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Written by the award-winning New-Zealand born author Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck is one of her most popular and acclaimed novels. Hailed by critics worldwide for its originality and vision, The Vintner's Luck is now a movie directed by fellow New Zealander Niki Caro, and scheduled for release next year. Top European stars Gaspard Ulliel and Jeremie Renier play the two lead characters. The angel Xas is played by rising French star Ulliel while Renier tackles the ambitious and troubled vintner Sobran. The film also marks the return to the screen of Keisha Castle-Hughes (who plays Sobran's wife Celeste) with her mentor, Caro, who filmed her in the much-celebrated Whale Rider.

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Special tMF Film Focus by Jed Medina

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In this special series, tMF begins with an introduction to the book, The Vintner's Luck, plus a detailed look at some of Elizabeth Knox's most acclaimed works apart from the upcoming movie.

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Part One: THE BOOK AND ELIZABETH KNOX

What better way to start our article than by quoting a glowing commentary about Elizabeth Knox? Says The Boston Globe:

Knox has provocative, disturbing things to say about how we define identity. She is obsessed with consciousness, sensation, memory, and the ways in which families mold, adapt, and define themselves. Her idiosyncratic stylistic impulses, though often irritating, are suave and assured, and she has a dead-on eye for atmospherics and the telling landscape.

More about the author: (From the Victoria University Press):

The unique attraction of The Vintner's Luck: There are a number of exciting book to movie adaptations happening this year and next. But Knox's novel, The Vintner's Luck is arguably one of the most anticipated. What's the buzz about this NZ-born author? Better read Chapter One of this book and you'll know what the buzz is all about...

[ With the author's permission, the New York Times published the first chapter of The Vintner's Luck. You can read the whole chapter by clicking this link. ]

A review entitled "He's No Clarence : In this novel by a New Zealand writer, a man is visited by a loyal, demonic and sexy angel " was written by Nina Auerbach especially for the Times. Says Auerbach:

The novel (the first of Knox's books to be published outside her native New Zealand) begins in 1808, a week after the midsummer festival, when an angel named Xas appears to a young Burgundian vintner, Sobran Jodeau. Woozy with wine and sexual frustration, Sobran promptly swoons in faith: ''This angel had been sent to him, obviously, not for comfort, but counsel, surely.'' Yet Xas is too grand and yearning a creature to be a guide.

Instead, like two young comrades, Sobran and Xas agree to drink wine together once a year on the anniversary of the night they first met. And Knox's novel keeps their appointment even when they can't, ranging from 1808 to 1863, with an elegiac coda set in 1997. Thus when Sobran is off in Russia with Napoleon's army or when Xas, in a wrenching scene, is too mutilated to glide down to his friend, the novel honors their promise.

In the course of their meetings and missings, Xas never does become a counselor, although he is, in turn, Sobran's tempter, friend, lover, child, succubus and storyteller. And he is always a haunting physical presence, draining Sobran's desire away from his wife, mistress and children, even from his thriving vineyard. In ''The Vintner's Luck,'' meetings with an angel provide neither guidance nor illumination nor moral clarification: they are simply so consuming, physically and imaginatively, that they make ordinary life impossible. [ read the full article here ]

Knox's angel appears more human than divine. Xas is simply not satisfied with just looking down at humans and observing their affairs; he is in fact quite interested in getting involved in human affairs and in some instances, he participates in and benefits from his own interference.

Unlike the guardian angels of  tales older and more popular than Knox's, Xas can be obnoxious and philosophical, aggressive and tender, sentimental and even capable of feeling pain. Take for instance the scene where  Xas is shown lying in Sobran's bed - from the Kirkus Reviews:

But a ferocious display of inventive power redeems and enlivens even the books more extravagant convolutions. Knox's flexible, image-driven sentences effortlessly evoke the lush plenitude of Clos Jodeau and environs, as well as Xas's ineffable strangeness (sleeping in Sobran's bed, ``He looked comical, like a young man sharing his bed with two large dogs, the humps his wings made under the covers'').

Sobran and Xas's relationship through the years is characterized by highs and lows, and there will be revelations later on that will further define their relationship - a much important scene (definitely) in the movie.

More about  Xas and Sobran in Part 2 of this series.

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Elizabeth Knox and her novels: An introduction

"I think that human consciousness is the most marvelous thing and the world is a beautiful place that walks over us and goes on without us," says Knox. "I believe God doesn't exist but I feel that God does - it's a strange quandary," the author was quoted as saying.

How can anyone not be impressed by Elizabeth Knox? Apart from her thought-provoking replies to a lot of interview questions, her lush and detailed description of the French countryside and its vineyards are so real and so authentic that one can only be shocked to learn that she wrote the book before setting foot on French soil.

