Janet Frame: Faces in the Water and The Edge of the Alphabet

Janet Frame's 1961 and 1962 novels Faces in the Water and The Edge of the Alphabet are re-released in the one volume as part of The Janet Frame Collection.

In her autobiographies, Frame avoided talking about her experiences in mental asylums and directed her readers instead to Faces in the Water where she said she had "described in detail the surroundings and events in the several mental hospitals I experienced and had also written factually of my own treatment and my thoughts about it".

However, at the same time, Frame was keen to point out that although she gifted many of her own experiences to her central character, Istina Mavet, Mavet was not a fictional version of Frame. Bluntly put, Istina Mavet in Faces in the Water suffers from mental illness, Janet Frame did not.

Faces in the Water is then a mixture of autobiography and fiction, though one wishes it was more of the latter than the former. Little short of harrowing, Faces in the Water describes not only the anguish exhibited by those afflicted with mental illness, but the intensification of that anguish by their ritualistic humiliation at the hands of their carers. It is a searing indictment of the treatment of the mentally ill in 1940s and 50s New Zealand, one which saw the book later feature as prescribed reading on training courses for the medical staff of psychiatric units.

While Frame remained highly critical of society and its conventions in her later work, she never seemed particularly interested in character; she was always more interested in words and ideas. Faces in the Water stands out among Frame's novels as the one where she builds characters who are not simply vessels for ideas, but who are also convincing as people of flesh and blood, trapped within appalling human tragedies. This is Frame the social crusader, determined to make the reader catch glimpses in the water of those people society did not want to see, and to cultivate within the reader a reflection of her own profound compassion for the afflicted and the abused.

Frame's writing in Faces in the Water is both lyrical and accessible, and at times achingly lovely. Somehow the novel manages to be fast paced while charting an interminable pain and despair. In the end, it is the force of will behind the novel — the desire for change that is palpable on every page — that prevents the experience of reading it being depressing.

The same cannot be said entirely about the wonderfully titled The Edge of the Alphabet. A reading of this book may not help to dispel certain negative notions about Frame's work and its tendency towards bleakness and occasional inaccessibility. The Edge of the Alphabet is un-relenting in its portrait of human isolation (this time outside the asylum).

In a nightmare version of the OE, it follows the experiences of three characters who travel from New Zealand to London and their search for meaning and identity. There is Toby Withers, the epileptic son from Frame's first novel Owls Do Cry; Zoe Pryce, who longs for fulfilment; and moralistic Irishman Pat Keenan. Once again Frame's extraordinary powers as a writer are in evidence. The Edge of the Alphabet boasts her first meta-fictional structure (these three characters are presented from the start as the creation of a central figure, Thora Pattern), and her choice of imagery is, as always, startlingly unexpected and of lasting impact.

The Edge of the Alphabet may be something of an acquired taste, but it is a taste well worth acquiring.

RANDOM HOUSE $34.95

* Dr Jan Cronin teaches New Zealand literature in the English Department at the University of Auckland. The next in this Random House series of Janet Frame reissues will be Living in the Maniatoto in May.