The Adaptable Man

by Janet Frame

Beneath the seemingly tranquil surface of an old English village lie murder, incest, and mystery. Alwyn Maude, a handsome young man, commits murder for no particular reason other than to kill. The senselessness of Alwyn's crime is contrasted with the antiquated ways of his father and uncle. The tensions between past and present are explored and the shortcomings of both exposed.

Genres: Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

The fate befalling the young woman who wanted "to be a poet" has been well documented. Desperately unhappy because of family tragedies and finding herself trapped in the wrong vocation (as a schoolteacher) her only escape appeared to be in submission to society's judgement of her as abnormal. She spent four and a half years out of eight years, incarcerated in mental hospitals. The story of her almost miraculous survival of the horrors and brutalising treatment in unenlightened institutions has become well known. She continued to write throughout her troubled years, and her first book (The Lagoon and Other Stories) won a prestigious literary prize, thus convincing her doctors not to carry out a planned lobotomy.

She returned to society, but not the one which had labelled her a misfit. She sought the support and company of fellow writers and set out single-mindedly and courageously to achieve her goal of being a writer. She wrote her first novel (Owls Do Cry) while staying with her mentor Frank Sargeson, and then left New Zealand, not to return for seven years.

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Are you ready for this? Here we go...

Humans are adaptable. It’s how we have survived—evolved, pretty much, for the most part, successfully, for now. Who knows how long we will last. It could go on for a long, long time, or all end badly, one big asteroid could screw us all—or just bomb the fuck out ourselves over disagreeable ideology shit. When it comes down to it—it doesn’t matter a hill of beans in this crazy world, universe, whatever, everything will go on with or without us.

But I digress just because of the times in which we live right now—which seems to reinvent itself with every generation.

Which brings us to the village of Little Burgelstatham (a burgel, a burial place for the heathen.) (p. 12) And what happens there—and the people who live there, it all starts with a senseless murder of Botti Julio, an Italian farm worker (and a survivor of a concentration camp) arrives in Little Burgelstatham one evening, on the way to the Sapley’s farm where he has a job picking black currents. He was found drowned in a pond the next morning… well, only the scarecrows saw what happened to Botti Julio. (Page 19.) His fate is ultimately blamed on the lack of electricity to light Murston Lane, the poor man couldn’t find his way in the dark, didn’t know there was a pond—he was a stranger, he was foreign, and his English wasn’t very good. What was officially determined to be an accident was actually a murder. But why was he murdered? Was it because he was a stranger? Or was there some other reason. Who killed him? Why? There are some who might ask: Why would the Sapley’s hire a man to come all the way from Italy to pick black currants for them, when there are perfectly capable people who live here who would be happy to do the job. This man died by the hand of another, Alwyn Maude (which isn’t a spoiler cuz it’s right on the back cover as the synopsis), a college student home for holiday. He gets away with it, and there is no justice served. He’s a real piece of work that one—argh! He “…has taken the first step toward being the truly Adaptable Man, a Child of His Time, by murdering someone whom he did not know, whom he had never seen in his life before, whom he neither loved nor hated, a man whose only qualification for being murdered was that he belonged to the human race.” ( from page 149) To kill someone just to do it, to know what it’s like to kill someone. “Alwyn is proud that he killed successfully…If Raskolnikov had lived now, Alwyn thinks, two pages rather than a novel would have been needed to describe his feelings after killing.” (p. 150)

It’s been awhile that a book made me flinch and squirm a bit. There’s some things I’m not going to cover here—I could go on a long rant about this asshole, but it wouldn’t be productive, so I won’t. If there’s anyone else out there that wants to take an intelligent and well researched psychoanalysis crack at it, be my guest. (Blargh!)

The ghostly memory of this man’s death lingers through the thoughts of the varied cast of characters, including Alwyn, he muses on page 113 I’m no Raskolnikov. It seems that some of the characters know or suspect who killed him, and/or may have witnessed the act, or just perceptive enough to put 2 + 2 together and think— hmmmm… (But don’t we all rather not think the worst of someone? Especially when they’re handsome and bright, and a family member?)
Botti Julio’s ghost lingers throughout the book, echoes of his learned phrases flit here and there just when you might have forgotten—What? You didn’t know this was a ghost story? In the traditional sense of a ghost story it wouldn’t be, but it is—on page 20 the ghost is first mentioned:

…see—here, now, a ghost in our story…

Oh, a haunting we will go, a haunting we will go—Boo! Scream! A haunting we will go! (A bit o’ silly business here, I had been tipping a little bit o’ our mead while Winter Storm Stella was raging outside so this might be a little more amusing or not...) Anyway, the ghost story purists won't like it, but an author who ventures beyond the parameters of expectation is one after my heart, Janet Frame never disappoints me.

