It is hard for the novelist of the lost childhood, the madhouse or the concentration camp to write about the so-called 'real' contemporary world. Janet Frame tries to do it in [The Edge of the Alphabet]; the result is part failure, part success.

Her failure is the inevitable consequence of pretending that the book is a manuscript 'found among the papers of Thora Pattern after her death, and submitted to the publishers by Peter Heron, Hire-Purchase Salesman.' It is a nineteenth century, even an eighteenth century device. None the worse for that, you may well say—but then the personae of Scott and the Gothic Novelists weren't in the habit of addressing their characters directly, nor were they so closely identified with their creator. Another trait reminiscent of early novels is the frequency with which essayistic comments on Life (presumably Thora Pattern's comments) are scattered throughout the book.

The novel about the writer composing a novel belongs to a more recent tradition than Sir Walter's. In this convention it is necessary that the novelist-character should be at least as convincing as the people he invents and, perhaps, that one of the book's main concerns should be the nature of the creative process itself. But we do not feel that Miss Pattern is in the least interesting or credible, and we don't learn much about how or why she writes, except that her motive is self-exploration; that the end of self-discovery is to arrive at the dead (why not at God? or at existence or essence? or at the contemplation of a universal dialectical process?); and that she belongs to a Chosen Race—the Unhappy Few who live 'at the edge of the alphabet'. Two of her characters—Toby Withers the epileptic from Owls Do Cry and Zoe the failed school-teacher—also live at the edge of the alphabet, and Thora persists in trying to communicate with them directly—

I hear your thoughts, Zoe…. Day and night, Zoe, I have walked in the market among the crowds and the cries, Lovely Oranges, Lovely Oranges, while the night-papers exhort Crucify, Crucify.

Who are the Lost Tribe, Toby? Why do they lie hidden in your mind, like beetles under a stone?… They live, he says, behind a mountain approached through a secret pass.

Thora's irritating questions and apostrophes destroy our faith in the reality of Toby, Zoe and even Pat Keenan, the pathetic 'ordinary man' who tries to decoy the introverts into his spider's web of normality. We just aren't able to believe in them after Zoe's Berkeleyan remark to Toby at the ship's fancy-dress party:

It doesn't make you afraid, does it, that you are fiction, that you are not really aboard the Matua sailing to England, that you exist only in someone's mind, some poor writer who cannot do better than bring forth the conversation of musicians, poets, mice?

Janet Frame does not seem altogether aware that Thora Pattern's attitudes and pronouncements are tinged with arrogance and spiritual pride. The blurb describes the novel as 'wise, compassionate, and infinitely tender'—but the wisdom appears pretentious, and the compassion too often like condescension: a sad falling off from Owls Do Cry. True, Chicks's diary in that novel is hardly motivated by generous sympathy; it is a masterpiece of savage irony that is more than a little unfair to the real Chicks's of this world because it fails to hint at the unrealized potentialities behind their petty suburbanite selfishness. Nevertheless, that is a minor blemish compared with the beautiful portrayal of young Toby and Daphne, and the fine evocation of the Withers's childhood world. In The Edge of the Alphabet, however, Thora Pattern seems to have acquired some of the characteristics of an introverted Chicks; there's a melancholy smugness that comes out in her glib scorn of 'pop' culture and common folk. Whether this is Miss Frame's intention or not, Thora cannot avoid displaying her sense that she is better than Pat and even Toby. Thora's greatest defect is a failure of tone, which could be demonstrated from almost every chapter. A small-scale example is provided by the placing of 'of course' in the following sentence: 'His early enthusiastic reading of love explained, of course, his facility in the translation of death; the alphabet, the grammar, are the same.' The implication is that such an idea is a truism to the Chosen Race; that you too, dear reader, are a member of a select band—though not ('of course') quite so select as Thora Pattern herself.

And yet, in spite of everything, the book's virtues outweigh its flaws. Miss Frame, our most subjective writer, is perhaps also our best writer of documentaries. Faces in the Water is a better rendering of mental hospitals than any social scientist could provide, and the present novel's handling of passenger life on a one class ship couldn't possibly be improved upon. When she keeps her eye on the object, she can do better than the realists. She is also a wonderful craftsman—mistress of pedal and keyboard, princess of the arpeggios and cadenzas of prose; and she has a nice sense of humour (seen at its best in her treatment of Mr and Mrs Kala and son, the family who come on board at Panama), which is all too often spoiled by Thora's solemn and wistful intrusions. It is precisely because of her great gifts, because words and phrasing, prose-rhythm and image patterns mean so much to her, that she has fallen into the trap of making her book a rhetorical construct rather than a novel, where Janet Frame, Thora Pattern, the characters they create, even the entire human race become fused into a single whole—or, if you like, they all fall into the same slough:

How I am haunted by death and the dead! And by the division of humanity into so many people when one birth, one mind, one death would be enough to end the tributary tears that flow in every acre of the earth in the stone obstructions of the heart that are called stars. What mathematical trick has divided the whole into the sum of so many people, only to set working in our hearts the process by which we continually strive to reduce the sum once more to its indivisible whole—until millions in one city become for us two or three people and finally one person. We pass our mother fifty times in a few seconds in the street, and our father, and the only people we have ever really known; and if we love, everyone we meet is our lover.

And what if the person who meets us for ever is ourselves? What if we meet ourselves on the edge of the alphabet and can make no sign, no speech?

So it is the end of self-discovery. I have arrived at the dead.

What moving rhetoric! What beauty of cadence! And how arbitrary, really, since the reader feels that Thora's voyage of self-discovery isn't a genuine voyage. She does not convince us that her own death, or Zoe's for that matter, is inevitable; she merely tells us so in language so eloquent that few of her contemporaries can equal it.