Malcolm Knox looks fit for a writer. Not that people who spend all day hunched over a keyboard can't keep in shape. But Knox, who has written almost 20 books including five novels, would not seem out of place in a rugby back line or as a short-distance runner. He owes that to a life-long love of sport, a subject that consumes much of his day job as a journalist.
As a child Knox was an accomplished all-rounder on the pitch. At the prestigious Sydney school he attended for 13 years, Knox Grammar, he was in the First XV rugby squad, captain of the First XI cricket team and a talented track and field performer, no mean feat at a school with a reputation for sporting excellence.
Sharing the same name must have seemed more than coincidence for Knox the boy at Knox the school, but destiny had something else in mind. An opening batsman and medium-pace bowler, he was selected for the NSW Schoolboys cricket team and went on to play for the Sydney club Gordon. It was there, however, that his confidence took a hammering. His team was playing against Bankstown and the youngest of the famous Waugh brothers, Dean, came into bat.
"I was bowling my usual little ducky medium pacer to off stump and next thing I knew the ball was racing along the ground to the mid-wicket boundary," Knox says, raising his arms in feigned surprise. "And I thought, crikey, he's not even one of the good Waughs. If Dean Waugh can do that, play a shot that I as a batsman did not even have, then [his brothers the Test cricketers] Mark and Steve were at another level beyond that. It was really eye-opening."
Knox eventually gave up cricket after accepting that his talent would never match his ambition. Such an experience, though, would sharpen his ability as a sport writer later in life.
"It has maintained my respect for talent," he says. "The worst Test cricketer you see is just streets ahead of the best of what you could have been."
Knox is a gently spoken man who thinks carefully about what he wants to say. When asked about the recent child abuse scandal involving his old school he pauses for some time before answering.
"It was compelling," he says, to see his former headmaster, Ian Paterson, being grilled at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. "Anybody who was at that school at that time would have felt like a former citizen of an old dictatorship watching the dictator on trial."
Knox says he "didn't have a clue" paedophiles taught at Knox Grammar when he was there, although some of his former teachers were later convicted of sexual abuse. But what most fascinated him about these revelations were the teachers' "subterranean lives", because secrecy has been a recurring theme in his writing.
Knox has written more than a dozen non-fiction books, five of them on cricket, as well as on the ice drug trade, the Australian mining industry and the jury system. In 2004, when he was the The Sydney Morning Herald's literary editor, he won a Walkley award for investigative journalism for exposing the fake Jordanian memoirist, Norma Khouri.
It is his fiction, though, that stands out for its exploration of secret lives. It has also earned him many accolades, including from Christos Tsolkias, author of The Slap, who praised him in the best way another author can – he said that reading Knox's work makes him want to be a better writer.
Knox's first novel, Summerland, for which he was a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist in 2001, is about the secret lives of the wealthy Sydney elite, while his second novel, A Private Man, which won a Ned Kelly award in 2005, is about a middle-aged family man with a secret life. His third novel, Jamaica, a progeny of Summerland, is about a similar group of people who are older, and his fourth novel, The Life, an inventive, clever work about a surfer who self-destructs, was loosely based on the surfing champion Michael Peterson, whose talent was lost to mental illness and addiction.
The secret life is also the subject of Knox's fifth novel, The Wonder Lover, which he calls "the son of A Private Man". It is about a trigamist, John Wonder, whose three wives – Sandy, Paulina and Kim – each have a son and a daughter called Adam and Evie. All three wives and their children are unknown to each other. John is an authenticator who checks facts and verifies world records. He has never told anyone about his family arrangement and although the secrecy makes him "shockingly lonely", it also holds him together. Only when John becomes entranced by a fourth woman, Cicada, does he look like coming unstuck.
The story is at times sexually explicit. Kim, for example, is a former prostitute who specialised in rape fantasy, and the beautiful Cicada is unrestrained when boasting about her erotic experiences. Yet the novel is narrated in the collective voice of John's children, a device used by Jeffrey Eugenides in The Virgin Suicides, and shows how an outsider who feels "utterly bamboozled by the idea of love" can spend his life searching for it within a fantasy world built on lies and deceit. It is not a realist novel; it is a fable with no setting, no place names, and has been described as an adult fairy tale told by children.
Although he has never met anyone with a secret family, Knox says he is amazed at how common it is when he mentions the subject to people: "I was chatting with a friend who was a flight attendant, who said, 'Oh yeah yeah, the pilots.' "
Knox, 48, grew up in St Ives on Sydney's North Shore. He says he had a happy childhood – "the scourge of the novelist", he jokes – and has an older brother who is now a vet. His father was an engineer for a company that built pumps the size of houses. "I wasn't an introspective kid. I was very busy running around playing sport, being with friends, trying hard at school," he says.
Later he studied arts/law at the University of Sydney but never finished the law degree. It was about this time he began to value literature as an art form. "Eventually I developed the ambition to want to be part of that and contribute to that ongoing conversation."
Among the authors who caught his attention were French writer Marcel Proust (Knox has read the mammoth Remembrance of Things Past three times) and the American novelist David Foster Wallace.
He also completed a masters in literature at St Andrews University in Scotland on a scholarship from an insurance company keen to foster ties with Australia. When he returned home, he began a career in journalism at the Herald, where he has been chief cricket correspondent and assistant sport editor, among other roles. He now writes a cricket column and has been compared to the acclaimed late cricket commentator Peter Roebuck.
Balancing journalism with other writing commitments is not easy, he says, although his fiction and journalism can complement each other. "Writing journalism helps my fiction get to the point and make itself clear and tell a story that will pull a reader in. Writing fiction helps my journalism in avoiding cliche and always trying to be a bit inventive with language."
Knox believes he has more in common with novelists than journalists. "When I'm in a room of novelists, I feel among my own kind, comfortable talking craft or whatever else novelists talk about. When I'm in a room of journalists, I feel that they're all probably better at it than I am, are more wedded to the profession than I am, and have a range of skills that I don't have. I guess I feel like a skilled tradesman among novelists, whereas among journalists I feel that I only know how to do a slice of it."
These days Knox keeps fit by surfing, which he took up seriously only 10 years ago after his wife, Wenona, bought him a surf lesson. They live in a renovated 1920s house overlooking Manly Lagoon, between Freshwater and Queenscliff beaches, with their two children and a misbehaving blue heeler-kelpie cross called Bruce.
Knox says he tries to surf at least a couple of times a week. Long spells away from the water can leave him "frothing", he jokes, but he doesn't consider himself obsessive about the sport.
"When I was young I was a white-line fever kid who was placid until you put me in a demarcated environment where competition was allowed. Then I was an absolute maniac," he says with a grin. "I love sport because it allows that."
And another thing: : The prolific Knox is working on two nonfiction books: Supermarket Monsters (Black Inc, June), and The Keepers, a cricket book (Penguin, September).
The Wonder Lover is published by Allen & Unwin at $32.99. Malcolm Knox will be a guest at Sydney Writers' Festival, May 18-24.
