The newest inhabitant of Janet Frame's world is thirty-year-old Godfrey Rainbird, an English immigrant who has become a Dunedin clerk, and who has a wife, a house with a view, and two children. In The Rainbirds, Godfrey experiences death and resurrection in suburbia. He is taken lifeless to the morgue after being knocked down one night on the way home from a meeting. His wife, her parents, his children and sister smoothly assume the attitudes of grief expected and accepted by society; his older sister Lynley decides to emigrate from England in time for the funeral, and this ceremony is expensively, lavishly prepared without love but with a monogrammed coffin. But fate has cruelly tricked them all: Godfrey wakes from a coma, a sleep of death and not death itself, and all those who reconciled themselves so swiftly to his going find it impossible to reconcile themselves to his return. His 'corpseness' constantly repels his wife Beatrice; both now possess an unspoken awareness of the presence of death in life. She often thinks and speaks of him in the preterite, is aware of the coldness of his body and hands (which even civilization's latest electric blanket cannot cherish back to lively warmth), and perceives new meaning in the word 'sleep'.

But where she increasingly shies away from this alien morbidity, he is increasingly fascinated by it. He begins to see emblems of death all about him. Those all about him also begin to perceive death in this man who has died and returned. On the bus going in to his job at the Tourist Bureau he is treated with curiosity by his fellow passengers, and he has to get off early. When he does reach the Tourist Bureau it is to receive notice: a man who has been dead cannot promote tourism. People stare at him in the street; his story is wanted for television, for newspapers, and for sermons at Easter. His experience makes him a social cripple. In a society engaged in a festering pursuit of the material, the 'live' and the superficial—a chase which is a panic avoidance of everything abstract, eternal, or spiritual—Godfrey is a walking reminder of mortality.

His withdrawal into himself is a withdrawal from life and its practical problems. Excluded from suitable work, he is content to assemble electric plugs at home; he spends the rest of his time in idle contemplation. The neighbours begin to call him an irresponsible cripple, and their children to taunt the Rainbirds. Beatrice Rainbird, a dull suburbanite unarmed for such battles, succumbs, and, with stones thrown by the neighbours rattling on the Rainbirds' roof, she opens up her throat with a sharp silver knife. The last chapter surveys the Rainbirds' grave in Anderson's Bay Cemetery, and, with skimpy irony, outlines their posthumous fame and the successes of their children. Seen in this compressed form, The Rainbirds appears to be a scathing criticism of New Zealand society. Janet Frame's dark suburbanites are an undifferentiated mass capable only of a dull collective evil against the Rainbirds, turning unseeing from the grain of sand which Godfrey holds up.

By inclination, Miss Frame favours interior exploration of her characters, and her technique has always aided her search. But in The Rainbirds she shows a desire to cast a cold eye also on the society in which she places her characters, and in which she perhaps sees herself as well. Her eye is often acute and perceptive.

… Easter: the beach, the last supply of sun … Easter eggs, rabbits for the children; Good Friday changed to Dead Friday; death on the roads, in the mountains, the final drownings before summer came again…. Alternate wails and cheers from the churches: He is dead, He is risen. Then Anzac Day most solemn: khaki and poppies.

Here is the panoramic sweep and the compression of the social observer—of Janet Frame, almost tangibly present as author, no matter which character she drapes each remark over. And there's the rub: the further the novel proceeds at this social level, whatever the intrinsic value of the observations made at these heights, the greater is the damage done to the introspective aspects of the novel, the very area in which in the past the writer has gained and communicated her most significant insights. Despite initial appearances to the contrary, Janet Frame is at heart an omniscient narrator 'peering in' at her characters. Rather than being a genuine user of the stream-of-consciousness technique, she establishes the illusion of 'possessing' the consciousness of her characters. More and more in The Rainbirds she will speak—either directly, or at a slight remove from us, through characters—in her own voice, surprising us often with her urban drawl. And the more we hear of this civilized voice, the less we hear of that barbarous tongue with which we are accustomed to receive her messages from the darker regions she explores. It is for these messages, after all, that we go to her books; and the story of Godfrey Rainbird implies by its emphasis that its burden, too, will result from exploration rather than survey. In recording a journey of exploration Janet Frame employs here the language of a social diary, and the resulting uncertainty distorts the meaning of The Rainbirds.

