KEY POINTS:
It should come as no surprise to anyone that Janet Frame is a writer who does not abide by conventions, but even the most seasoned Frame reader must be amused by her "take" on writer's block. What happens when Frame encounters writer's block? She produces two novels instead
of one.
Readers of Michael King's biography of Frame will know that in 1963, work on The Adaptable Man faltered and she wrote a short autobiographical novel, Towards Another Summer, which she deemed too personal for publication in her lifetime.
Almost 20 years after the appearance of Frame's last published novel (The Carpathians), Towards Another Summer makes it to bookshop shelves.
The segue from Frame's highly playful later novels to Towards Another Summer is eased by the recent re-publication of her novels from the 1960s. Certainly Towards Another Summer is very much of a piece with The Edge of the Alphabet and Scented Gardens for the Blind in its preoccupation with identity and its hauntingly lyrical (though it must be said, noticeably more accessible) prose.
Readers looking for the dazzling wit and the intricate narrative layering of her final novels are more likely to find tantalising traces of these things in Towards Another Summer than a full-blown Framean extravaganza.
Here, she has other things on her mind, including a profound meditation on the nature of "home" that goes beyond cultural and geographical concerns into that most familiar, if most elusive, of Frame terrains - the metaphysical.
The novel's autobiographical protagonist is Grace Cleave, a writer who finds that - having realised she is a migratory bird (yes, you read that correctly) - she must write about a weekend she has spent with a journalist and his family, in order to salvage her novel "in progress".
This weekend, we learn, has acted as a catalyst to encounters with Grace's past, and as the book progresses we get the poignant account of Grace's crippling social unease increasingly interwoven with memories of her childhood material which appears familiar from Frame's first volume of autobiography, To the Is-land. In this way, the past increasingly leaks through into the present, and indeed this dissolution of boundaries acts as a unifying theme.
Geographical, interpersonal, and textual boundaries waver and fade: Winchley, England, morphs into Otago; Grace finds herself overlapping with the journalist's wife Anne; Philip (the journalist) and Anne frequently meld into Grace's parents, George and Lottie; and material from The Adaptable Man, a text from another dimension of reality, continually surfaces as Grace's interrupted novel.
In a neat coincidence, posthumous publication means the book also plays host to a raft of allusions to later Frame novels, as terms, ideas and phrases from Towards Another Summer find their way into later works, and, of course, there is now the added irony of the boundaries between this book and To the Is-land.
There is the danger that the posthumous publication of this novel will mean readers automatically regard it as containing "the truth", which Frame couldn't air in her lifetime.
Yes, the portrait of the protagonist is of a woman over-sensitised to the threat of familial violence, but before we get too excited about depositing skeletons in the Frame closet, we should take heed of the lessons of her oeuvre.
To see the alternate versions of similar material in Towards Another Summer and To the Is-land as offering true and false accounts seems naïve in relation to the work of a writer who specialises in exploiting multiple versions of reality, and whose autobiographies assert the indivisibility of truth, memory and myth.
Towards Another Summer is possibly most valuable for what it confirms about Frame's creative processes: her destabilisation of the boundaries between art and life and her continual refashioning of the "found fiction" of experience.
It is a fitting irony that Frame's more personal posthumous publications, Towards Another Summer and The Goosebath, have brought with them not categorical revelations of self but new versions of Frame to add to the existing plethora.
* Dr Jan Cronin teaches New Zealand literature in the English Department at the University of Auckland.
* Published by Random House $29.99
