Stories And Fantasies

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31083, 11 June 1966, Page 4

Stories And Fantasies

[Reviewed By R.A.C.]

The Reservoir and other stories. By Janet Frame. Pegasus.

A couple of years ago Janet Frame published in America a twin set of stories and fantasies, one called “Snowman, Snowman,” the other called “The Reservoir.” The two books were set up and sold as a pair in a box. Now a selection from both books appears under one title, “The Reservoir.” The title-story of

“Snowman, Snowman,” running over a hundred pages, has been dropped. To take worst things first: the paper is poor, the dust-jacket commonplace, and the margins skimpy for the original plates have been used on a smaller page. Thus the American re-spelling of Miss Frame’s manuscript remains, making an unhappy combination of New Zealand language and American spelling. “Aeroplane” becomes “airplane.” Yet in the course of this retouching nobody has had the tact to tidy up a few grammatical lapses eg. “lay” is always used for “laid.” Altogether the presentation is uncomplimentary to the most gifted of our writers, and the publishers here must have been despressed at the sight of this English job of work when they have striven so successfully to make fine books themselves.

These stories vary greatly in length and in manner. Undoubtedly the longer they are the easier they are to accept as true fiction. Many are short and defy conventional classifications, partaking somewhat

of the lyric poem, somewhat of the pensee (what Lawrence called “pansies”) and somewhat of the reminiscence found scattered through autobiographies. What holds all the pieces together within the grasp of a single creative manner is the prevalence of an almost grotesque imagery. Both the external world and the internal world are reported in terms of unwonted comparisons. It is a sort of modem metaphysical presentation of experience, startling and occasionally unacceptable in its new juxtapositions. At its best this writing casts a strange and searching light upon our society, the images being fashioned by the rubbing together of ironical observation and bitterness of feeling: “Beating his head he sent up a cloud of ideas which had a stored musty smell for they had been swept under the carpet years ago.”

"She could make no Impression on him ... his secret Inward weather covered all her tracks.”

As a maker of metaphors Janet Frame is always alert to the submerged metaphors in common English usage and these she fetches to the surface again and again to exploit anew the imaginative resources of our language. The dominant themes of this collection are loss and frustration, the bafflement of hope, the supreme significance of death as a fact of life, and the petty victories of routine, respectability and greed. Sometimes there is little more than a chain of associated images expressing a vagueness of pain or defeat. The finest of the pieces are those like .“The Reservoir” itself, or “Royal Icing," where, in the Katherine Mansfield manner, the situation has been comprehended in a central symbol. This Janet Frame was able to do as “The Lagoon” (see e.g. "The Sheep”) and it is a blessing for us that she still supremely possesses this gift.

Since it appeared in 1961 Joan Stevens’s “The New Zealand Novel” has been an indispensable compendium of its subject, embodying both perspective and detail. It is now brought up to 1965 with sections on Light Fiction and Serious Fiction. Bill Pearson and Graham Billing make important entries and Janet Frame is rightly recognised as “the major novelist of our 1960’5”. The appendix remains one of the book's chief interests for teachers.