Janet Frame on her lonely journey

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33189, 31 March 1973, Page 10

Janet Frame on her lonely journey

Daughter Buffalo. By Janet Frame. A. H. and A. W. Reed. (Reviewed by R.A.C.) When Janet Frame published “The Lagoon” 22 years ago she was, for the greater part, investigating a world unmistakably real: “That’s that. A flatroofed house and beds with shiny covers, and polished fire-tongs, and a picture of moonlight on a lake.” The poetic use of language was a means of conveying this dense and cluttered

reality as it existed at emotional depths: “She was tall with a fair square head like the top of a clothes-peg, and she smelt like the inside of our front wardrobe.” But even this first volume had begun to bring in the note of doubt as though this world, so firm and richly varied, were a paper landscape through which one might break at any moment: “Do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we’re always in other places. . . In particular the world made of words seemed at one and

the same time the most beautifully true and dangerously false: “Everything is always a story.” The latest novel by Janet Frame is a continuation of her lonely journey into a world behind the paper landscape. If we now glimpse that landscape at all it is as a record of childhood’s misunderstanding: to go into Standard Two was to sit in “jewel” desks. This recoUtion, in Chapter 12, of the sort of material that once was celebrated in “The Lagoon,” a real-life story, is brought with ironic clarity into a world of spectral figures and impossible acts. Ironic, for the child who believed in “jewel” desks. This recollection, in by a word, and reality would prove another “story” altogether. The conventional devices of fiction are still being employed by Janet Frame but only as one might use dominoes to build a tower: there is no account taken of those round dots that once held meanings for the player. Tumlung is one character’s name. He has half the burden of narration. Talbot Edelman is another character who takes a turn at telling the story. The first man is very ancient, a New Zealander who finds himself in New York. The other man is young, an American engaged to be married. Both men are totally possessed by the idea of death, the one as a senile poet and philosopher, the other as a doctor and vivisectionist. Their common deathinterest draws them together into a love-affair and they become the parents of a female buffalo. But the course of their true love never does run smooth for them. In the midst of death we are in life, and Tumlung finds himself alive in New Zealand about the same time as Edelman finds him dead in New York. The daughter, too, following the advice of cruel passers-by on Fifth Avenue (“They said ... to my daughter, Get lost, long hair!”) has got lost. It is not clear whether Turnlung has dreamed Edelman, or vice versa, or both. The bizarre tale is told in tones moving with ease and conviction between the elegiac and the comic, A grisly poetry of associated images

keeps breaking out wherever prose narrative has to be abandoned: that is, where its content becomes so piled up with interlocking ideas and symbols that the realism of prose ceases to be an adequate medium. Death is a constant theme and it is treated in many variations. Death’s solemnity, its reward of peace, its promise of renewal, its seductive mystery, are set off against its horrors, its deformities, its decay, its brutal madness. The buffalo is chosen as America’s most mind-stunning example of this last aspect of death. Indeed Turnlung has gone to America precisely because of the incomparably high standard of dying they have achieved there. The nation’s creed is summed up on the first pages of the novel: It moves, it is alive, kill it. Such is the steadiness of Janet Frame’s vision of her surrealist landscape, so eerie is her assurance that the “beautiful outward” is in fact “full of dead men’s bones,” that the reader is impelled to follow her out into this wilderness and sb to acknowledge her supreme art. The work of explicating these rich books becomes every year a more important and a more complex undertaking.