With four novels and three novellas over the past 14 years, she has flirted with fame in her New Zealand homeland, traveling to France as the 1999 Katherine Mansfield Fellow and selling over 20,000 copies of The Vintner's Luck since its December 1998 release. But at 42 ( now 49 ), Knox is maturing into a sought-after literary export. Last week she brushed past Australia's reigning Miles Franklin Award winners Thea Astley and Kim Scott to win the inaugural $A40,000 Tasmania Pacific Region Prize in Hobart.

Where previous New Zealand literary heroines such as Mansfield and Janet Frame journeyed to Europe to find themselves, Knox travels mostly in her imagination and via the Internet (next month sees the launch of her website). For Vintner she never set foot in Burgundy; instead, she says, a fevered dream set the story in motion: "I was having a conversation with this being who was hidden in the shadows of the trees and the shadows were like wings, and the angel was telling me the story of this life-long friendship he had with a French vintner." Her forthcoming two novels leap from South America to the Outer Hebrides. In an age when authors sweat over research and authenticity, Knox's flights of fantasy are (to quote Vintner) "as invigorating as the air immediately over a wild sea." [ read more ]

In one of her latest interviews, she was asked about her writing and if she has some sort of 'creative process', for which she replied:

I usually have a number of ideas for novels circling in a holding pattern. I'm never sure which idea is the first in the queue. And I don't begin writing till I get what I call 'a book-starting idea', the idea that makes it possible for a cluster of notions for a novel to consolidate and start generating their own heat. The book-starting idea is like a starter motor in a car, it makes the big engine of a novel turn over.

Once I start writing the ideas accrue. This is what I think of as 'consequential invention'. For example, in the Dreamhunter Duet, if there is no water in the Place, then it follows that exploration is limited by how much water explorers can carry. Or another example: if each freshly caught dream fades as it is repeated then a dreamhunter would have stay awake till their audience has gathered, so therefore dreamhunters would probably take stimulants. I work out all my 'if this then that' stuff as I go, and, usually, the logic of the ifs and thens helps whatever odd or contingent idea I've started with begin to seem real and necessary.

To date, here are some of Knox's best works:

What's the Book About: A woman's attempt to find her elusive and complicated father lies at the heart of this novel by New Zealand writer Knox. As fans of her previous book (The Vintner's Luck) are aware, Knox's lush, hyperinventive storytelling is anything but traditional, and this time-traveling tale is as exuberantly unorthodox as its predecessor. In the year 2022, Carme Risk lives in northern California and is undergoing narrative therapy to better understand her life and her father's influence. Told through the journal entries of Carme and her father, the story spans 40 years and involves many shifts in time and place. There is the Eden of Carme's father's adolescence (a place reminiscent of the Scottish highlands), where young Carme spent her first years with an extended family and her father's lover, Dev. Then there is the poor Latin American country of Lequama, where Carme's father is a confused revolutionary, unsure of how he became a local legend.

The California settings are equally fantastic, depicting the exploits of Carme's half-sister Fidela, a child television star, and Edwin Money, an elderly billionaire who engages their father for some mysterious work. Throughout, Carme must wrestle with an unsettling question: is her father fully human or some species of otherworldly being? With this wealth of creativity and tales spun within tales, it's fortunate that Knox's prose, poetic and precise, features no indulgent pyrotechnics. And despite the many detailed digressions, the overall themes of family and identity possess an internal logic. This isn't for the unadventurous, but readers eager for total immersion will be delighted by Knox's highly imaginative and entertaining world. (July) Forecast: The understated jacket art a mask on a black background doesn't adequately express the roiling drama within. This is a perfect book for literary readers with a taste for the fantastic, but will require careful handselling. [ More about the book ]

What's the Book About: Saint or vampire? The identity of the Blessed Martine Raimondi, a French nun murdered by the Nazis in 1944 for her part in the daring cave escape of rebel partisans, is only one question answered in this illuminating tour-de-force set in the south of France from New Zealander Knox (Billie's Kiss). Another puzzle is Martine Dardo, the suspected daughter of the nun. Brian "Bad" Phelan, a New South Wales bomb tech and expert "caver" on paid injury leave, helps retrieve Martine's blistered corpse outside a cave near the Italian border and discovers she bears a shocking resemblance to a woman he'd encountered years before in another flooded cave. He's further struck by Martine's resemblance to Eve Moskelute, the subject of a painting by Jean Ares, her Picasso-esque deceased husband.

