In the Memorial Room by Janet Frame - Reviewed by Gordon McLauchlan

In the Memorial Room by Janet Frame (Text Publishing).

Reviewed by Gordon McLauchlan

This novel is lightly brushed satire, mostly arch in tone, deftly poking fun at writing groupies and other poseurs as well as writing residencies. But what may take some readers aback is that there is surely something here of self-parody as the author pins a certain type of character to the wall with devastating insight.

          When Frame’s new and previously uncollected short stories were published last year under the title Gorse is Not People, I wrote in a review that they represented her last work, were “a wrap on a stellar career”.  Now we know they weren’t a wrap at all with the surfacing of this previously unknown work, something different from anything she had done before. 

Glancing back at those short stories I am reminded that her earlier work is not at all free from glancing blows at certain types of people, but none quite so penetrating as this book.

Harry Gill is the first-person protagonist’s name. He wins the “Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship” which takes him to Menton where Janet Frame spent months in the 1970s as Katherine Mansfield Fellow. Gill travels through this story from pathological shyness to near-obliteration.  In conversation over his fellowship accommodation soon after his arrival in Menton he says to himself: “I agreed. I’m an habitual agreer.”

He then travels down a road towards a kind of annihilation. Fearing he is going blind he consults Dr Rumor in Menton  who tells him he is seeking invisibility: “You are not ill, you are not going blind, you are a sane man, I believe. But through a combination of circumstances, through being in a certain place – which must be here, this city, at a certain time, and in the company of certain people, you are on the point of vanishing.”

He doesn’t go blind. He becomes stone deaf. He again consults Dr Rumor who calls his condition “Auditory Retaliation. Strategy of War”, and predicts it will last only as long as his fellowship. Gill refuses to see a specialist and, back in his fellowship environment, insists he is permanently deaf. He shrinks behind his defensive wall.

This novel, it seems, was written either while Frame was at Menton or not long afterwards and it is impossible not to read it as a satire, a self-parody, based on difficulties she faced there – as the shy and reclusive woman that she was. That, it is obvious, was the reason she refused its publication until after her death.

Footnote:

Gordon McLauchlan (left) is an Auckland-based writer & commentator and a regular reviewer on this blog.