KRIS KNEEN Rite of Spring. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart

 

The characters in Kris Kneen’s latest novel free themselves from the constraints of gender, diving into a new world beneath the waves.

Two people alone on a challenging frontier, surviving physically but also dealing with loneliness and each other’s limitations, is a familiar trope. What Kneen does with it is not. This novel is a page-turning compulsion that sucks you into its tunnels and caves, into the fissures of rock and crevices of coastline carved by the Southern Ocean. Like Miranda, its protagonist, we are often underwater, rendered breathless by its defiance of taboos, its wild eroticism, its daring.

Kris Kneen has constructed an architecture of ‘other’. They have given it shape, desire and sentience, inviting us not only to feel difference, to comprehend it, but to desire it. This story sings a song of abandonment, in both body and spirit, of the scaffolds that constrain our lives, and of reconciliation with self. Rite of Spring is a novel that Kneen, author of fiction and memoir published as Krissy Kneen, may have written to reflect their own journey across gender.

It opens with the author’s voice, Kris, on their arrival in the world, living within a binary, a

tug of war between what is innate and what is learned behaviour. Impossible to untangle the web of nature and nurture, but once the process has begun, the whole of it must play out.

They say,

Once upon a time I went out into the human world and fell down and fell down and fell down again.

Now I swim.

Miranda and Richard are living as caretakers on an island off Tasmania, a remote, wild place unpopulated but for its seal colony, torn by massive gusts of wind and water-logged from the rain and relentless sea spray. They are looking after the buildings, the lighthouse, and recording the weather at stations around the island four times a day. Miranda is a marine biologist, and moving through water is her comfort zone, be it laps in pools or diving under the ocean, gathering specimens to take to her lab. She has recently had an accident surfacing, and this sojourn to the island is partially because she must heal. She and Richard are trying to heal their marriage, too. He has had an affair and Miranda obsesses over his lover: ‘how sweet and wet she would be’ where she is dry; her thinness, where Miranda is not.

Miranda’s relationship with her body is fraught. She catalogues her unease: her menopause, her thickening waist, her shortness. These externalities are secondary, however, to her deep-seated sense of wrongness living in it. ‘A weird space, this idea of girlhood …’ The changes that come with puberty cement her horror and she finds human copulation crude and ugly compared with the sea cucumbers, ‘spraying sperm out on the cucumbers below’ in a ‘mass aquatic orgy’. She dreams of different forms, different couplings, than those offered her.

She grows up, however, a woman, and the gendered world pierces her. While Richard goes competently about the island chainsawing trees, fixing the truck, making bread, doing ‘husband’ things, Miranda feels incompetent. Though she rejects the pandering of the male ego, she compares her own role as ‘wife’ and sees it as weak, paltry. She escapes to the shoreline and, though her medical instructions are to stay in the shallows, strips off on the small crescent of sand down at the cliff, pulls on her wetsuit and splashes with finned feet into the sea. Kneen’s writing here, of the water, the life beneath, and Miranda’s oneness with these elements, is powerful. She finds a narrow gulch and tunnel leading into a sea cave. She bobs with the incoming waves, reaches out to the walls, pulling herself along, the light dimming. She turns to look at the cave mouth, the day outside, but goes in deeper.

The mystery of the gulch, and the extraordinary song that Miranda hears over and over that pulls her there, is riveting. She discovers innumerable carvings in the trees in the garden she tends, and in the rocks around the shore, of bodies – all vulvas, penises, breasts – and she finds effigies of figures made from straw and glass with engorged sex organs. These bizarre tokens are given new form when she reads the journals of former caretakers, particularly a KJ, whose yearnings and torments reflect her own.

Miranda realises that there is a stranger on the island, another, an other, who should not be there. Her immediate fear turns to something else and, as she follows this unexpected, unfamiliar desire, she leaves behind everything she has known. Miranda plants a trap, a net in the gulch, to snare this creature and goes out at night to see what it yields. Silvery fish leap and she catches one and is at once appalled and excited by her desire to sink her teeth into the flesh, to tear into it. The creature who comes to her is known and not known, not to be feared but trusted, and as they lead her to the beach, she is freed from all worldly constraints. The lovemaking that follows, sex that transcends gender, or even human form, recalls Christos Tsiolkas, whose writing about the body and its organs shows that the pulsing, living animal lust of men and women can be similarly primal.

No longer in mourning for her own place in the world, Miranda has come home. Kneen has pulled off an extraordinary feat here: a lyrical, exquisitely written novel which is both wildly imaginative and compelling in equal measure.

Kris Kneen Rite of Spring Transit Lounge PB 2026 272pp $34.99

Jessica Stewart is a freelance writer and editor. She can be found at www.yourseconddraft.com where she writes about editing, vagaries of the English language and books she’s loved.

You can buy this book from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW. You can also buy it from Booktopia. We receive a small commission if you purchase through these links.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

Tags: Australian fiction, Australian writers, gender, Islands, isolation, Kris | Kneen, lighthouses, relationships, sexuality