Frame

Faces in the Water by Janet Frame – #1961Club

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I made a lot of notes on Faces in the Water while I was reading it, but I find that I don’t really know what to write now! It’s a novel about a woman who is in and out of psychiatric institutions – mostly in – and the treatment she receives from the staff there. Frame was famously going to have a lobotomy before she was awarded a literary prize, and her characters face and fear the same fate – as well as other brutal forms of treatment that were meted out to those deemed ‘mad’. It is clearly a heavily autobiographical book, despite what the note at the beginning protests.

I’m not going to write a full review, but will share some quotes and a couple of reasons why I didn’t love this book as much as I was hoping.

The strongest part of it is Frame’s ability to write moments of madness – getting into the curiously lucid incoherence of somebody in the throes of delusion.

I will write about the season of peril.  I was put in hospital because a great gap opened in the ice floe between myself and the other people whom I watched, with their world, drifting away through a violet-coloured sea where hammerhead sharks in tropical ease swam side by side with the seals and the polar bears. I was alone on the ice. A blizzard came and I grew numb and wanted to lie down and sleep and I would have done so had not the strangers arrrived with scissors and cloth bags filled with lice and red-labelled bottles of poison, and other dangers which I had not realised before – mirrors, cloaks, corridors, furniture, square inches, bolted lengths of silence – plain and patterned, free samples of voices. And the strangers, without speaking, put up circular calico tents and camped with me, surrounded me with their merchanise of peril.

Elsewhere in the novel, where she is more lucid, she can write piercingly of the way that mentally unwell patients are treated in reality and fiction.

There is an aspect of madness which is seldom mentioned in fiction because it would damage the romantic popular idea of the insane as a person whose speech appeals as immediately poetic; but it is seldom the east Opheliana recited like pages of a seed catalog or the outpourings of Crazy Janes who provide, in fiction, an outlet for poetic abandon. Few of the people who roamed the dayroom would have qualified as acceptable heroines, in popular taste; few were charminginly uninhibited eccentrics. The mass provoke mostly irritation hostility and impatience. Their behavior affronted, caused uneasiness; they wept and moaned; they quarreled and complained. They were a nuisance and were treated as such. It was forgotten that they too possessed a prized humanity which needed care and love, that a tiny poetic essence could be distilled from their overflowing squalid truth.

Finally, I loved this darkly beautiful description of a possible lobotomy:

So Dr. Portman had changed his mind, he had decided they would bore two holes in the side of my head for my unsuitable personality to fly out like a migrating bird to another country and never return not even when spring came and the cherry blossom opened and the spindly wild plum showed white along the paddock fences.

So, with all this extraordinary writing, why did I end up not loving Faces in the Water? It was largely because so much of it was written in a general sense. For each different hospital or institution, the narrator tells us things that often happen – ‘We always did X, they always did Y’. It means that the story doesn’t have as much specificity or immediacy if she had spent more time on particular events. It also made everything feel more distanced. A slight change, to telling one-off stories in the moment, would have made Faces in the Water so much more effective and compelling, in my opinion.

That was my major criticism. Besides that, it moved between so many institutions that we didn’t get many characters to follow through the novel, leaving it feeling a bit disjointed – not in an effective way that mirrored the protagonist’s mental disjointment, but in a way that felt a bit clumsy.

So, very much a novel of parts. There are so many paragraphs you could quote that are extraordinary. But I’m not sure it worked well as a novel.

1961 Club badge: a library from the 1960s, with the dates 13-19 April 2026 and The 1961 Club overlaid.

A couple more #1961Club titles

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As usual with the clubs, there were some books that didn’t work as well for me – and I didn’t have a whole blog post’s worth to say about them. But let’s add them to the 1961 Club list anyway!

1961 Club badge: a library from the 1960s, with the dates 13-19 April 2026 and The 1961 Club overlaid.

Rose Under Glass by Elizabeth Berridge

If only this could have lived up to its extraordinary first line! Here it is: ‘What amazed and affronted Penelope Hinton most about her husband’s death was that the fortune-teller had been right.’

Penelope is only 44, but has been married for 15 years. Widowhood is a jarring shift – but she quite quickly meets a man, Pye, who runs a laundrette-coffee-shop and finds an affinity with him that manages to evade the differences in lifestyle and class between them (though she rather overstates the class distinction to herself).

I think I’d have liked Rose Under Glass more if it focused on Penelope, which the blurb to my edition rather implies that it does. But we leave her behind and go over to another group of people, moving from the countryside (against the wife’s will) so that the husband can start a publishing house. And then there’s all sorts of narrative about that, about Pye’s possible involvement, and various outlandish figures in that world.

