Janet Frame (1924–2004)

"Much of living is an attempt to preserve oneself by annexing and occupying others."

For reasons that we are never told about Istina Mavet has been committed to a psychiatric hospital where she spends a number of years oscillating between being well enough to be released to being considered so ill that she is suitable for a lobotomy to change her personality. Yet despite her apparent madness, she is keenly observant of her fellow patients and the dictatorial staff.

If you have read the show more introduction by Hilary Mantel you will be aware that the author had a very similar experience to Istina. She, too, was stigmatised as being mad and committed to a mental asylum for eight years, if she hadn't won a literary award would herself have undergone brain surgery. But whilst there are undoubtedly similarities between what Frame and Istina had to endure it is dangerous to view this book as being purely autobiographical. In fact, you would be missing the point. Instead I believe that it should be viewed as a snapshot of how mental illness was misunderstood during the 1950s and how its sufferers were treated or perhaps that should say mistreated, told from the viewpoint of first hand experience.

In 'Faces in the Water' all of the patients, including Istina, are treated as naughty children who must learn to behave and very little effort is made into trying to discover the root of their illnesses. When the more 'progressive' doctors do attempt to understand their patients their efforts fall woefully short. On pre-ordained occasions the patients are allowed to engage in normal human activities but it is always with the threat that if they misbehave they will be sent for ECT. Public relations is apparently more important that therapy.

Istina's fear of the prospect of being treated with ECT and the lengths she goes to avoid it leaves the reader with little doubt about what Frame thinks about ECT. However, she doesn't totally condemn it, rather she is prefers the reader to make their own mind up; she is simply presenting the facts.

I must admit that I initially struggled with the disjointed nature of the writing even if I understood quite why Frame employed it, but there is undoubtedly a certain artistry in her use of it. Although Istina is released from the mental hospitals for short periods of time she always finds herself returning and sees little likelihood of a better life on the outside making this a remarkable but an unremittingly bleak and depressing read also.

I would certainly recommend it to others to but with the fervent hope that it was a book of it's time and that things have since changed for the better.

"There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water" show less

Floating somewhere between free verse and stream of consciousness, Janet Frame's beautifully evocative, semi-autobiographical novel traces the various fortunes of the dirt poor Withers family...most notably siblings Francie, Daphne, Toby, and Teresa (nicknamed "Chicks")...as they grow up and strive to establish lives for themselves in the modern world of 1950's New Zealand. Frame uses words the way a painter uses oils (or a sculptor a chisel) giving her readers not so much a linear story but show more rather a carefully curated collage of memories, impressions, and emotional impacts. One marries well and turns to consumerism in order to fill an inner void; another tries to make their own way despite a severe handicap only to find Poverty traveling alongside them; and yet another struggles to understand the world through a mind crippled by madness. Humorous and heartbreaking in turn, "Owls Do Cry" is the closest I've come to an immersive reading experience in quite some time. show less

Not much changes in the English village of Little Burgelstatham, in East Suffolk. The place and the people have remained much the same since the end of the Second World War. But it’s the 1960s and change is creeping in whether the villagers like it or not. In The Adaptable Man, her fifth novel, Janet Frame explores the tension between progress and stagnation, between adapting to changing times and attitudes and clinging to old, outmoded ways. Her cast of characters are unremarkable people show more whose lives have been disrupted by unwelcome shifts in fortune or are on the cusp of planned change. The Reverend Aisley Maude, who has recently lost his wife and is questioning his faith, has come to Little Burgelstatham after an illness to convalesce at Clematis Cottage, the home of his brother Russell and Russell’s wife Greta. Aisley, who reads Anglo Saxon poetry, is obsessed with St. Cuthbert, a 7th-century monk, and aspires to mimic the saint, who lived as a hermit in quiet contemplation. Russell and Greta have their own obsessions. Russell, a dentist who has resisted updating the equipment in his surgery, is obsessed with teeth and his stamp collection. Greta spends her time gardening and trying to exterminate the pests that are giving her trouble. Living with the Maudes as guests are their 20-year-old son Alwyn and his fiancé Jenny. Alwyn, who seems to float above the fray, fancies himself an amoral creature, a man of his times who welcomes change, untethered to the past, free to do as he pleases. The village in general is suspicious of strangers and resistant to change, especially technology (television, electricity) and the recent influx of holiday visitors from London, who are buying up property as they look to the English countryside as a refuge from the urban rat-race. With patience and remarkable specificity, Frame depicts the goings-on over several months in an assortment of households in a rural community that on its surface appears tranquil, but which a little digging reveals to be a seething hotbed of envy, resentment and fear. To make matters worse, the encroachment of the external world on Little Burgelstatham has taken unexpected and disturbingly tangible form in the body of a young Italian man, a seasonal farm worker, found dead (murdered?) at the edge of a pond on the village outskirts. The novel has a satirical tone and does not shy away from absurdity, and Frame’s lyrical, stream-of-consciousness approach to the narrative poses challenges but offers a huge aesthetic payoff to the persistent reader. Janet Frame delights in exposing the weaknesses, delusions and foibles of her characters—never in mockery, but affectionately, drawing the reader to them in sympathy. The third-person omniscient narrative meanders somewhat but always returns to the notion that change is an inevitable feature of the human condition, and when we resist it, we risk making ourselves look ridiculous. Janet Frame’s work draws inspiration from the author’s fascination with human behaviour, in all its manifestations, and The Adaptable Man is no exception. But this is the first of her novels to not dwell overtly, either exclusively or in part, on the many ways that mental illness can destabilize a person’s life (though a droll critic could argue that all of the characters in this novel are to some extent insane). The catastrophic and tragic event that closes the novel is perhaps a comment on the futility of humanity’s endeavours to assert control over its destiny. But as always with Janet Frame’s fiction, the reader is ultimately left to make of it what she will. show less

This book was published posthumously as the author considered it to be too personal as it is very autobiographical.
Grace Cleave is struggling with the onset of the English winter. her mind keeps drifting to home, New Zealand. she feels like a migratory bird and her mental health is suffering along with her writing. After a stay in hospital, Grace decides to accept an invitation to spend a weekend in rural England with an acquaintance and his family. Observing the young family her mind is show more drawn back to her own childhood in New Zealand.
However, the weekend is not a success, as Grace suffers acute anxiety with social etiquette, expectations and small daily interactions. She cuts her stay short to return to the seclusion of her flat and typewriter.
This book has all of Frame's trademark lyrical language and a painful honesty. I immediately recognized that she would now be diagnosed as autistic and this was confirmed as I did some research. Instead, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and suffered shock treatments. She narrowly avoided having a scheduled lobotomy, only because of winning a literary prize. show less