The Carpathians by Janet Frame

She thought, surprised at such a natural event, 'Why, it's raining.' Yet the falling rain was not 'real' rain. Specks, some small as carrot seed (George Coker had shown her his packets of garden seed), others as large, mapped purple and grey, as beanseed, some like hundreds-and-thousands, others like dew-drops set with polished diamonds, rubies, emeralds; or plain dew-drops that flowed in changing shapes among the layers of seeds and seed-pearls and jewels white and brown and red pellets of clay and then earth-coloured flecks of mould; smears of dung, animal and human, and every 'raindrop' and mixture of jewels and waste, in shapes of the 'old' punctuation and language--apostrophes, notes of music, letters of the alphabets of all languages. The rain was at once alive in its falling and flowing; and dead, for it was voiceless, completely without sound. The only sound was the continuing rage from the people of Kowhai Street.

Mattina Brecon is the rich American wife of a once-successful novelist. Her hobby is long vacations in which she stays in one place, trying to know it as best she can, and her latest trip takes her to the small town of Puamahara in New Zealand. What draws her to the town is the legend of the Memory Flower, an ancient... uh, flower... that holds all... memories? It's pretty unclear, but whatever it is, it's been seized upon by the tourist board, and whoever Mattina talks to on Kowhai Street where she has taken up residence regards it as little more than a tourist gimmick. The Memory Flower is one of two mysterious phenomena that exert their influence on The Carpathians; the other is the "Gravity Star," which is some kind of scientific phenomenon that has the power to erase distance, separation, particularity, to turn the mountains of New Zealand into the Carpathians of eastern Europe. Neither the Memory Flower nor the Gravity Star is ever explained in any real way, but the influence they exert is powerful, especially on Kowhai Street, which seems to be the focal point for metaphysical powers with the ability to transform life entirely.

The Carpathians is a strange book in how not strange it can be. Much of it seems to be the fairly simple story of a woman who travels to a part of the world that is strange to her and tries, and mostly fails, to get to know people. They're far more interested in a murder that has recently occurred on the street than whatever the "Memory Flower" is, and they want to hear stories about American places they know by name, like San Francisco and Miami. Not only is Mattina unable to connect with these people, they seem to barely be able to connect with each other. But eventually the Gravity Star comes to bear: in the middle of the night, Mattina is woken by the sound of all the residents of Kowhai Street walking into their yard and screaming. A rain pours down letters, numbers, punctuation marks, that gather, real enough, on the edge of the windowsill. The next day, all of the residents are gone, and Mattina is unable to get anyone else in Puamahara to take their disappearance seriously. The best she can do is buy up the vacant properties, which she will leave for her husband and son to visit later, and pay witness to.

What is this book all about? The Gravity Star, whatever it might be on a literal level, seems to have the potential to truly transform human life on the planet. Who needs language when there is a power that can literally bring what is distant close? Language, words, have mostly failed us; they have not provided the residents of Kowhai Street with a sufficient means to enter into each others' lives. The happiest among them might be a non-verbal autistic daughter, placed in a local home, who will never be able to express what she is feeling, whether happiness or something else, to her parents. But if the scene of the alphabet rain is a sign that the Gravity Star is obliterating language in exchange for something else, why is it that all the people disappear? Have they been brought closer, or brought together, or have they simply been annihilated? It's a strange, strange scene in a deceptively strange book, made stranger by small details, like the fact that it seems to be simultaneously "written" by a local amateur named Dinny Wheatstone and Mattina's son John Henry. I didn't find it as immediately gratifying as Frame's Owls Do Cry, which I read last year and loved, but that scene--the screaming, the jewel-and-shit-encrusted letters falling from the sky--is certain to stick with me.