One of the many things I love about Janet Frame novels, they are more than they seem. On a whim one morning, I dug around the Internet to see if someone had written something interesting about her books (someone usually does) and I found an essay: An Other Form of Ghost Story by Josephine Carter (link at end). It’s a fascinating essay overall, but I only wish to quote from it here: “Critical of all state legitimized violence, Frame, a literary agitator, enacts a disruptive response: an unconventional ghost story which denies closure and the reestablishment of order.” The “spine tingling” in this “Other Form of Ghost Story” is not about the ghost jumping out, saying “boo!” to scare the jeepers-creepers out of a body to get revenge. It’s about the persistent sense of no reprieve, this man’s death will forever haunt Little Burgelstatham—even if it doesn’t create a guilty conscious for the arrogant jerk who did the deed—this man’s death lingers in the atmosphere because this sort of thing doesn’t happen around here. Sometimes it’s the uncommon occurrences that are the train wrecks that cause the rubberneck syndrome during the humdrum of the day-to-day routines. They’re uncomfortable and distressing events, no one wants to see it happen, hear about it, or experience it—but the hushed conversations and gasps of astonishment gets the old blood flowing and the sparks flying in our brains; the dark thoughts prevailing over the light.

In my view of such things as the ghosts that haunt us, it’s more than the paranormal, it’s the history that the community itself lives with that haunts them. Their traditions, their way of living, doing, everything about them down to the clothes they wear and the food they eat, their routines in everyday life, the fields of barley and sugar beets. They are the Children of Their Time. The outside world is invading their homes through modern conveniences like electricity, the improvement of transportation by upgrading the roads. Early on in the novel (page 34), Bert Whattling, a 74 year old pensioner, riding his bicycle feels intimidated by the traffic— It was no help for Bert, facing the hazards of fifty yards of A-class road, to remember that he’d once been a soldier, in the First World War. Danger seemed not as simple as it used to be. I understand Bert completely. I’ll be 55 in May, and the world is changing faster than I can keep up. It pisses me off to no end.

With electricity comes information and entertainment more readily available through television (again, Bert’s perspective later in the book, he laments on page 232 “A television breed!”

The final nail in the coffin of this small community comes in the form of the migration of people from London, “the Overspill.” Poor Bert, near the end of the book can’t even catch his breath in a favorite spot against the old Unwin family cottage wall facing the lilac hedge because the owner of the cottage has fenced it off, effectively barring him from settling himself down to take a load off after eating his lunch. Then on page 223, he suffers the indignity of the “television man from London” calling out to him “Whattling, here a minute!” Bert was always just Bert to those who knew him, and so… he [the television man from London] had committed the double crime of imagining that he already belonged to the village, and that he could speak to Bert as a master might speak to his slave.

(Sigh.) Take a breath, there’s more…

The Overspill is coming like a plague of locusts. This book is from 1965—the Baby Boomer generation (which I’m at the end-bookend of it, I’m like a hybrid with GenX) and the post-WWII life, a society in motion, and the mandated consequence branded as “The Overspill” of Londoners to the quiet little hamlets and villages in the countryside. The Overspill is otherwise known as Suburban Sprawl in America. I grew up in a neighborhood that was built in the 1950’s by some of the GI’s who came home from the war. The one story ranch houses were fitted into neat little sections, butted up against older homes that had once been the grand, fine homes from another time. Their original property lines cut, and cut again, parceled out, bit by bit, until it’s just an odd-shaped lot on which a rather large house lounges, the lone proud lion surrounded by domestic cats. My mother, who grew up in that small town, remembered our neighborhood as farmland, the street had once been a horse-drawn wagon track into the woods. The town was changing, the economy was changing, business that had once been the boom of the town was dying out with the slow demise of generations that had built it. The new generation commuted to The City to work. It was a nice town to raise a family. Through the 1970’s I watched out of the corner of my eye as the town evolved into something other than what it once was, the old homes themselves became parceled within into apartments, some neighborhoods that were once very nice, became rundown and sad. The once grand homes sagged and leaned, their facades furrowed with age. I moved to the city to go to college, and then started my family there, but later, we moved to the country to get away from the problems of the city, the crime, the filth, the schools. We followed our dreams to an old farmhouse on a piece of land, which was surrounded by fields being farmed by local people who were renting from the current owner. It was the classic fixer-upper. The land and house had once been part of the farm, subdivided, and sold off piecemeal. And now, twenty years later, the “overspill,” is happening, bordering on my backyard. There was a time when our house, before we owned it, was the only one on Irish Hill, but things change. People live and die, move on, adapt to do something else other than farming. Now our old farmhouse is the sore thumb compared to the newly built homes that arrived made to order, pre-fab, delivered on the back of trucks, each section pieced together. It’s a difficult transition getting used to their sounds, and their being there. Now we’re the oddity—we’re those people. I am irritated by the encroachment, we were here first—with that said, I felt sympathy for the residents of Little Burgelstatham—they’re becoming the ghosts of a time and way of life fading fast.

