Mathias Dargnat/UnsplashKris Kneen’s new novel of rich strangeness and blurred boundaries, and set on a wild island, references both Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring – which gives it its name.Rite of Spring adds to Kneen’s warmly received body of work, which includes fiction and memoir. Kneen writes narratives that accommodate both the literary and the erotic – and their new novel continues this legacy. Its narrative structure is clear and persuasive, its language is lyrical, and its sex scenes are convincing but never gratuitous. A pulsing story, it moves energetically across its terrain, delivering a sense of alien understanding. Review: Rite of Spring – Kris Kneen (Transit Lounge)The story starts on a violently tossing boat in the middle of rough seas. Miranda, in recovery from a (so far) unspecified accident, is doing pretty well; her husband Richard, perhaps, less so. He is gripping Miranda too tightly, whether to protect her or himself – and he seems to be less at home on the ocean than is she. The boat is heading for an isolated island in the middle of nowhere, “one of the windiest places on earth”, frequently cut off from the rest of the world. Richard and Miranda are taking up a six-month stint as caretakers. This island had once been the location for a lighthouse, and now functions as a weather station. The couple will be responsible for recording data, and taking care of the infrastructure that is, in this storm-tossed location, in constant need of repair.They will be entirely alone, except for (weather permitting) supply deliveries. They will be having an adventure, where Richard hopes to rebuild the marriage he damaged by having an affair, and Miranda hopes to rebuild herself, following the diving accident that has left her with neurological damage. It is not a safe place: they know the history of caretakers who preceded them – “broken legs, burst appendixes, instances of them coming to grief in a storm”, accounts of “madness” and suicide, of caretakers who “ended up fleeing the island in terror or pain”. Miranda and Richard are undeterred. She, after all, is a marine biologist who understands the sea; he is a fixer, a confident repairer of engines and buildings – and maybe his own marriage. Kris Kneen’s new novel references both Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Sean Gillligan/Text Exquisite scenes and erotic feverThe early scenes – getting to the island, then getting to know the island – are exquisitely written, with passages that read like prose poetry. In these scenes, readers get to know the characters. We see Miranda’s bleak tendencies: her “doom spiralling”, her nightmares: “In her dreams she knew the end of the world was coming.” She longs to be able to dive again but cannot go underwater safely. She wants to reconnect to Richard, but He was a creature of the land. She was a thing of water. Their life together was a thin stretch of sand.When Miranda begins to explore the island, she is startled to find a series of fetish objects placed among the plants, or suspended from trees. They are savage-toothed poppets made of branches and scrap materials, or monstrous petroglyphs carved into the rocks. With their angel wings and demon teeth, with their non-gendered or over-gendered bodies, they remind her of the creepy image of preserved mermaids she saw as a child. It is a wild place; unnerving. More unnerving when she sees a more-or-less human form moving across the island, feels herself being watched, hears strange voices in the wind. She is not the first: in notebooks and records left by earlier caretakers, she comes across entries signed “KJ”, with similar stories, and with sketches of this strange creature. As Miranda becomes more determined to find the angel-demon, she also becomes increasingly captured by what she terms “erotic fever”, the all-absorbing physicality of sexual desire. There are descriptions of enthusiastic, even aggressive, masturbation; there are accounts of what might be characterised as consensual sex with sea-life, or equally might be framed as a kind of rape. Throughout, the novel questions the borders of reality. Do we see what is there, or simply what we think is there? Is there a difference between living beings and, say, mineral forms; between human and everything else? Miranda is losing the sense of distinction. She sees what seems to be “a loom of rock”, or “part-rock, part-flesh”. She hears “a woman, crying, wailing up and down the scale” – a woman who is in fact (or is also) the wind. The island itself is “a huge whale breaching”; and when she finds a sea cave, she perceives it as a “gullet” in the body of the island. While swimming, “something grabbed at her ankle. It curled its fingers around her calf”. This “something”, it transpires, is seaweed. Across the story, stability and consistency dissolve; everything seems to be in a state of transformation. For Richard, this is evidence of her damaged brain. “You can’t trust what you see,” he insists. “You can’t trust your brain.”Yet she sees it, perceives it, feels it, knows she is becoming something other than what she has been. The Tempest and StravinskyThere are precursors for such stories of strangeness, of blurred boundaries. An obvious reference is Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The narrative of this composition, like the novel’s, is driven by secret meanings, by the necessity to sacrifice the human to natural forces, and by what musicologist Richard Taruskin describes as “maximalised primitivism” – a perspective that, like Miranda’s, rejects any claims to human exceptionalism. Another precursor, The Tempest, shares with this novel a character named Miranda, an isolated island, and an overly sexual, or sexualised, local creature. Shakespeare’s Miranda was, of course, an adolescent girl, not a menopausal marine biologist. But in each story, the island offers at least a temporary refuge from troubles. Each story includes the idea of transformation into “something rich and strange”. And each story has worrying alien characters: Shakespeare’s Caliban (savage, rough, sexually aggressive) and Ariel (evanescent, androgynous, shapeshifting), blended together, are very like Kneen’s angel-demon. Miranda’s bodily transformation reminded me forcefully of an argument presented by science communicator Hank Green about the evolutionary move from sea to land. He argues this change required the new land-dwellers (or what he calls “land fish”) to develop waterproof skin, and that such skin traps liquid inside the body. From this, he offers the lyrical observation that this means we carried the ocean out of the ocean, in our skins, when we moved onto land. I admit that I found the ending a little disappointing: in my reading, it wraps up the loose ends, rather than leaving all in a state of continual transformation, continual blur. Despite this, the novel is captivating, provocative, evocative. It illuminates what is becoming more obvious, the more we learn: how little we know about the planet we inhabit, or the bodies we inhabit. And it makes vividly present all the possibilities and complexities of transformation, in terms of ways of living and ways of being alive.Jen Webb has received funding from the Australian Research Council.