With the publication at sixty of the first three volumes of her autobiography (To the Is-land, 1983; An Angel at My Table, 1984; The Envoy from Mirror City, 1985), Janet Frame gives the impression of rounding out her long career as a writer. Her first published story appeared just after the Second World War; since then there have been five volumes of short fiction, one of poetry, ten novels, a children's book, and three volumes of autobiography. If the latter is in fact the end of things it will conclude one of the oddest and most distinctive bodies of writing in the history of English. While she is demonstrably a New Zealand writer and a writer of her time, she has also made her own rules and is directly influenced by nobody. Least of all is she concerned, it seems, with any notion of penetrability; reading her fiction is like tangling in a thicket of words and illusions, constantly being moved away from the possibility of explanation or meaning. Hers is the novel (Scented Gardens for the Blind, published in 1963) in which a young girl has long conversations about death with a black beetle while her mother waits anxiously in the next room and her father plays with toy soldiers twelve thousand miles away in England. At the end the novel is revealed to have been hallucinated by a patient in a mental hospital.

The deceptive nature of fiction, particularly of the conventions of realism, almost obsesses Frame; in her tenth novel (Living in the Maniototo, published in 1979) a character is removed from the text by a household bleach, characters who die early in the novel reappear alive later in it, characters who seem alive prove imaginary, and the narrator's American host is bumped off for good measure as the book closes. The 'ficticides' of these novels are relatively jolly and arbitrary compared with the unremittingly tragic vision of the earlier writing. No consistent reading of Frame's writing leaves much sense of optimism for the human race.

Although the equating of life with art is far too deceptively simple to explain the nature of her writing, no account of her work can avoid the tragic aspects of her first thirty years of life. There is its provenance, for a start, in the dreary little coastal South Island town of Oamaru, where she lived for fifteen years from about 1930, the third of the five children of an impoverished railway worker. Her reconstruction of this period in To the Is-land is surprisingly sunny and bright, evoking the pleasures of family closeness and especially the richness of nature and the literature brought into the house by a well-read mother. Elsewhere, in the fiction and in interviews, we glimpse and sense a darker world marked by that special contempt a smug, conservative rural community reserves for those who are in any way different from the rest. But more than poverty, death disfigured the family twice: the oldest girl, Myrtle, drowned in the local swimming baths in 1937, and almost exactly ten years later the fourth child of the family, Isabel, drowned at the holiday resort of Picton, at the north of the South Island. Not long after Isabel died Janet was admitted to mental care, in which she stayed for eight years. She had already broken down and had a period in hospital, where she was classified as a schizophrenic, a diagnosis she has consistently rejected and, in the second volume of her autobiography, ridiculed.

Appalling as these events are they should not be seen as the sort of explanation that assumes that parachutists must write about the fall of man. Because all writing is in some way autobiographical (as all autobiography is fiction) details of her life appear frequently in her imaginative work; the deaths of her sisters are described in as late a novel as Daughter Buffalo (1973), while the unfortunate American host who dies in Living in the Maniototo bears a resemblance to her own friend and American host, Professor John Money of Baltimore. The autobiographical thread is clearest in the first three of her novels, published between 1951 and 1963. Effectively a trilogy, they follow the misfortunes of a family named Withers in a small New Zealand town named Waimaru, and compositely they address the question asked by Frank Sargeson in his fake Maori placename 'Waiamihea' (I Saw in My Dream, 1949): 'Why am I here, so far from European civilisation, writing in a tradition that has its roots elsewhere, in a country that does not value art?' It is the sort of question James Joyce addressed years before. The Withers trilogy, like Sargeson's novel and Robin Hyde's The Godwits Fly (1938), is a portrait of the artist.

The first novel, Owls Do Cry (1957) is a remarkable though depressing account of the loss of childhood, the commonest theme in New Zealand literature. There is no sense of the world as a place full of opportunities for pleasure, growth and fulfillment: society and the universe itself threaten to engulf the proletarian Withers family with a destructiveness that is as real as it is indefinite:

and the world in one stride would walk in and take possession of them, holding them tight in its 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 never finish.

This destructive force is in the world, represented particularly by imagery of winter, and it is hostile to all society; but somehow society transforms its power and makes it destructive of the individual.

The assumption here is basically romantic, that children possess a spontaneity of seeing and living that is dinned out of them as they grow older. As the novel develops the four Withers children move inexorably towards the sterility of their parents. Freedom for them is represented by the town rubbish dump, where amongst the usual discarded refuse of a society obsessed with puritan tidiness they find Grimms' fairy tales and a mildewed book of poems—the 'treasure' that is referred to in the title of the first section, 'Talk of Treasure' (the original title of the book). But it is in this same rubbish dump that the oldest child, the adolescent Francie, dies, falling into a fire lit by a council worker.