(From page 224) An exciting, controversial talking-point, but not nearly so enjoyable now that the idea was becoming a frightful reality... “Overspill. Overspill.”
Such a strange word to choose. Didn’t something that spilled, spill over also? Or were they using “overspill” to try to explain that once the people of London began coming to East Anglia nothing could stop them, there’d never be an end of their spilling, as there’d never be an end of people from London…and all over the new words that motorways brought with them—“bypass,” “flyover,” “flyunder.” …

(From page 232) Rumors became the tall stories of the hour. “They” were going to pull down all the farm workers’ cottages. “They” would build Council flats in the barley fields, offices with luxury penthouses (for directors) in the sugar-beet fields. If your cottage was not pulled down, then it would be taken under the Compulsory Purchase Order to make room for a motorway. Noise, smoke, smell, crime, no jobs, and a race of strangers who laughed at your dialect and your customs and your clothes and your ignorance of the great world; a nasty television breed.

(From page 234) The town planner, in the deep chair by the fire, put down his glass and turned to his companion, a London architect.
“See what we’ll have to meet?” he said. “They’re a different race. Talk about New Town loneliness! That reminds me—there’s that competition to name the new town. The psychologists say it should be held locally—you know, let the natives feel they have a share in the project. It pays dividends, overcomes hostility.”
“Wouldn’t you be hostile?”
“I’d shoot the invaders as if they were so many wood pigeons. So be careful. We’re in a foreign land here.”
“Should we try to fraternize?”
“Hell no, not more than usual. Just don’t make the mistake of pointing out a wheat field and exclaiming in your educated accent, ‘What magnificent barley!’”

Infuriating isn’t it? You bet she meant it. This book is quite deliberate with its message—being adaptable. Each character adapts to something in spite of the unpleasant circumstances they find themselves in—some very strange and some very familiar. There is no need to scratch too deep into their surface to find the itch they worry over, the weather, the overspill, longing for something lost, and the lingering ghost of Botti Julio. “These photographs are underexposed. Please will you intensify them.”

I love Janet Frame’s work because there’s so much more below the surface of the story—it’s more than a story. I “get her.” She’s not an easy read, she presents readers with puzzles and scatters the pieces for us to fit together—I take my time, examine the bits—ooo and ahh over their intricate plots, and dog-ear the pages, and if I have a pencil handy, I make notes, underline, re-read. Just picking it up to write this I catch myself immersing already, I have a hard time putting it down.

Carter, Josephine. An Other Form of Ghost Story: Janet Frame's "The Adaptable Man," Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 13, no. 1/2 (2011): 45-60. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41328511.

[Lee Foust · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an only marginally compelling novel by a really great writer--one of my favorite novelists. While it's the weakest of the five Janet Frame novels that I've so-far read, it still has some passages of extraordinary beauty and intelligence. It just failed, in the long run, to completely come together to wow me as her first three novels have. It's also slightly more ambitious than her earlier novels (I'm sort of reading in chronological order), with a kind of panorama of characters and a theme of a community in flux trying to pull the characters and events all together into an aesthetic whole--which is where, for me anyway, the novel just barely fell short of greatness. The theme was obvious and the characters and events--although interesting in and of themselves--didn't quite come together as a single aesthetic experience for me.

