[Sheed is a British novelist, editor, columnist, and critic. In the following review, he praises Frame's The Adaptable Man, considering the novel "comic, intense, [and] stylish."]

The New Zealand authoress Janet Frame is a "witch-novelist" who stirs her plots under a full moon and has various magic powers, including a number-one witch's curse. Her prose style is a series of charms and incantations, passwords repeated in a baleful voice, which hex up the whole landscape, turning the vegetables into people and the people back into vegetables, or worse: into rock formations, soap advertisements or ancient ruins.

These alchemistic tricks are central to her new novel, [The Adaptable Man,] which concerns the urge of people and things to adapt, to assume the right shapes for the 20th century. Each of her characters would like to become the human equivalent of a television antenna or a three-day deodorant or a really good museum piece. Under Miss Frame's curse, they become instead crystal radios, one-day deodorants, museum rejects.

Even the village they live in (one of those whimsical English ones well-known to mystery readers) is struggling to adapt—to become a jet airport or a thruway or a history reserve. A hundred local deities fuse in this effort, sprites of field and harvest and even gods secreted in the new farm-machines. For in Miss Frame's metaphor kingdom you never know what has a soul and who hasn't.

The human characters proper are introduced in a prologue which suggests that they are all basically the same person anyway, in a sequence of different attitudes. In a mythic novel of this type, the personality is nothing, the role is everything—i.e., it doesn't matter who is priest and who is victim, so long as the rite is performed. Each uses the same voice—the milkman, the clergyman, the village bore—passing the "I, I, I," back and forth and ending with "I, the earth,"—the earth being no more and no less a character than the others.

Each of these alleged characters has one foot inside his own century and one waving about outside. Russell Maude the dentist has barricaded himself behind a picket-fence of teeth, solid as tombstones: his strategy is to practice a modern science with outrageously out-of-date instruments. His wife has buried herself in vegetables, and fortifies herself with litanies of the latest plant diseases. Their son Alwyn seems to have stepped all the way into his own century, committing a senseless murder and feeling only two pages of guilt to 600-odd for Raskolnikov, but by the end of the book he has begun to look worried. And of course, to worry is to be unadapted, to lose your place in the lemming-rush.

Parts of this book could best be reviewed a page at a time, as a number of poems and essays stashed together—some pages of excellent nature writing, a few more of theologizing—and indeed, whenever plot-development threatens to dominate. Miss Frame determinedly changes the subject and goes off on a new ramble. When the magic is working, which is most of the time, the effect is spellbinding; when it isn't the brew tastes more like Campbell's toad soup, and you half wonder why such an earnest, talky woman should be a witch in the first place.

But this is probably the kind of trick you can expect from witches. When the juice is on, Miss Frame is undoubtedly the real thing. Her prose is haunting, and she can use it to lay a spooky atmosphere over anything she chooses, from a stamp album to a row of teeth. Occasionally she wrestles a metaphor too fiercely and winds up in a snarl of arms and legs, but few writers have ever used so many of them so successfully. In general, she has done what every writer strives to do: find and perfect a form that fits over her ideas and dreams like a skullcap.

Now if she could just find an equally good proofreader, or wave a wand over her old one. But maybe these weird typos and open-ended parentheses are meant to add an extra Halloween touch. In any event, The Adaptable Man is an original novel, comic, intense, stylish, from one of the most interesting writers around.