Frame's latest novel

Janet Frame's new novel. The Adaptable Man, is all that its publishers claim to be. This was somewhat unexpected, because the publishers claim it to be "unquestionably, her most important novel to date, and her book of widest appeal."

The Adaptable Man is not an easy book to read—it is complex and subtle; but it will impress as a startling and original experiment which has a contribution to make to the development of the novel. The prose still demands to be read aloud, but for its sound and rhythm, more particularly as a non-poetic art-form.

Romantic or mystical attractiveness is present, but the words are effective chiefly for their toughness and vitality.

Janet Frame has created a curious, but essentially dull, world. The novel presents calm, almost matter of fact exterior. There is beauty or ugliness, violence and ambition; but these are. or seem to be, hidden.

The characters live in their own small orbits, egocentric and alone. They seem to struggle against truth, "determined to establish the scene as one of contentment"; there is, as the refrain to the prologue points out, "not much fun; out then who wants fun?"

They are the Great Dull who "are not even made familiar to themselves and others by being described, analysed, explained by novelists," whose world "is largely unknown."

The novelist, contrasting herself ironically with Spender ("I think continually of those who were truly great"), resists the temptation, as she would describe it, to "cheat by implying. This man is a bore but I shall write about him in such an interesting way that you will not realise he is a bore."

The gloomy thing about the position in which she finds herself is that she is no longer "on the side of life"; she is giving us no reason to suspend the "death-sentence of the individual."

These are the people, as we come to realise, whose death passed unnoticed, "brought no protest or mourning"; but Janet Frame has succeeded in interesting us if not in them, then in their predicament.

It is fortunate that The Adaptable Man is such a very witty novel—witty in the sense of being funny through the intellect and the understanding, of showing fine perceptions of the incongruous and the ridiculous. The writer's slightly whimsical attitude to herself and her characters is established from the first; the old "witch-novelist" rises up out of a Macbeth landscape and we are told:

"Witches still have a tough constitution; there's a kind of unselfishness, detachment in their devilish cooking. They can't cat. it themselves."

The writing is also consistently clever, the comments constantly unexpected; sometimes the observations have a tone that can only be called wise:

"Hate is so often taken for granted; people seldom remark— I can't see why you should hate her or him, yet always there is someone, somewhere, exclaiming with indignation, envy, intense curiosity—What does he see in her, what does she see in him.

This is a way, I suppose, of working a rearguard action against the overall denial of individuality— in this way the language and the wit sustain us when the characters appear most dull.

But, as we have said, it is the predicament of these characters, which sustains us most of all. There is of course a certain inherent danger in their position: "They even contribute by their own actions to the denial of their soul."

Nothing makes their bewilderment more pathetic, however, than the dangers of the age and its demands.

Most of the characters in this novel are unable to live in the present time; they each escape to their own little world—some dream of another village left years before, others of another country just visited; some find themselves in an earlier generation, others in another age. And as each retreats to his particular dream, it is seen, that their composite world is itself unfitted to the age: the Overspill comes to the village.

The gestures against this fate, this inability to adapt, are quite futile: Russell Maude's trip to the airport, Aisley Maude's struggles with a God who has moved, and most, spectacularly Muriel Baldry's attempt to display the Venini chandelier with which she has been obsessed.

Within this pattern even the most violent or improper acts may be committed without necessarily providing an escape—it does not seem that even Alwyn Maude. who tries to live as the Adaptable Man, has succeeded in escaping himself as he escapes Little Burgelstatham: His philosophy, a version of Ivan Koramazov's "everything is permissable," provides no answer to his predicament.

It is almost as if his destructiveness, in acting as one destroyer of the unadaptable, is merely another form of escape.

Janet Frame evokes the East Suffolk countryside with ease and conviction—the same skill which she brings to bear on all her symbolism—and within this rural framework she creates what is virtually a quaint and almost entirely new mythology. She is, of course, uncovering an unexplored world, where there are unknown forms of isolation and estrangement, unthought ways of passion and frustration. It is perhaps the greatest tribute to this novel that Janet Frame is able to move in this dull world without sabotaging herself.

For the novel is never dull— perhaps because, with all the wit, it is uncompromisingly serious. Its questions are subtly, beautifully conceived. Their implications are not comforting: "... imposing our own weather, our own limits of reach and touch ... don't we all live in mirrors, for ever?"—

P.G.R.