Is there an author with a better origin story than the New Zealand novelist Janet Frame? Frame, who was born 100 years ago next week and died in 2004, was diagnosed with schizophrenia in her twenties and spent eight years in mental hospitals. She was told she was “there for life”, but started writing stories: she was paid two guineas for her first story in The Listener magazine in 1945.
In 1951 she found out that she had been put on the hospital list for a dreaded lobotomy — cutting away parts of the brain — aimed at curing her condition. “Wouldn’t you like to be normal?” Then, shortly before she was due to be operated on, the hospital superintendent told her that her first book of stories, The Lagoon, had won a prestigious literary prize. “I’ve decided that you should stay as you are,” he told her. “I don’t want you changed.”
And so “my writing saved me”, as Frame put it in her autobiography An Angel at My Table (which was made into a film by Jane Campion in 1990). She went on to publish 11 novels in her lifetime, along with many more stories. Her second novel, Faces in the Water (1961), describes her time in the hospitals, and now, to mark her centenary, the coolest publisher in town, Fitzcarraldo Editions, has reissued her third novel, The Edge of the Alphabet (1962).
It’s a charming, lyrical, unconventional story of a trio of misfits in London after the war, and the first half of the book shows how they got there. One is Toby Withers, a young man with epilepsy living in New Zealand with his father after his mother’s death. “You’re wearing Mum’s slippers!” he scolds his dad. He wants to write a book called The Lost Tribe and leave New Zealand, where his diet consists of oxtail stew and tinned peaches, and where his aunt shuns him because of his “embarrassing disease … that caused people to wonder about the family history”. And so he boards a ship to London. “‘As from today,’ Toby lied to himself, ‘I am free.’”
On board he meets Pat, a hopeless Irishman who tells Toby he “might have been a doctor. People say I have the qualities for a doctor. I have close friends who are doctors.” The viewpoint switches between Toby and Pat in a string of perfect vignettes both funny and sad: Pat’s visions of leprechauns; Toby’s memories of his mother who was forever waiting for “some day when my ship comes home”. Pat suggests Toby should live with him in Clapham once they reach London, and invites another passenger too, Zoe Bryce. Zoe is a schoolteacher who feels herself to be “out of date”: she has never been kissed, and has only seen kisses “on television, in cinemas, tadpole-tongued in summer parks”.
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Eventually, the unlikely threesome arrive in London, where “the streets are paved with prostitutes, artists, one-legged trumpeters” and Pat is disappointed. “You have to steer clear of the foreigners,” he tells the others without irony. There follows a lively account of the uncertainties of life in a new city — where shop window displays have “neon lit polythene lawns” — and settling into rented accommodation. “There is a knack in pulling the lavatory chain,” Toby’s landlady tells him.
The comedy blends with sadness: Toby longs to be able to write to his late mother and receive a comforting letter in reply. He gets a job as a doorman — “the hardest work was to stand around switching your face on and off from welcoming (to patrons) to threatening (to suspicious characters)” — and Zoe works as a cinema usherette. But they are both lonely; this is a book about loneliness — will Toby ever find his lost tribe? — and there’s a plot turn to come that will shock the reader.
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Frame’s books are ideal reading for anyone with an appetite for eccentric, darkly comic postwar novelists: Barbara Comyns, Beryl Bainbridge, Muriel Spark. Her writing is engaging and idiosyncratic — full of a character that proves that the best way to strike deep with the reader is not to do what everyone else is doing, but to grasp your distinctive vision of the world and hammer it hard.
The title — The Edge of the Alphabet — refers to people such as Toby and Zoe, who are out of place in the world, but also to the slippery nature of language. Words help us to communicate, but they can also divide us. “What more successful means of avoidance are there than words?” Toby asks. And words are durable: they “may sometimes act like invisible ink” when, years after they are written, they “emerge stark and black with meaning and message, like telegraph wires against a clear sky”. And that is the joy of books like this, out of print for 60 years, but now roaring into view, stronger and brighter than ever. It’s good to have it back.
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The Edge of the Alphabet by Janet Frame (Fitzcarraldo Editions £12.99 pp296). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