The whole thing feels like it doesn’t have a centre, or any particular reason to keep reading. The writing is good (sometimes very good, in its quieter, domestic moments) but I found what I often find with Berridge – she needs to be several degrees stranger for it to really work. She writes in a similar vein to Beryl Bainbridge or Barbara Comyns, but lacks their distinctive oddness. Rose Under Glass needs to be sharper in one direction or another, and feels a little pointless over all.

Owls and Satrys by David Pryce-Jones

Another one that starts extremely well, with a funny, strange scene of Henry discovering his mother’s lover leaving the house during the early hours. I really enjoyed the dry irony and the distorted take on family life. Here’s the first couple of paragraphs:

The room in which Henry and his mother were playing cards had not changed in appearance since it has been first done up in 1933, when the Bouchers had married. It had seemed reasonable then to settle into a house in Regent’s Park that required servants to run it; to paint some of the walls an interesting ochre, and to build a cocktail cabinet to hold thirty different bottles. A sick world of incendiary bombs and V.25 refugees and steels helmets had made no difference to the paster casts of Negro-minstral faces that adorned the walls, nor to the carefully collected Lalique glass all over the house.

Lying on the floor of the drawing-room, Henry shuffled the cards. Backed by a specially designed window-seat that had been covered in ersatz fur, they were playing racing-demon, not from pleasure, but from long-established habit. Both mother and son played with game with apparent negligence, but confident of victory, savouring a secret skill.

But, again, Pryce-Jones doesn’t quite live up to the opening. I thought it might be something like A Confederacy of Dunces, where extravagant selfishness bumps up alongside amusing grotesque versions of domesticity. But it becomes less funny, more normal, and… fine. Just nothing very exciting, particularly when the first chapter is so striking.

In the Frame

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Thanks for all your contributions on the previous post, that was both interesting and reassuring – I thought I might be single-handedly holding up the biography market! I couldn’t think of any better way to express why I chose to read biographies (and their ilk) except the rather obvious one ‘to find out more’ – but Karen put it so adroitly when she wrote in the comments “A good auto/biography tempts a different part of the appetite from that which fiction satisfies.”

Onto another section of that appetite tonight – short stories. Those in the collection The Lagoon by Janet Frame, to be precise. I’ve said it before – every time I blog about a book of short stories, I come up against a brick wall, and find it more or less impossible to write coherently (or, rather, cohesively) about the book. But I’ll do my best…

I have Lynne (aka dovegreyreader) to thank for bringing Janet Frame to my attention, which she did with one of these posts. I’d been meaning to read more New Zealand authors, and so the name was stored in the back of my mind… when I found The Lagoon in an Oxford charity shop, I pounced. And I thought it was very good. This is Frame’s first published work, from 1951, and it went on to win the Hubert Church Award – which basically saved her from a leucotomy operation, which had been due to take place at the psychiatric hospital where she’d been diagnosed as schizophrenic. Gulp. As I wrote yesterday, an author’s life and experiences probably oughtn’t overly influence how I read their work, but with Frame she makes no secret of it. A lot of the stories take place in institutes, and the themes are often of seeking mental freedom, of experiencing life in independent and rich ways. This excerpt from ‘Snap-Dragons’ is quite representative: If you were free did you always fly away? Or were you ever free? Were you not always blundering into some prison whose door shut fast behind you so that you cried, let me out, like the bee knocking in the snap-dragon, or the people beating their hands on the walls of their ward.Frame often uses a sort of off-kilter stream-of-consciousness intended to reflect an mind going through imbalance, using structure to unsettle. Sometimes it works, sometimes it gets in the way of the narrative a little… it was a technique which didn’t really succeed for me in Emily Holmes Coleman’s A Shutter of Snow, but with Frame it is more subtle, and only sometimes irksome rather than effective.

A more successful way of unsettling the reader is Frame’s technique of disconcerting endings to her stories. They often end disjointedly, suddenly touching another topic or emotion. For example, ‘The Pictures’ is about a girl and her mother visiting the cinema. All the emotions they feel in response to the film are explored, and the world outside once they leave the cinema, and then the final words are: ‘But the little girl in the pixie-cap didn’t feel sad, she was eating a paper lolly, it was greeny-blue and it tasted like peppermints.’ It introduces a new tone, and shows that the close of a short story is only really the reader turning to face something else, it isn’t really an end.

I usually write in reviews of short story collections that they’re not as good as my first experience, with Katherine Mansfield – Janet Frame is no different, but she is perhaps closer than anyone else I’ve read. These stories, like Mansfield’s, are often very short, very perceptive and affecting. One of my favourites was one of the shortest – ‘A Short Note on the Russian War’. If people are interested to sample Frame’s work, I’ll type it out and post it in a day or too? Anyway, I wholeheartedly second Lynne’s recommendation. Once you’ve exhausted all of KM’s output, there is another New Zealander worth putting in the Frame…