As I just said, the theme of the novel is community, change, and the coming of twentieth-century modernity--as represented by the modern ideal, the "adaptable man" of the novel's title. Written in the mid 1960s, the novel is set in a rural village in Sussex on the cusp of losing its old country ways to electricity, a WWII refugee, and, finally, spillover from London's growing overcrowding. Some characters resist, others try to deal with it, and some collaborate. Then there are the disasters...but I'll leave the events of the narrative to your own reading. Not the place to start with Frame, but still well worth reading I should think.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Janet Frame: Modernism at the edge of the Alphabet
There is a something of a divide in Janet Frame’s fiction between the conventionality of her short stories (always excellent ‘slices of life’, sometimes lightly touched by the fantastic or fairy tale) and the, peculiar, modernism dominant in her novels. Her work is occasionally reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s lyrical modernism, sometimes of Beckett’s absurdism, but ultimately Frame’s is a pessimistic, primitivist modernism. Frame’s primitivism is an aspect of her frustration at literary prose to express human experience in the face of modernity – in contrast to this assumption in key modernists like Woolf, Beckett and Joyce. Frame despaired not only at the novel but at language itself as a means to adequately express the ‘dark’ elements of life she experienced. Frame continually knocks at the doors of language but ultimately only to state and repeat a modified Wittgenstein’ position where the limits of language limit not so much our understanding of the world, but of our ability to express feelings beyond the connotations of words.
Frame’s despair of language and her ultimate resort to modernist primitivism derives from her concern with two key and dark aspects of human experience: mental trauma and death. This combination of biographical concerns lying beyond the limits of language derives from Frame’s experience of the death of three siblings at an early age and her own episodes of psychosis and committal to asylums. Nearly all of her major novels address these key themes, but all ultimately despair at the novel as a vehicle to articulate them adequately. We find Frame pointing to how so often we find ourselves floundering at the edge of the alphabet in our everyday lives as words fail us to express what we are feeling or thinking. Frame turns this encounter with inexpressibility back on herself as a novelist dealing in words, and rejects the supposed (presupposed in the case of modernists like Woolf and Joyce) expressive plasticity of literary prose. These two themes appear so regularly they may at first appear as repetitious - but there are significant variations in how they are addressed across the range of Frame’s novels.
The title of Frame’s early novel The Edge of the Alphabet signals her position, the definite article and singular ‘edge’ pointing to her view of the fundamental limitations of standard and literary language – it isn’t ‘my’ language, as Wittgenstein has it, that is at fault, but the language. Frame’s alter-ego here is the novelist Thora Pattern who is said to have ‘dreamed-up’ the characters of Toby, Zoe and Pat (pps. 24, 270). However, all these central characters, but particularly the social isolate Toby (a would-be writer but never able to put down words) are described by Thora as her ‘creatures’, fictional beings but ‘living beyond the boundaries of words’ (36-7). At this time Frame still had some confidence in modernism’s ability to create a sense of synchronicity in order to enable the reader to experience something of Toby’s bipolarity, or of the sense of Zoe and Pat’s floundering in the sea of modern life. The young, incipient modernist Frame allows her prose to regularly become somewhat ‘haywire’, disruptive, poeticized, a highly metaphorical language and similes conjugated together in singular passages that spring-up and disrupt the novel’s narrative:
What shall I, Thora Pattern, make from the bottled material of these days? Snip measure charge pay and walk adorned with patches of cloud and frost and words, in a string of beads, around my neck; strong polished beads which do not break at the first tug of anger or confusion; there is no scattering of them in the room and blood-to-the-head search for them beneath furniture…I have one table, three chairs. No one visits me. why should I wear words, like beads, around my neck if no one will visit me? (270-1)

However, in her novel The Memorial Room, published posthumously but written in the early 1970s, we find the narrator starkly stating the limitations of literary fiction:
I told myself I was dreaming the literary dream of a literary blind man, just as those who write or dream fiction have invented a ‘literary’ madness which abstracts from the dreary commonplaces of thinking behavior a poetic essence and sprinkles it where the shadow of ‘the truth’ falls upon the written or printed page. (65)
The novelist’s illusion is accompanied, underlined by frustration at conceptualizing death and time which stems from ‘the illusion of, the obeisance to, time, from birth to death…’ (91). Frame wrote this pessimistic novel despite the early success she had found as a writer with Owls do Cry, focusing instead on the ‘betrayal of the myths conveyed by language’ (94). She now despairs of novelists having to fall back on the ‘stuttering images and cliches of time’ (92). Symbolically, her novelist character Harry Gill becomes increasing deaf as the novel progresses (there are hints he is becoming perhaps dumb as well) in the face of the encaging contradictions facing the writer of fiction:
Poor chap, I thought. He’s already going to seed. Destroyed by his promising future. A man without a past or present. Was he not then a completely unmetaphorical man, deprived of time? […] Now that I was deaf I was becoming more and more used to interior monologues, of the type that always bored me when I tried to read fiction. Within the last few weeks, however, I had been so shocked by the banality of my paper conversations that I almost resolved to give them up… (194-195)

