Elizabeth Knox’s weighty, first YA novel for 12 years most certainly qualifies as “dark academia” – a literary aesthetic and subculture concerned with the arts, higher education and literature. In Kings of This World, her diverse assortment of entitled senior students are clocking in for their final year at Tiebold Academy, a co-ed boarding school known informally as Bold and located somewhere at the top of the South Island (there’s a map).
Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel The Secret History is credited with being the contemporary starting point for the dark academic novel, and some of the best YA writers are creating creepy scenarios in gothic settings with characters who, even at a young age, already hold a lifetime of secrets. Earlier this year, Australian Lili Wilkinson introduced us to the demonic magic of Agathion College in Unhallowed Halls, set on broody Scottish moors not unlike those of Wuthering Heights’ Yorkshire.
Knox’s ambiguously named Southland, the setting for her earlier YA novels Mortal Fire and the Dreamhunter duet, is peppered with half-recognised, pointed place names such as Coal Bay, Wry Valley and So-long Spit, all part of the playing with words she is so good at – and so unsettling. Everything is vaguely familiar, yet you can’t quite pin it down; it’s the same but not the same. Allusions abound, all part of the way her world is built up – sleight of hand, smoke and mirrors.
Mortal Fire had a heady sensuality; Kings of This World, with its biblical ring, is much more edgy, with a sense of something more sinister at play. It also feels closer in time to the present.
A poignant, dreamlike prologue introduces the story’s complex central character and narrator, Victoria Magdolen. Aged eight when we meet her, she has survived some sort of cult meltdown, though not without significant physical trauma, perhaps the result of a resuscitation attempt. She seems to be underwater, in a car.
Fast-forward and Vex, as she’s now known, and the rest of her group of incoming fellow students are at the compulsory senior morgue visit, an attempt by the powers that be to demonstrate the potency of the force known as P (for Push). Apparently connected with a plague sometime in the country’s past, P’s power – Vex is among those who has it – is the ability to persuade Nopeys (those who don’t have it) to do sometimes dangerous things against their will.
Inevitably, the revealed bodies induce PTSD flashbacks for some of those present, notably Ari, son of a senator (even the political titles are American, along with sheriffs, which may rile some readers and certainly set this reviewer on edge).
Then the minibus ride back to school is hijacked, and the drama unfolds.
The story alternates between straightforward, often amusing, day-today college life – presented in flashback – and scenes of hostage captivity involving quite blatant violence, which would put the novel at the top end of YA fiction.
But as kidnappings go, this too is slightly out of focus, as the five teens, who barely know each other, are not sure who is being targeted or who is behind the aggression.
Their emerging cohesion as a group, forged under fire, and subsequent escape, is skilfully crafted, if sickening.
And it all has a frighteningly likeness to events currently being played out in real life, balaclava-clad thugs throwing their weight around but with nobody quite sure who’s in charge.
There’s much discussion here about ethics, and an attempt to tease such arguments apart from issues of elitism and entitlement. But sometimes it’s like those theological discussions on predetermination versus free will: circular arguments that no one can really win.
Kings of This World, by Elizabeth Knox (Allen & Unwin, $29.99), is out now.