In a novel of such symbolic intensity no fire is simply a means of incinerating trash and careless children. Francie is destroyed literally, but in different ways the remaining children are destroyed by figurative fires. Toby, the slow, half-witted son, falls during his epileptic fits into a world of poetic and imaginative understanding, but as he grows older he betrays the meaning of the rubbish dump by becoming a scrap merchant who sells the 'treasure'. The youngest child, Chicks, makes a successful marriage and lives in a house built on reclaimed land over the dump, her house full of the gadgets and conveniences the novel clearly labels as rubbish. Only the third child, Daphne, who narrates the novel, keeps herself clear of this destruction for a while. But as an adult with the eye and imagination of a child she is labelled 'insane' and locked away in a mental hospital. There she is given a lobotomy and returns to the work-force 'normal' and 'safe'. The novel's coda shows her as a mill forewoman being presented with a watch for long service.

A summary like this emphasises both the pessimism and the conservatism of Janet Frame's writing; she is not the first or the only writer to depict lost souls going nowhere, and the grimness of her world is typical of much New Zealand writing. But what makes Owls Do Cry stand out are its form and language. In her own life Frame claims to distinguish between what she calls 'this' world (the here-and-now with its tax returns, unwashed dishes, clamouring children, and so on) and 'that' world (the rich, private imaginary world in which she spends her life). That division is in the novel, which alternates passages in roman type for the narration of events with passages in italic that are lyrical and full of images:

what use the green river, the gold place, if time and death pinned human in the pocket of my land not rest from taking underground the green all-willowed and white rose and bean flower and morning-mist picnic of song in pepper-pot breast of thrush?

'Sung' by Daphne from the 'dead room', these are her last utterances before the lobotomy which robs her of her power to 'sing,' and they provide a seed-bed of images which enrich and help us better understand the remainder of the work. Rather than gesturing at powers which distinguish the artist, this novel demonstrates them, making more poignant their final surgical demise.

The remaining novels in the trilogy that follows the lives of some of the Withers family lack the imaginative achievement of Owls Do Cry, but the second, Faces in the Water, has a power quite distinctive in Frame's writing. The question it briefly invites—whether its account of its heroine's time in mental hospitals is autobiographical—is unimportant; the renaming of the heroine (she is called Istina Mavet now) and the cool detachment of tone suggest a reworking of experience. Relentlessly foregrounded are the horrors of incarceration and the inevitability of the slow descent into insanity; it is only after a rereading that the book's true themes become quietly evident: the question of what constitutes insanity and whose faces its waters reflect, the question of what our society does to women in suburbia, the question of what is implied by Istina's ultimate—and sudden—recovery. The third 'Withers novel', The Edge of the Alphabet, lacks the imaginative power of the first and the force of the second. It appears to reflect some of the experiences of Frame's journey to Europe in 1956, giving these to the moronic Toby from Owls Do Cry. Although references to reality, illusion and the sacrifices required by the artist occur and recur throughout, the novel never transcends its dreary descriptions of loneliness, inadequacy and social decay. Its heroine, Zoe Bryce, ends the novel in suicide; Toby develops a sore on his chest and returns to New Zealand in defeat, and a novel about the demands of artistic inspiration closes by showing what happens when that inspiration is not there.

In the early 1960s when she was living in England, Frame seemed to write continuously. Within a year of publishing The Edge of the Alphabet, Scented Gardens for the Blind appeared. The central figures are Erlene, the mute girl, and the black beetle with whom she holds imaginary conversations on her windowsill. Its chapters move from Erlene to anxious mother to genealogist father and back to Erlene again, until the nuclear explosion which concludes it, along with the revelation that we have been tricked into believing that its one character, an old mute mental hospital patient called Vera Glace, is three people.

Scented Gardens for the Blind is in many ways the most important of her books. It gives us the way of seeing the world of old Vera Glace, who, in her loneliness and fear, particularly of the interrogating father-figure psychiatrist, Dr Clapper, has changed herself imaginatively into a child and the psychiatrist into the less threatening fairytale figure of the aproned black beetle who spins her stories and parables. These stories pass the day but they also provide clues to how the novel should be read. The beetle tells a story of another beetle who lives in a dictionary between the words 'trichotomy' and 'trick'. (The trick is that Vera is a trichotomy of characters.) Once attuned to these signals the reader can understand how the novel works, and realise its central message of the metaphoric power of language, its hidden power to direct and enrich. What concerns Frame here, as in her other fiction, is the inadequacy of language to bring people together in love, trust and understanding. When language fails—as it does in the everyday sections set in roman type in the first novel—humans drift apart, seek power over one another, make war, and destroy themselves. It is no accident that Scented Gardens for the Blind ends with nuclear destruction. Like Freud, Frame sees civilisation caught between Eros and Thanatos; but she sees in language the potential for love and harmony. In the novel language fails, and at its end the ancient Vera Glace utters the grunts that begin the evolution of a new, healing language.

