There are themes that may be ultimately inimical to fiction. Too absolute a despair about meaningful connection between events is the death of plot. Too great a reluctance to find coherence in personality prohibits the presentation of character. Too feeble a hope of human communication is the withering, ultimately, of style. Janet Frame has sought, in six novels, to express these negative convictions with such brilliance and earnestness that she makes something, if not always a story, of them.

Still, one cannot help feeling that what she makes—call it what you will—is somehow less than her talents entitle her to. What a novelist she might be, I have felt after reading each of her books, if only her imagination were not so severely confined by her views, or, more correctly, her lack of views….

[In] "A State of Siege," the desire to see truly is, as a matter of fact, the compelling force that drives a retired art teacher to leave her southern New Zealand birthplace for an island in the subtropical north. Malfred Signal hopes to be alone with nature and the "room two inches behind the eyes"—free of the dominating presences of her family, free of the long habit of attaching "correct" shadows to coal scuttles, milk pitchers and other humdrum objects. She makes her journey, moves into her beach cottage, and—? Well, what happens is not clearly evident in the bright outer air of the sunny island.

It is somewhere within our heroine that one stormy night a week (or a month?) after her arrival, the drama of her existence seems to stage itself. She hears (or dreams?) a midnight-to-dawn pounding on her door. And while she wakes and sleeps and gets on the disconnected telephone to neighbor, priest, police and doctor, the phantasms of her past rise within her, and those she has loved or hated seek entrance into her present life. When morning comes she is dead, her intruders repelled, though a stone, perhaps proof of some outer reality, has been cast through the window and is found clutched in her cold grasp. What has happened? Where have we been? On a night-journey of the soul, obviously; on a failed spiritual quest and trial enacted in the buried consciousness.

"A State of Siege" is, it can be seen, a study of the isolated and stagnant spirit struggling unsuccessfully for definition and expression. It is related to the author's earlier explorations of lives cut off from outer relationship….

In her current book, Miss Frame sets herself no easy task in seeking our interest in the drab stuff of a spinster's dreams and gropings. And it is not merely the insubstantiality of her material that leaves us without even a stone in hand to prove that something has "happened." Miss Frame's gifts are unquestionably poetic—the description of personal mood and of nature. These, and a verbal wit, are at her command. But she is not, as I think she would like to be, a metaphysical poet; ideas and images do not fuse in her pages. Her style tends to dissolve in mere obscurity. Her poetic voice croons and haunts, she summons wraiths upon the dark heath, but the night passes without revelation. And yet, her fragmented visions are true nightmares, raising authentic goose-pimples upon the skin.