The New Zealand Novelist Janet Frame is an obsessed mourner at the grave of the ancient mysteries that once linked the individual and his group in a tradition of man's oneness with the universe. [Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room] seems intended as a parable of our grievous separation from the mythic past. Yet its hold on the form is shaky; I find it more satisfying when read as an inquiry—by a compulsively directed poetic imagination—into the darkness that lies beneath our supposed enlightenment. Story is not so much side-stepped as skewed to serve the author's preoccupations: reversals of symbolic meaning; contradictions in our perception of what is real (sanity, health) and what is illusion (madness, disease); death in life and its opposite.

The narrative derives from a rite of initiation. The adventurer crosses the threshold into the unknown and returns, radically transformed, to be reborn. The modern world, however, does not "permit" the regenerative cycle to be completed. The voyager's new knowledge threatens a temporal society that exalts utility above all, and he is cast out, for he has lost material value. "Everything could be worked out in money … it seemed easier to give all the responsibility of living and dying over to money. It's so hard to keep judging, weighing, testing, valuing what is invisible."

The man rejected is Godfrey Rainbird, a young, altogether unremarkable Englishman, a clerk in a tourist office, who has already moved, quite literally, to the other side of the world. Ten years earlier he had emigrated from London to New Zealand in search of warmth, space, and the life of salutary ease offered by a land of benign climate and fair shares for all. One night he is struck down by a car on the highway and, through a medical error, pronounced dead. When he awakens in the mortuary thirty-six hours later, Godfrey finds himself neither hero nor miracle, but an acute embarrassment to the normal world and, as time passes, an object of fear and finally contempt. He lives on, cut off from the sun's glow, in an icy purgatory of psychic arrest and split consciousness. Gradually his sphere as wage-earner, father, and husband is usurped and his domain shrinks to that of a cripple's chair.

Miss Frame's attitude toward her homeland shows traces of the resentment of the ousted proprietor. It is not just from New Zealand but everywhere that the gods have been routed, to be replaced by the banners of the secular, competitive nation-state described by Joseph Campbell, "where every last vestige of the human heritage of ritual, morality and art is in full decay." But, whereas Campbell looks ahead to envision the task of the future hero, Janet Frame is steeped in nostalgia and, in her grief for man's betrayal of his sustaining myths, tends to slight present social and cultural complexities (for science and technology cannot be banished).

The author, however, freshens the now-familiar theme of spiritual impoverishment and infantilism by the sweep and sharpness of her observations of this part of the world she knows so thoroughly. No detail escapes her regarding the endless perversity by which nature's beneficence, its unifying religious presence, has been corrupted through a cult of Philistine pleasure-seeking and chauvinism. The "Antipodean room" of her title, the open stretch of an underpopulated physical paradise, translates to the smug isolation of one's own "section," the graveyard of community. "Where are the people?" wonders Godfrey's sister, arriving for the first time in Dunedin after leaving congested London. Hills, the expanse of harbor and sky, no longer whisper of eternity, but are objects of status, possessive pride in a view. Forests, weather, the profusion of flowers cater to an arrogant sense of superiority. "A healthy outdoor life" is the true blessedness and tourism its profitable end-product.

I dwell on this background because I find it more persuasive of Miss Frame's special view of the world and simply more interesting than the story she has placed against it. A parable must convince not just in its latent meaning, but on the objective level. Since Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room is necessarily set in the present day, its plot runs counter to certain logical expectations to which the times entitle us. The events are improbable. Like the characters, who are flatly symbolic, they are contrived to the author's purpose. So the pleasure to be found in this book is in another sense its handicap: the omnipresence of the author's voice conducting an insistent, ever-sifting, ever-shredding monologue. It is an essentially literary voice which speaks even for her characters, taking charge of their thoughts and dialogue, though Miss Frame has, and occasionally uses, gifts of mimicry. Sometimes this voice is brilliant, as in Godfrey's "icy spelling," an invention of ruefully comic puns. Then again it is just funny in a homely, everyday sort of way, as when Miss Frame rings changes on the word-traps that lie in wait for the conversationalist who tries to avoid allusions to death.

Still, in the end, even the virtuosity wears thin. The line between the serious and the self-parodic in such a feverishly driven work is dangerously fine. Miss Frame does not entirely surmount this risk.