Its force, too, is dissipated by fundamental troubles at the heart of the process of writing, in the matter of technique. Because of an unusual attitude towards her medium, Miss Frame often allows the force of her writing to be deflected. It is ironic that a writer with an almost Joycean reverence for words should on this occasion, instead of building surely, tend at times to go against the business of true creation through her use of them. Her aim as a writer has always been high, she attempts to lift the painted veil which those who live call Life. Her problem is that Shelley's veil, for her, has always had words painted on it, not people; and these words often distract her from telling us what lies beneath them. Janet Frame is more interested in the appearance, size, sound, and personal reverberations of each word rather than in its meaning. So we see this:

—Have either of you noticed this?…—Why no, they said together and he could not tell if they spoke the truth or lied; liars; liar; fair fire.

At another point she follows the thought 'killed instantly' with the unnecessarily facile 'like coffee'; and the narrative pursues this until exhaustion sets in. Word association in interior monologue must have only a secondary place to verisimilitude set up in the novel. Reality must dictate meaning in the long run, whoever owns the consciousness that perceives both the reality and the meaning. But too often, the meaning of this book is dictated by the word associations—almost as if life is one of those interminable Oxford Debates which change direction with each new pun or change of key word. The degree to which Miss Frame sees life as words is indicated in her description of Beatrice Rainbird's realization that her parents are mortal: 'Then realizing that one day their tense would change …'. And when Godfrey, after his 'resurrection', sees life and society in the perspective of the grave, Miss Frame makes him turn over the thick surface of words, reversing them and turning them inside out:

        here in the creamtorium
        lie the dead
        radeye to be bunred.

Surely the resurrected should turn over ideas and values and concepts, and not just the words they are wrapped in?

That the author is preoccupied so often with the colour, sound and 'feel' of words at the expense of semantics again places the author constantly at the reader's side. Like Hopkins' Holy Ghost, Miss Frame broods over her bent world—and sometimes blinds us with the flash of those bright wings—but with a commitment to the inward lives of characters there should go an attempt to create the illusion that those words formed themselves upon the page, that no author was required to arrange them in that way. Miss Frame's constant 'presence' goes against this, and ultimately penalizes her creation of character—it drains them of any chance for integrity or uniqueness, for no characteristic is sacred, all traits are common and held in the presence of the author. The beautiful and often lyrical stream of consciousness which we have had from this writer in the past is now replaced too frequently by a kind of interpretation which puts us at a distance from the characters. Intimacy is lost. The voice which pervades the book is Janet Frame's, not those of her characters. She appears to inhabit her characters perfunctorily: it is only with an effort that we believe that Godfrey really did awaken from that coma, and at no point does he, nor do any of his family, become 'alive' and true. This individuality in a character, whether in a conventionally-narrated novel or in one using some sort of 'interior' narration, is after all basically an illusion, created in the surface of the book. When the author remains 'outside' his character, he gives it depth by assigning to it certain traits of speech, actions and behaviour, which he excludes from other characters. The novelist who takes us on a voyage through the consciousness of his characters has a greater number of ways by which to foster this illusion of individuality in characters: he may give them different patterns of thinking, using distinctive symbols and images in their thoughts; at his best he will equip each character with his own rhetoric of thought and speech.

Virginia Woolf springs to mind here as a successful exponent of many of these methods, especially in The Waves, that book devoid of apparent author or narration, which sweeps us along in the six-fold stream of its characters' consciousness. But the Janet Frame of Owls Do Cry also has this ability and is able to voyage on the dangerous seas of the human mind armed with the discretion of fine objectivity. In Owls Do Cry Miss Frame disciplined her talents towards self-effacement, eliminating the artistically gratuitous passages of authorial comment which occasionally threaten to capsize The Rainbirds.

However, the immense verbal talent remains, always best when economical, concentrated into phrases and single words. Here is Beatrice, alone in bed after Godfrey has 'died': '… she … felt … the cold lack, the unattended level and chill of his absence …'. Although the bold vision and insight which distinguished the earlier books, particularly Owls Do Cry, is still present, to find less than the full measure in this new novel is a disappointment.