VIGOUR AND POWER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 929, 31 May 1957, Page 12

VIGOUR AND POWER

OWLS DO CRY, o, Janet Frame; Pegasus Press, N.Z. price 15/-.

(Reviewed by

Davil

Hall

XCESSIVE expectation sometimes creates its own disappointment: this is not the case with Janet Frame’s first novel. It has the originality and freshness of her stories. (The Lagoon has gained recognition slowly, but it is now firmly placed on its own eminence.) It has a sense of tragedy, a sense of the hopelessness of human beings in the toils of circumstance; it has deep feeling and a heightened emotional awareness. It is, in short, a fine novel, and a novel with a distinctively New Zealand flavour. None the less, it is flawed and imperfect as a work of art. The family live in Waimaru (fairly readily identifiable as Oamaru). Amy and Bob Withers have four children, Francie, Toby, Daphne and Chicks. They are little ragamuffins and love visiting the town dump to pick up unconsidered trifles. The childhood scenes are altogether convincing, perhaps because, until the end of the first part, the misfortunes are not laid.on too thick. There are only poverty and Toby’s epileptic fits to contend with. But at the end of this section, Francie, pert, made-up and be-trousered, who has not long left school, and not long entered the unbiddable phase of adolescence, comes to a grotesque, accidental end in the rubbish-tip fire. This is a family Fate has Doomed. The’ dooms are various. Toby-shingle-short and money-obsessed-for all his handicaps, begins to make his ‘way in the world, but no one understands him. Daphne is condemned to years in a mental hospital-these scenes are the most ubearably poignant in the book. Chicks, married, has grown into a social climber who is also a culturesnob, confiding all her own meanness of spirit; quite incredibly, to a diarythe diary which Toby finds, to read his climbing sister’s real opinion of him. In all the. characterisation in this book Janet Frame shows herself gifted with a psychological insight used ruthlessly and with assured power. We are placed inside the minds of the children in turn, and see enough for our thorough discomfort. The mother, Amy, stupid, kind and trusting in a singularly improvident Providence, and the father, Bob, limited, bewildered and adrift on the idle current of retirement, are viewed externally, but are none the less portraits as accurate as they are moving. Certain elements in the book suggest echoes of Sargeson’s I Saw In My Dream -unfortunately the work of his least suited to imitation. The deliberate cherishing of a sense of social inferiority, and especially the symbolism, suggest not wholly happy contrivance. The symbolism, Francie dying in the rubbish fire and Chicks coming to live in a modern house on the very site of the filled-in rubbish tip, or the Bessick murder case jolting Chicks’s efforts to make nice friends, twists life into a pattern which remains, for all Janet Frame’s brilliance, teasingly obscure. This obscurity obviously reaches its climax in the epilogue, with its tallying up of the horrid things which have happened to each of the main characters, crowned by the chorus phrase, "And the name was Tobias E. Withers,, though the

papers said another name." At least, in The Lagoon, however wildly the imagination soared, we knew always what was image and what was fact. That I think is the core of the difficulty of Owls Do Cry: it is full of superb and triumphant realism, and at the same time it is a work of an unbridled and richly-endowed imagination. The two elements remain unresolved, fighting against each other from _beginning to end. Janet Frame is so well armed as a satirist she could well make this her sole field: And they wore rouge and powder and face-cream from the same box, because, thought Flora Norris and Sister Dulling, that sort of thing is the first step to leading a normal life; and once they learn which comes first and where, vanishing or cold cream, they move, as one of the chiefs expressed it, in a radio talk -along the path to sanity, toward the real values of civilisation. Indeed the book is stuffed full of quotable titbits, instinct with either irony or pathos, Owls Do Cry is the most interesting novel by a New Zealander published in the last few years. If I think it in some ways imperfect, I am none the less grateful for it. It is as exciting as it is disturbing, and a work of vigour and power. Janet Frame’s next novel may be tremendous.