Inside The Mind

Press, Volume C, Issue 29638, 7 October 1961, Page 3

Inside The Mind

Faces In The Water. By Janet Frame. Pegasus Press. 219 pp. Janet Frame’s new work is a fictional account of a young woman’s hprrifying sufferings during nine years’ confinement in New Zealand mental hospitals. Estina Mavet is about 20 when she enters a South Island mental hospital called Cliffhaven. Like scores of the mentally afflicted she is not wholly insane. She knows she is a mental patient and is trying to grapple with her confusion and fears. She suffers loneliness, humiliation, constant anxiety of what is to happen next, and resents mass herding as if of animals, contact with filth, hysteria, illness and despair, and sadism. The appalling lowering of pride, the lack'of privacy, warmth, love and understanding agonisingly shrivel and dilate by turn the sensitive diseased mind and spirit. A story of life in a mental hospital is not unusual; like convents, mental hospitals have been the scenes of quite a few* books that have shocked. In Janet Frame’s first novel, "Owls Do Cry,” one of the characters went to a mental hospital where she experienced lobotomy. The new story follows the accepted theme of the debased world of a mental hospital; what makes it remarkable is the extreme perception of the author and her extraordinary ability to express thought and the reactions of the senses. Through flights of a wildly free imagination so magnificently harnessed as to uncover rock-bottom truths, Janet Frame hammers home this twin-cell theme: the essential aloneness of the individual mind and the agonis-

ing difficulty of human communication. Mental aloneness can be portrayed as our most precious private privilege; here it is seen as the deep, lonely and irrevocable tragedy of humanity, the striving for communication as bleakly doomed. The author seems to present the classic question of the philosophers: Are the mad any madder than the sane are insane? Another reason which makes this book special is the excitement it evokes for the New Zealand reader still unused to having his background unself - consciously presented. Like all other countries, New Zealand is unique. It smells like no other, the colour of Its vegetation matches no other, the air that hangs about it hangs not elsewhere. How many New Zealand authors have sincerely tried to interpret all this, and how few, outside the poets, have overcome selfconsciousness with marked success? Janet Frame is here wholly successful. An entirely unobtrusive New Zealand atmosphere breathes as naturally as a baby with the same simplicity, though, especially where there is allegory, the prose is not always simple. Nevertheless, the book is as though it were written with a shaft of prismatic crystal which reflects the sunlight greyness and black of night of the human mind. The impact of this on the reader would be more powerful if there were slightly less of it The book is divided into three sections. Estina Mavet describes her experiences first in Cliffhaven hospital, then in Treecroft hospital near Auckland, then back in Cliffhaven. On her return to Cliffhaven wards and buildings

where fear and panic lie in wait are stamped on her memory: but the reader has already forgotten the names and numbers of the wards. The patient vividly revives 8

memories and makes comparisons; but the reader has become bemused. If the third section were carefully pruned it would benefit the book, turning it from a thudding cannon into a deadly salvo.