her return to the supernatural (setting and subject matter may remind them of the jewel in her crown, The Vintner's Luck), and simply enjoy the twists and turns of her thinking - and the all-ends-tied-up resolution. But I just couldn't get into it.

VUP, $29.95