The author constructs an impressive mystery that dissects the meaning of miracles while putting a fresh spin on the vampire archetype, with her creation of Lou Ila, an 18th-century Proven‡al journeyman/artist vampire, on a par with the best Anne Rice has to offer. Bad seeks out Eve, who not only knew Martine but has a "dead" twin, Dawn, accidentally "turned" by Ila when he mistook her for Eve. This multi-layered dazzler also includes the unforgettable Father Daniel Octave, who hopes his investigation into the "miracles" surrounding the Blessed Martine will result in her canonization but instead leads into Ila's dark world and the disturbing discovery that the vampire is "a sign... and so belonged to God." [ More about the book ]

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What's the Book About: Although the premise of this dark, inventive novel is almost absurdly romantic--a brooding hero and a pink-haired heroine, both in mourning, are thrown together in a stark, windswept landscape that evokes the Yorkshire moors--Elizabeth Knox's astonishing gift for language and imagery lift Billie's Kiss above others in its genre. It is 1903, and Murdo Hesketh (a fair-haired Heathcliff) is returning to his cousin's remote Scottish island estate, where he is engaged to implement the many "improvements" his wealthy cousin is foisting on the unwilling islanders. Just as his ship reaches harbor, Billie Paxton, a young female passenger, jumps onto land, avoiding by seconds the explosion that destroys the ship. Is she responsible for the destruction of the Gustav Edda and the deaths of her sister Edith and just-born nephew, as well as of Hesketh's loyal servant and friend, Ian Betler? Knox's third novel takes a few pages to get going, and some will find its uneven pace disorienting. But it is hard to put down a book in which the heroine accidentally throws a bucket of bile at the hero, and in which some 20 people die within the first 130 pages. Eventful and lushly descriptive, Billie's Kiss has the atmosphere of Jane Eyre with the revisionist sensibility of Wide Sargasso Sea. [ More about the book ]

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What's the Book About: Laura Hame and her cousin Rose, 14, live in a recognizable early-20th-century society, realistically portrayed but for one thing: the Place, discovered about 20 years earlier by Laura's father. It lies outside geographical boundaries, and only select people are able to enter and experience dreams there. These dreamhunters then perform their received dreams for large theater audiences, and those in attendance go to sleep and experience them. At the time of this story, dreams have become big business and are embroiled in issues of social control (especially the control of prisoners) and power politics. When Laura's father disappears, the girl takes enormous risks first to try to find him, and then to complete his mission.

While the author leaves tantalizing clues throughout the novel, the plot moves slowly at first. However, patient readers will find themselves rewarded by the riveting action in the final third of the book. Relationships between the characters, especially Laura and Rose, are given center stage, but their interaction flags in the middle of the book. Particularly touching is the relationship between Laura and a golem-type creature sculpted out of sand in the magical world of the Place. Dry, unchanging, with nothing either fully living or dead, no wind or sounds, it is eerily suffused with atmosphere and powerfully portrayed. This novel, the first of a duet of books, concludes neither with a cliffhanger nor at the end, but in the middle of the action. It will appeal to lovers of fantasy set in the real world, who will eagerly await the resolution in the second volume. [ More about the book ]

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What's the Book About: This title begins where Dreamhunter (Farrar, 2006) left off, and is written in the same detailed, eloquent prose. Dreamhunter Laura Hame has just inflicted the sleeping patrons at the Rainbow Opera dream palace with a nightmare that blows a government conspiracy wide open. Now everyone knows about the sickening, horrific dreams used by Cas Doran and his Regulatory Body to control prison convicts. But mysteries remain about the origins of The Place, the invisible geographic area a rare dreamhunter is able to enter for the purpose of acquiring dreams, and Doran's secret railroad being built there. As Laura and her family attempt to uncover secrets and bring Doran to justice, they deal with internal divisions about the right course of action to take. Passions run deep between these complicated characters, and Knox beautifully portrays a family dynamic infused with genuine affection. Laura's tender relationship with her Sandman, a creature she created, is further developed and becomes an integral piece in the puzzle of The Place. The reality that is ultimately revealed catches readers by surprise yet manages to tie all loose ends together in an emotionally satisfying way. Richly layered and thoroughly enthralling, Knox's literary duet is a unique blend of fantasy and history that stands out as a stunning achievement in recent young adult literature. [ More about the book ]

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Up Next: A Tale of Two Actors: Gaspard Ulliel is Xas, Jeremie Renier is Sobran.

References and Acknowledgment:

• Ms. Knox photo was taken from her New Zealand book council page.

Excerpts from her interviews from various sources, among which:

• He's No Clarence: In this novel by a New Zealand writer, a man is visited by a loyal, demonic and sexy angel. by Nina Auerbach.
• A Time Traveler on Imagination's Wings: With faith and fantasy, a New Zealander transports readers around the globe.
• WBBT Stop: Elizabeth Knox by Gwenda Bond.

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