Living in the Maniototo Book

Expect the unexpected when it comes to Janet Frame'she's magical (I think I've said this before.)

Starting off with the book, things went along with this even flow and then on page 38 a "sudden plague of unreality" happened…

Our visit was short. As we left I reminded Tommy that I still had his starfish brooch and the world earrings and that I would keep them "Forever"'my feeble contradiction and denial of the disintegrators and the demolishers. He didn't seem to hear me. With a fearful look in his eyes he turned toward some apparition beside him.

"Got you," he cried, grasping the air.

There was a flash of light, a smell of laundry and the penetrating fumes of a powerful cleanser, then a neutral nothing-smell, not even the usual substituted forest glad or field of lavender or carnation, and all that remained of Tommy were two faded footprints on the floor.

"Things like that don't happen," Brian said when we had arrived home.

We were both shocked by the sudden plague of unreality.

Thus, Tommy was vaped by a tv advertisement cartoon character, The Blue Fury, that he claimed was haunting him…sure it was, right?

An explanation of sorts is on page 39:

"Those creatures and worlds that we know only in sleep and dream and mythology'of yesterday and of today'the magical technology'are emerging as usual reality in the new dimension of living and dying. And when the unreal has been accepted and made real, new realities will present themselves, forces which become gentlenesses, gentlenesses which become forces."

Whatever it is'the fact in this fiction'Tommy is gone. POOF! Anything can happen in a Janet Frame book.

Janet Frame's word play is always a treat, a writer's writer, the novel is about a writer and her musings over a book she's subsequently writing, and dealing with the interruptions of life and death the struggle to get back on track. The death of one of her two husbands goes like this…

Page 64
Two hours later, in his sleep, he coughed violently, and died. They said it was an inexplicable spasm in his throat that choked him. I was too angry to mourn. Fiction would have arranged it better, I thought. And yet it would be thrown out of fiction as unforgivable. The pronouns, tenses, participles, past and present, would fight to exclude it. And for all I know he might have choked on a remembered idiom.

A Janet Frame book is always chockful of beauty, wisdom, and wonder.

Page 92…language is all we have for the delicacy and truth of telling, that words are the sole heroes and heroines of fiction. Their generosity and forgiveness make one weep. They will accept anything and stand by it, and show no sign of suffering. They will accept change, painlessly, the only pain being that experienced by those who use words, scattering them like beans in a field and hoping for morning beanstalks as high as the sky with heavenly commotion there, upstairs where the giants live.

The power of words.

There are a dozen or so pages that I've dog-eared for later visits, and it's always too easy to turn to a page, pick up and read, and get lost again. Fictions within a fiction, truth within the lies. Sense and sensibility. Prose randomly runs into poetry. The life in the Maniototo, mysterious and as desirable as "overseas"…a high plain in the south…you know, where the air is known to be rare…didn't it mean a plain of blood after the battles fought there? But wasn't it also a place where patients went to be cured of their sicknesses?'Does the place exist? Yes, and from the photos that I saw online, it's quite lovely.