Frame's period in England was enormously productive. During that time she wrote five novels and two collections of short prose. The last of these, The Adaptable Man, was written at the end of her time in England and published after she returned to New Zealand. It can be seen as a wry farewell to the demands of the English tradition. In my view the most underestimated of her novels, it also departs from the sombre tone of the earlier fiction. Set in a fictional Suffolk village it allows Frame to return, with a delight that is apparent, to the Anglo-Saxon origins both of language and of place:

Say the names, then to yourself.

Little Burgelstatham (a burgel was originally a burial place of the heathen). Tydd. Lakenthorpe. Murston. Segham. Colsea. Withigford. Say the names again and again, and soon there's no weetbox-coloured railway station … There's no village store … There's no Clematis Cottage … nothing but a dream of earliest praise, of sea-flooded inlets, lakes, marshes, sedge, willows and those birds, half-hidden, which walk tall, camouflaged as reeds, and sound, morning and evening, their lonely cries; water, birds, and now and again the soft rustle and wash and splash of the men, the Southfolk, guiding their boats through the inland seas.

This novel is a parable of misevolution; it sees the twentieth century as a time when, to use Henry Adams's phrase, 'the continuity stopped'. Its central figure, Alwyn Maude, is a man of the age, able to murder and fornicate without conscience or scruple; around him Frame forms a novel that politely thumbs the nose at the English tradition it imitates and satirises. With one hand she creates characters, spins plots, describes and contrives, and with the other she as skillfully pulls her own work down to show the arbitrariness of fiction within the arbitrariness of all things. Finally, after a display of nonchalant brilliance, she continues one of the larger scale ficticides in modern fiction by dropping a chandelier onto several of her characters as they sit round a dinner table. It is typical of Frame's control and skill in this novel that this moment also consummates its symbolism.

Her next two novels, written during years spent in the town of her birth, Dunedin, display a clear recession of her powers. It is as if the return from Europe to a place of earlier suffering (An Angel at My Table reveals the terrors of her student years in Dunedin) diminished the range of her thought and associations and forced her in on herself. Certainly, both A State of Siege (1967) and The Rainbirds (1969) can be seen as parables about herself as an artist and an outsider. The first is a competent enough work about the failure of an art teacher who retires to paint 'properly' but is destroyed by the growth of new, visionary powers. The second is the story of a man who becomes a pariah after being thought killed by a car; like the artist of the preceding book he too is killed by his apprehension of what lies beyond the here and now. Both these novels feel frustrated; essentially they rework Frame's earlier assertions about the trials and superiority of the artist, and they reveal how limiting she finds New Zealand. Her last three novels were written when she began to travel and to live and write in North America; all of them are freer, lighter in tone, and with her interest in experiment renewed.

Intensive Care (1970) is one of a small group of New Zealand novels that respond to New Zealand's minor involvement in the later stages of the Vietnam War. Like Karl Stead's Smith's Dream and Craig Harrison's Broken October it imagines New Zealand as Vietnam, divided and full of American troops. There is little that is thematically new here; reading its pages we are told again of the aridity of New Zealand life, its fear of the imaginative and the artistic and of the regimentation and suppressed violence of a society that is, in Kendrick Smithyman's phrase, a 'death-centred democracy'. But the imaginative transplantation of this country into another part of the world rekindles powers dormant for five years: Frame's portrait of the hideous adventurer, Peggy Warren, is unforgettably convincing, while the whole work is rich with the evocative strength of her symbolic imagination and is often nearer poetry than prose.

The settings of Daughter Buffalo (1972) and Living in the Maniototo are predominantly North American. The former is an extraordinary novel, again ultimately revealed as the hallucination of one of its actors, about an elderly New Zealand writer who 'mates' with a young Jewish doctor in New York; together this odd couple produces a 'daughter', a young buffalo they see while visiting a local zoo. Baffling if seen as realistic, Daughter Buffalo is best read as another parable about the predicament of the artist, the dying old man Turnlung representing Frame's New Zealand self, perhaps, and the young man, Edelman, a new, cosmopolitan self capable of fathering rough but authentic beasts that are not quite what we expect to come from human beings. Such an interpretation gives emphasis to Edelman's long ruminations on the American way of death that take up so much of the novel:

When I set out toward the rivers, taking the cross-town bus part of the way, I found that there was no place to be, and this, within my waking dream of death, seemed ominous. The two rivers flow farther and farther from the streams of man and if a man can get to stand near them he realises that the water does not even grant him a shadow, nor does it grant a shadow to the city, while the sun itself cannot dredge from it a light-glimmer of gold. The city rivers, filled with death, have long ago given up speaking of seasonal irony; in springtime, they allow a green and yellow fire of grass and forsythia to break out along the riverbanks of the Hudson Valley, above the opaque polluted waters, flaunting the green and yellow life that bears the seeds of decay.

