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.

Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame

And listening to their father say about Francie, the children felt afraid, as if suddenly the walls of the house would collapse and the roof disappear and leave them, naked, with nothing to shut them away from the world, and the  world in one stride would walk in and take possession of them, holding them tight in his hand of rock and lava, as if they were insects, and they would have to struggle and kick and fight to escape and make their way. and each time they made their way and the world had dropped them for a while to a peaceful hiding place, it would again seize them with a burning one of its million hands, and the struggle would begin again and again and go on and on and never finish.

The Withers family of Waimaru, New Zealand: Father Bob and Mother Amy, and the children, Francie, Toby, Chicks, Daphne. Each of them grows up among the stultifying conformity of this small town in their own way, each a little strange. Toby is an epileptic, and his disease puts him outside the bounds of normal society; he grows up to work in the "tip," the garbage dump, where as a child he used to hunt for treasures. Chicks is a little strange in her vicious insistence on being normal; her section of Owls Do Cry is a long journal in which she confesses her desire to fit in with the respectable neighbor company, until she learns that one respectable neighbor has respectably murdered another one. As the oldest, Francie is the first to grow up into this world and face a life of working at the woollen mill, where the local lower-middle-class is condemned to its particular shape of narrow life. It's Francie who is the first to learn of the "time of living" in which people are slotted by life into their little niches:

But in all her knowing, she had not learned of the time of living, the unseen always, when people are like the marbles in the fun alley at the show; and a gaudy circumstance will squeeze payment from their cringing and poverty-stricken fate, to give him the privilege of rolling them into the bright or dark box, till they drop into one of the little painted holes, their niche, it is called, and there roll their lives around and around in a frustrating circle.

Here I will issue the customary SPOILER ALERT because I have to talk about the moment that I knew Janet Frame's novel was something special: after a quarter of the book devoted to Francie and her the particular struggles of her coming of age, she accidentally falls down the side of the garbage dump, where she's taken her siblings to forage, into a garbage fire, and dies. It's Francie's death that makes her strange, that puts her outside the margins of society and makes her like Toby, and it continues to haunt the other three siblings as they grow up. To Daphne, the youngest sibling, who spends most of the novel inside a mental institution, Francie never really dies. Daphne's mental state is not one that understands or permits death, at least not in the usual way. There's something incredibly bold about including both Toby and Daphne, and whether they differ in the unusualness of their perspective by kind or degree, I'm not really sure.

Daphne's story has a special resonance when you know a little about Janet Frame, the legendary Kiwi author. In and out of institutions herself for much of her life, Frame was scheduled to undergo a lobotomy when she received notification that a collection of her stories had been accepted for publication, the news of which made her doctors decide maybe it would be better not to remove a hunk of her brain. Daphne undergoes the procedure that Frame never did, and her final section of the book--in which her father comes to visit her, for the first time in years, right before the operation--is one of the book's most shocking and original moments.

Owls Do Cry blew me away. It reminded me a little of Patrick White, her counterpart across the Tasman Sea, who also wrote about altered states of understanding and the way epiphany emerges amid the repressive qualities of modern middle-class life. It reminded me, too, of N. Scott Momaday in the way that Frame folds in multiple modes and points-of-view that vary the voice and tone, like Chicks' diary. But it reminded me, too, of the great modern masters like Joyce--if what this is is "stream-of-consciousness," it's among the best of it. I found Owls Do Cry in turns shocking, tragic, bewildering, and profoundly funny. One of my favorite experiences every year is discovering a new author that makes me say, I want to read everything they've ever read, and Janet Frame is one of two for me this year, along with Rikki Ducornet. Really looking forward to that.