Janet Frame’s insights

Press, 2 May 1981, Page 17

Janet Frame’s insights

Faces in the Water. By Janet Frame. The Women’s Press, 1980. 254 pp. $8.95 (paperback).

(Reviewed by

Diane Prout)

Janet Frame is rather a shadowy literary figure here in her own country. Acclaimed abroad as “the most talented novelist ... since Katherine Mansfield” and “among the best of contemporary novelists,” she has, for the most part, been • a subject for critical analysis by students of New Zealand literature who find in her evocative imagery and elliptical prose a rich lode for that favourite academic pastime of “hunt the symbol.” The fact that she has suffered periods of mental instability lends an extra dimension to her work, while posing critical problems. To what extent is her frequent obscurity of meaning the product of genius- and insight? To what degree does the vision belong to a tragically disordered mind? These problems of the individual’s perception of reality, both internal and external, are treated in a relatively straightforward way in “Faces In The Water” which, the author states, is a work of fiction written in “documentary form.” It is the secondary aspect that predominates in this. work. No one could have written such a fascinating, touching and utterly convincing book about life in a mental institution unless there had been previous experienceon which to found it. Certain parallels between author and narrator are readily apparent. Istina Mavet, like Frame, has been a teacher. Intelligent and cultured, she has gradually lost touch with the real world and retreated into a private landscape of

» image and symbol, unable to * communicate' her feelings and fears except at a most fundamental level. She. is committed to Cliffhaven, then . to Treecroft, asylums situated somewhere in New Zealand, where, with periods of. remission, she is to spend eight long years of imprisonment and anguish; anguish which is rendered more acute on account of the inability of the psychiatric nursing, staff to understand and assuage the nameless and unspeakable, torments of the insane. For, as Istina is able to tell us, the horrors are very real. First shock therapy,, which, as has been well documented in the past, was used for the punishment and control of patients as much as for their cure. Then, like the organisation of Dante’s Inferno, are the hierarchical divisions of Damned, ranging from the privileged peacefulness of “Ward, Seven,” to the hopelessness of “Lawn Lodge” where patients are “so far gone” that even the doctors considered time spent on their treatment of little avail. As for the inmates themselves, though allegedly bearing no resemblance to living persons, these are so real, so tragic in their bizarre afflictions, that the reader’s sympathies are totally engaged throughout the book. Anyone who has ever worked in an institution or been engaged in social work will recognise many of the cases — the schizoid, the manic and the depressive. And yet this book escapes being a clinical study by virtue of the poetic sensibility which informs it. Bitter, funny, compassionate, and above all frighteningly human, “Faces In The Water” is a compulsively readable book.