Anyone audacious enough to write a novel with a plot like this has obviously left the cares of traditionalism far behind, and it seems almost inevitable that her most recent work, Living in the Maniototo, should be openly and happily a metafiction; that, after all, is where The Adaptable Man was leading her. The novel is like a survey of all her others: there is a section set in Baltimore that dwells on poverty, death and suffering, the surface of its language crackles with puns on which deeper structural meanings depend; and it is about what it is like to be a writer.

Its narrator, Mavis Halleton, opens the novel with a disquisition on the deceptiveness of language and the writer as a confidence trickster. She explores the way artists try to express their vision without departing wholly from the real world. Amongst the many metaphors for this, that of the hypotenuse triangle stands out, with a base that represents life and a vertical that represents art. Although this opening section, and a second set in Baltimore, are full of events, there is no larger narrative carrying the novel's meaning; rather, as in most of her novels, Frame relies on images to evoke the complicated and private ideas that animate her writing. Images of reflection, for example, occur, with their evocations of the mirroring of life by art: there are twins, as well as children called Binnorie and Lonnie, and a confidence trickster in Auckland has a duplicate in Baltimore, which in turn is twin city to Blenheim in Auckland.

It is in the final section of the novel, set in California, that Frame gets down to the business of demonstrating the power and the shortcomings of literature. Mavis moves into the opulent home of the Garretts, two wealthy art lovers who are off to Italy, in order to write. News arrives of their death in an earthquake and that their house is, surprisingly, willed to Mavis. Equally surprisingly, two couples, friends of the Garretts, arrive at the house to mourn its former owners; they each tell their stories, meticulously recorded in realistic prose by the writer, and then the Garretts, alive after all, return to reclaim their home. Mavis goes back to Baltimore and finds that her host there has died in her absence.

None of this of course can do justice to a novel that is both baffling and compelling. But old Frame hands will find their way clearer on the second and third readings that all her novels demand, and will see that the first two sections, with their meditations on the trials, aspirations and limitations of the artist, are a preparation for a third in which Frame sets about the business of illustrating these. Mavis is like the author, a writer overwhelmed by the difficulties of artistic communication; in the Garretts' house she is in an artist's 'garret' and the house of fiction itself. The four characters who enter it are indeed characters, inventions of the mind of the artist-within-the-novel, as real and as fake as characters in realistic fiction, their invented stories and the evocation of their psychological life as convincing as anything in literature.

In Living in the Maniototo Frame has it both ways, exploiting the limitations of traditional fiction to write in a way that is entertaining and curiously realistic, given the attacks on realism that her writing contains. For her, it seems, there is little distinction between life and art, for the process of shaping appears to begin with perception and not with a conscious act of creation. To write three volumes of autobiography, as she has after Living in the Maniototo, is not to alter her medium or her purpose or necessarily to signal the end of the fiction-writing process in her life. Indeed, there seems to be little alteration of emphasis, language or ideas in the move from 'art' to 'life', and to read these works is to be suspended again, magically and rather mysteriously, in a space that lies between the two.

My memory is once again of the colours and spaces and natural features of the outside world. On our first week in our Glenham house on the hill, I discovered a place, my place. Exploring by myself, I found a secret place among old fallen trees by a tiny creek, with a moss-covered log to sit on while the new-leaved branches of the silver birch tree formed a roof shutting out the sky except for the patterned holes of sunlight. The ground was covered with masses of old, used leaves, squelchy, slippery, wet. I sat on the log and looked around myself. I was overcome by a delicious feeling of discovery, of gratitude, of possession. I knew that this place was entirely mine; mine the moss, the log, the secrecy.

From the first Frame's autobiography assumes its freedom, the lack of responsibility that the act of remembering gives, the way it releases the writer more than fictionalising does to explore the places which give rise to that fiction. Her first volume, with its pungent and yet delicate evocations of a childhood familiar to many New Zealanders, takes us into that frozen 'ice-land' of present memory which, one suspects, is the hinterland of all her art, the 'mirror city', glittering, distant, intimate, eternal, that gives the title of her third volume. Here, one suspects, she most happily belongs, safe from the blows of what has clearly been a demanding life and equally safe from the traditional demands to shape and mean.