The book:
Our fiction choice this March is the dazzling and under-appreciated classic Owls Do Cry by New Zealand’s finest author, Janet Frame. Just released in a brand new edition, this was her first full-length work of fiction, originally published in 1957. A hugely innovative work at the time, it is now considered a modernist masterpiece.
Poetic and experimental, Owls Do Cry recounts the story of a poor and tragedy-bound family, gently exploring mental health, poverty and loneliness. It was one of the first novels to deal with life in a mental institution, drawing similarities to Mrs Dalloway, The Bell Jar and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – the all-time greats alongside which Owls Do Cry earns a worthy place. Informed by the author’s own time in such institutions, it skilfully allows the realistic narration of events to drift into evocative and dreamlike prose.
A sombre and, in places, heart-breaking story, Owls Do Cry is beautifully written and affecting, and we think will stay with you long after you turn the last pages.
What the Guardian thought:
This month, alongside Claire Hazelton’s short review, is an extract from director Jane Campion’s feature on Janet Frame that sheds more light on Owls Do Cry.
Considered the first great New Zealand novel and a modernist masterpiece, Owls Do Cry, first published in 1957, tells of the Withers siblings, Daphne, Chicks, Toby and Francie, and their struggles with financial instability, mental health, disability and grief. The sections on Daphne’s mental illness, informed as they are by Janet Frame’s own experiences in institutions, are especially powerful. Descriptions of events in Daphne’s life begin grounded in reality, but slip into grand, dreamlike imagery (“a woman led Daphne to the bathroom where a trough had been scooped from a side of one of the mountains”), vividly conveying her struggle for sanity. Lack of understanding of epilepsy at the time is touched on: Toby “falls into fits”, scaring and embarrassing his sisters. His illness severely restricts his life and only in dreams is he free to be and do what he wants. While a strong reflection of the time at which it was written, Owls Do Cry remains innovative and relevant. Frame’s idiosyncratic and startlingly visual style means that the book’s immense power to unnerve, astonish and impress endures.
Claire Hazelton
Janet Frame’s first novel, Owls Do Cry, created a sensation in New Zealand when it was published in 1957. Hailed by some critics as the country’s long-awaited first great novel, even “a masterpiece”, and criticised by others for being too experimental … Owls Do Cry is based partly on events in Frame’s life, including her experience of spending eight years in and out of mental asylums. It started many rumours and dark imaginings about her actual life. Some believed she was still in an asylum, perhaps having had a lobotomy. Others said she had gone overseas and was living anonymously.
Most weekends our family drove to our beach house in Plimmerton, passing the notorious Porirua asylum. “Was Janet Frame in Porirua?” I would ask, peering at the flat prison-like buildings surrounded by misshapen macrocarpas.
“No, not Porirua.”
“Where?”
“Sunnyside.”
“Sunnyside? They call a mental hospital Sunnyside? Is she still there?”
I looked on her life with admiration, pity and fear. To be in any way abnormal in New Zealand’s closed society was a stigma; to be “mental” was an unrecoverable shame. Fifteen years later I was to become familiar with Porirua hospital, ward K2, as my mother tried repeatedly to find some relief from the terror and bleakness of her late-life depression.
Jane Campion - Read the full extract
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