Customer Reviews

The Edge of the Alphabet

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Following the publishing of her first novel, "Owls Do Cry" (1957), Frame published, in close succession, "Faces in the Water" (1961) and "The Edge of the Alphabet" (1962) which, together, are thought by some to form a loose trilogy.

The novels from this first decade of Frame's writing continue to develop the dualistic concerns of the early stories. In what Vincent *O'Sullivan has called `the economy of the gifted victim', alienation figures in the novels as an index of authenticity.

Frame's Romantic visionaries-eccentrics, mad people, epileptics, oddities -are pitted against the repressive forces of a sterile conformist society stultified by philistinism, materialism and the corrupt use of language. Her characters are precariously balanced on the borders between (linguistic and social) conformity and wholesale abandonment to the dissolutions of meaning and selfhood: silence, insanity, death (often suicide).

Given the preponderance of death, suicide and madness in the novels, it is not surprising that some of Frame's readers have criticised the negativity of a vision that risks idealising insanity and difference as privileged sites of (incommunicable) knowledge. Frame's characters on `the edge of the alphabet' lack an effective medium to communicate the `treasure' to which they have privileged access: how can one express the visionary dream of wholeness in the divisive medium of social language?

The ambivalent attitude towards language expressed in the novels is typically Modernist; language is understood as dual: a duel and potential jewel (to utilise one of her frequent homophonic puns). Cutting against the possibility of the healing potential of language, properly used, is an intuition of the `deceit' of words, and the ultimate failure of language to breach the `eternity' that lies beyond the `hieroglyphic commonplace'.

For one is so critical of language, Frame's work sparkles with prose that is both original and poigant. Her stylistic experimentation incorporates elements of magic realism and surrealism, poetry and prose in a tour de force of sheer imagination.

Janet Frame is a wonderful writer. Her use of language is visual, eloquent without being contrived. I read this book in a sort of go with the flow fashion. I didn't always follow the narrative, some of her digressions were a bit obtuse, yet throughout the absolute strength of her prose kept me involved.

The Edge of the Alphabet is a pessimistic tale of ordinary lives that are for the most part half-lived at best. The narrator is a confusing character, Thora. She is not always present in the novel and often the chapters in which she speaks are quite ambivalent. The rest of the novels follows three characters.Each is damaged and isolated in some way - Pat(the Irish bus driver looking for a stable retirement), Zoe(the middle-aged, socially awkward school teacher) and Toby (the epileptic). They are lonely people who meet on a boat en route to England from New Zealand. Toby goes with the intent of writing a novel, Pat is returning after his unsuccessful search for a servile New Zealand bride and Zoe is off to do "research."

I read this book after seeing Jane Campion's movie "Angel at my Table" (Janet Frame's biography) and felt knowledge of the author definately enhanced the book.

When I first started this novel it put me off (in the 59 years of my life I've read a lot of 19th C. novels) as the narrative is not naturalistic like George Elliot or Tolstoy. Sin embargo(that's nevertheless in Spanish), as I read on I was amazed by the author's magical metaphoric flights and realized here is a person with a special gift, although the cost of this gift could be weighty. Here are a couple of sentences from the novel I copied into my journal: "Here the dead(my goldsmiths) keep cropping up like daisies with their floral blackmail." and, "It was decided she needed to be "drawn out", a process of social economy where one is encouraged to extract and display one's personality in the manner of a small boy drawing out a length of chewing gum." -creative ironic satire. I thought the review by Customer, Sept.2, 2002 to be particularly apt and intelligent.