`Black Oxen,' by Elizabeth Knox; Farrar, Straus and Giroux.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

If there is any message to be squeezed from Elizabeth Knox's erotic, hyperimaginative fiction, maybe it is this: Some people simply cannot be filled up by that risky, fated thing we call life. Maybe they are too deep; maybe they are just too full of holes. Yet, ravenous and fearless, they claw gleefully into the squirmy magic of the world, organizing the prostitutes' collective, sharing intriguing breakfasts with sorcerers or photographing the corpse levitating in the palace corridor. Do we wish we were more like them? Sure. But as someone in these pages warns, "You'd get it wrong, don't you see?" and, of course, we would.

Knox, a New Zealander, is largely unknown to U.S. readers, though her previous novel, "The Vintner's Luck," caused a mild stir when it was published here in 1998. Set amid murders and boiling passions in rural France during the first half of the 19th century, its story focuses on two unlikely comrades: Sobran Jodeau, a young Burgundian winemaker, and Xas, an angel of smudgy loyalties who visits for a night every summer, always smelling wonderfully of snow. An angel! we barked and flung the book into a corner. But on a second visit a few months later, we gradually grew enchanted with Knox's fable-like tale and its zestful blurring of natural landscapes and supernatural possibilities.

Now here is something even more lush, dark and puzzling.

"Black Oxen" opens in 2022 in the office of therapist Sean Hart somewhere in or near San Francisco. Carme Risk, a Harvard-educated physician in her mid-40s who specializes in treating multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, has come here on a quest _ to try to understand her beloved father, so often absent, so burdened by his secret history and strange essence, his life more a state of hovering than of being.

In fact, as we quickly learn, Carme's story first unfolds decades earlier, in the land of her childhood, a mystical corner of what appears to be the Scottish Highlands. She is not yet born. Her future father, 15-year-old Abra Cadaver (get it?), is a scabies-scarred former runaway who may or may not be autistic. On this fine afternoon Abra and his wealthy guardian, Carlin, have gone fishing. When Abra had been here at the river alone the previous Saturday, he had stumbled upon a place where the water split around "what might have been an island, with its own stony beach and trees...." Odd that he cannot locate the spot now. Abra's memory is perfect, although he is "always noticing things, then not knowing what to do about them."

Quite a lot of this same sort of noticing and not knowing, etc., occurs in these pages, often at the expense of Knox's reader who _ stunned by the sudden appearance of a cavalcade of medieval archers on horseback or the image of a three-masted clipper ship whirling in flames _ may succumb to this unsettling reaction: Huh? Knox has said that she based this novel, with its groaning wordplay, large, vividly animated cast and abrupt leaps in time, setting and reality, on a game she invented as a child, and the reader often feels ...