This is a text that seethes with literary allusions: classics of ancient literature, fairy stories, crime capers, philosophical treatises and radical polemics, novels of manners and revenge, heroic quests and big books-about-books such as The Shadow of the Wind, The Da Vinci Code, Night Train to Lisbon and The Saragossa Manuscript – “arcane thrillers”, as Knox has called them. As she is drawn into an adventure of trans-dimensional magnitude, Taryn comes increasingly to suspect that her sister’s death was collateral damage in a secret war for possession of the casket’s contents.Īs the author of a history of book-burning, Taryn Cornick is something of an expert on the subject, and it is books, more than anything, that form the beating heart of The Absolute Book. Shift insists that Taryn alone holds the key to its whereabouts, that a long-ago blaze in her grandfather’s library was no accident, but an attempt by the forces of darkness to smoke out the casket. The rupture is centred on an object, a wooden casket containing a book known as the Firestarter due to its habit of surviving disastrous and often inexplicable library fires. He explains to Taryn that the world she knows is not the only world, and that the equilibrium between human reality and the fairy realm is becoming unstable. His name is Shift, and he is not quite human.
Meanwhile, a missing witness to Beatrice’s death has finally resurfaced. But Berger senses there must be a connection between Webber’s death and Taryn’s silence, and his memories of the original crime leave him unwilling to let the matter drop. Someone is stalking Taryn – plaguing her with silent phone calls – and when a police detective, Jacob Berger, turns up on her doorstep asking questions about the death of Timothy Webber, Taryn suggests that Berger should stop bothering her and look for the stalker instead. Soon after his release, Beatrice’s killer is found dead in a ditch not far from the site of the original accident. The perpetrator, Timothy Webber, is sentenced to six years in jail Taryn remains convinced that her sister’s death was not an accident, but murder. When Taryn Cornick is still a teenager, her older sister Beatrice is killed in a hit-and-run.
The Absolute Book has the feel of an instant classic, a work to rank alongside other modern masterpieces of fantasy such as Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series or Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. That international success has thus far been denied her is something of a scandal, but with her latest work the tide could be about to turn. E lizabeth Knox is the recipient of a multitude of literary honours in her native New Zealand, with the kind of popular following that befits the luminous quality of her writing.
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