TITLE: Living in Maniototo
AUTHOR: Janet Frame
PUBLISHER:      Random House  (March 2008)
ISBN: 978 1 74166 606 9     PRICE: A$23.95 (paperback)  236pages
       
Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com).
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Nothing in this story is what is seems. Mavis Furness, Mavis Barwell, Mavis Halleton, a woman who has buried two husbands (which, she believes, entitles her to special attention in neighbourly conversations at the bus-stop) is also Alice Thumb or Aurelia Lokinia, or Maui's sister...or, even, Violet Pansy Proudlock, ventriloquist. She tells us from the start that she is "twice removed from the real world". And, indeed, we would do well not to trust the stories she tells us, except that she tells them so well and so convincingly.

Like her creator, Janet Frame, Mavis is a New Zealander, a successful author, and a some-time inhabitant of mental hospitals. She teases us with details of her life, her likes, her dislikes, her beliefs and ideas, all of which could equally well be those of Janet Frame. She tells us about her marriages, her children, her friends, and, in particular, about the bizarre, totally unexpected inheritance of a house in America in which she had expected to be only a temporary house-sitter.

In the process of complying with the Will of the former owners of the house, neither of whom she had met, Mavis agrees to allow two couples to visit. Under the impulse of what she describes as 'Californian confession', each of Mavis's house-guests tells their life story - or, rather, a potted version, imagined and verbalized by Mavis herself in her alternative identity of Violet Pansy Proudlock, ventriloquist.

Throughout the book, Mavis's story-telling is imaginative, poetic, reflective, intelligent and gossipy. And, like the neighbours at the bus-stop, we pay due attention to her. But built into her tale, there is also a continuous reflection on (and of) the whole process of imaginative writing, on the boundaries between fact and fiction, on identity, on what is real, solid, reliable and what is not.

Janet Frame, who was once diagnosed as schizophrenic, perhaps knew better than most writers the unreliability of the boundaries between the world of physical and historical reality and the fluid, a-temporal world of the imagination. In this book, she played with this unreliability with considerable psychological insight and, ultimately, to great effect. Only occasionally do the meanderings of her story-teller, Mavis, become obscure or out of hand. Only occasionally does Mavis's ability to draw us into her world falter. So believable is she as a character, that we are drawn into her world, and trust her even as we disagree with some of her actions and views. So, when she pulls the rug from beneath our feet, we are totally unprepared.

Living in Maniototo is a strange, eccentric and often unpredictable book but in it Janet Frame imaginatively, interestingly and provocatively demonstrated just how unreliable our own judgement of others can be.

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Janet Frame was born in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1924. She won numerous awards for her writing, including a CBE in 1983 for services to literature, a New Zealand Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement, and honorary foreign membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She died in Jan. 2004. A brief biography on Wikipedia outlines her life, her several involuntary and voluntary internments in mental hospitals, and her narrow escape (as a young woman) from a scheduled lobotomy.

Ann Skea
Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/

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