In the glitter of a remote Australian summer, two girls play at being horses. The elder, Emily, can whinny, prance, canter and neigh like a perfect horse but her sister, Bec, is hopeless. When Emily urges her into their imaginary steeplechase, all Bec sees are the earthly dangers of falling and hurting herself, although she goes through with the terrifying game because she sees it as her duty to try to please her sister. Emily, flying over the ditches and sand traps (garden beds and swings), inhabiting the souls of both horse and rider, completely leaves the earth. It is to be the pattern of their lives.
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Steeplechase has the Dewey classification around A823.4, Australian literary fiction. Krissy Kneen's two previous books were filed around the 808.805, erotic literature, because Kneen, a high-profile Brisbane bookseller, is celebrated and feted for a paradoxical thing, high-calibre erotica. Steeplechase, her first novel and first non-erotic book, illuminates different skills.
Emily and Bec live with their oma, a sought-after art restorer, in an isolated farmhouse. They don't go to school, their dress is singular, and they never play with other children. The woman they are told is their mother is catatonic, and is cared for by their grandmother in the house. A father is never mentioned. Every night the grandmother goes around the house locking all the windows and doors, shutting in as well as shutting out. This is their world.
Twenty-three years after the steeplechase game, Emily is a renowned artist and can command huge prices for her work. Bec, the narrator of the tale, is also an artist, but her only fame comes from sharing the same name as her sister.
Bec teaches art at a tertiary college in the city and exhibits her own work very occasionally. Her life is isolated and odd, and she makes references to some time in the past when she had a serious mental illness. Bec remembers her mental illness with dread and shame and keeps it to herself, but her sister's precarious mental state is the subject of intimate discussion on the internet. Emily Reich is a famous artist, and that madness and art are often mutual fuel is an acceptable theory. The sisters have not spoken for 20 years, but when Bec has an operation to remove her gall bladder, she picks up the phone and is rattled to hear her own voice. She blames the morphine, but it is her sister, speaking as if 20 years of silence had never happened. Emily is calling her from her house in Beijing and she's booked a ticket for Bec to visit her.
It happens to be difficult for Bec to travel. Not only has she never travelled before, but she has something going with her most talented student. Something as unsuitable as it is irresistible.
Steeplechase is a strange and intricate work that, like any excellent work of art, creates its own tight world whose engine is anxiety and suppression. Kneen has an unvarnished and natural voice, which belies the immense sophistication framing the restrained texture of the emotion. Her voice might sound natural, but the weight of years of careful reading and understanding is behind it. Her evocation of the affair between Bec and John, the young student, is distinguished by the erotic compulsion between them. Affair? The delicate provocation of Kneen intimates that ''affair'' is too light to suggest the intimacy between the teacher and the exceptional student. At the same time there is this nag - is he just pursuing Bec because of his obsession with her sister, the famous artist?
The story develops in a series of terse episodes that flick back and forward between the past and present. And the past, as always, defines the present. There is some catastrophic secret, some diabolical exchange between the sisters that is the reason for the decades of silence. It must, we assume, have to do with Flame, the wonderful, and real, horse that they admire in the paddock next to them. In her secret studio Bec paints pictures that are ''almost Emily Reich's''. She used to sign her sister's name to the pictures when her sister couldn't be bothered, and sometimes her sister used to sign hers. In Beijing Emily acts as if they had seen one another yesterday, but just before her new and much-anticipated exhibition opens, she disappears.
Gothic easily slips into tacky, but exceptional writers inevitably find new ways to line tired genres. Kneen has created a world of Australian Gothic with the same reach and luminous stillness as her fellow Queenslander Andrew McGahan's impressive 2004 prize-winning The White Earth.
Buy the ebook here.
STEEPLECHASE
Krissy Kneen
Text, 272pp, $29.99