Similarly, in another of Frame’s novels from this period, the intriguing Daughter Buffalo (1972) inexpressibility of death is presented head-on in the encounter between the characters of Turnlung and Talbot Endelman. Turnlung is an aged poet, close to death whereas Endelman is a young scientist and ‘experimenter in death’. Turnlung has hopes that language ‘may give up the secrets of life and death and lead us to the original Word’ (24). But he soon realizes that literary language is inadequate for this task, that his poetic ‘excursion(s) into metaphor’ may be undermined by the nature of language itself:
I try to understand death itself, with inadequate language that is forced to make an excursion into metaphor and returns changed, emaciated, impoverished or enriched, often too powerful for its alphabet. (102)
In contrast, Edelman embraces death, practices cruel and needless surgery on his pet dog, and is shown to be sexually-aroused at the event of its death (127). Edelman expresses capital-D death in scientific and laboratory terms, as something that has developed in human culture as ‘an intractable state of nothingness’ due to long-term evolutionary developments in avoidance:
I began to think of death as a simple darkness and by that I do not mean the comparative ease of killing the embryo for I thought neither of agent nor instrument nor of object; I had in mind a pure personless darkness like the original void of the universe. It’s a romantic notion I had; it was unscientific, as the genes and chromosomes of the embryo had already been given a generous helping of centuries of humankind and it would seem to be too late to rescue or retrieve the simplicity of nothingness – supposing that nothingness is simple, or supposing that there were indeed room for nothingness in the fullness and complexity of the life cycle. (14-15)

In her 1964 novel Scented Gardens for the Blind rather than printed prose and its constituents, word, sentence and alphabet, Frame focuses on spoken language. Vera Glace is, eventually, revealed as someone who has dreamed up the other characters, like a novelist: Edward her husband and their mute daughter Erlene are both equally figures of her imagination. But Vera’s own mutism is very real, and the issue of the lack of communicability at the heart of speech is stated starkly at the start of this novel:
So I placed before me a diagram of the human head neck and chest, drawn to scale, with the tunnels of speech and breath so gay in their scarlet lining; and ignoring the arrows darting from right and left to stab at the listed names of the blue and red and pink territory, I moved my finger, walked it along the corridor, trying to find the door into speech, but the diagram did not show it , somewhere in the brain, the book said, an impulse in the brain letting the words go free, sympathetic movements of larynx lips tongue, the shaping of breath, and even then, the book said, it may not be speech which emerges, it may only be a cry such as a bird makes or a beast lurking in the trees at night, or, loneliest of all, not the crys of a bird or beast but the first uttering of a new language which is understood by no one and nothing, and which cause a smoke screen of fear to cloud the mind, as defense against the strangeness. (10)
For Erlene (but, really - Vera), speech is seen to have become ‘a bad habit’ (152) but nevertheless Frame suggests here and there that there may be a faint hope that words might develop, to become like ‘bombs’ (161). And speech may still deliver, develop, resources that could enable, reveal, truth:
Erlene, and all others who are mute, must learn to speak, not mere animal cries, demands for food, warmth, love, nor human pleas for forgiveness salvation peace of mind, but the speech which arranges the dance and pattern of the most complicated ideas and feelings of man in relation to truth… (153)
Vera’s creature – her historian husband Edward - is seen as dwelling very much in the past, and as such is a vehicle for Frame’s concern with Death and temporality. Edward bemoans the deadening legacy of language (in his case, conventional language but, the implication is clear, also literary language) as ‘the footprints of an extinct education in grammar and written expression’ (117). Foremost, however, Edward is presented as wanting to overcome time, to reevoke history, essentially the history of the, arbitrally chosen, Strang family. But this task of writing history is seen as formidable:
… why, he wondered, did I not use one of the new Death Rays, which are cleanest of the clean, laundering death into invisibility, shrinking the monstrous dead to tiny leftovers with which one can cope put in the palm of the hand, in an envelope, coat pocket, coin purse, walled, paper bag; a handful of ash? What should I do? Edward wondered. (35-6)

In light of all this despair at the limits of language, written and oral, of the limits of imaginative prose, the limitations of the ‘atoms’ (Frame goes well beyond, even, the smallest elements of meaning that Greimas refers to as ‘semes’) of language, the alphabet and the rules of grammar, ‘imposter typescript’ (The Carpathians 79) one might ask why Frame continued to write fiction. Frame relentlessly states the problem of language but offers very little by way of addressing it creatively as Woolf did in the lyricism of The Waves, or as Beckett’s absurd modernism articulated unnameability.
There are, however, certain elements in Frame’s novels that adopt, partially or fleetingly, some modernist tropes that are steps to a kind of imaginative, literary, response to the problems she grappled with. In Towards A (Frame, 1973)nother Summer Frame’s prose is reminiscent of Woolf’s, particularly when conveying a sense of redemption, of personal time captured in moments of being:
I must be careful, she thought. My mind is spread with a quick-growing substance, a kind of compost favourable to discarded moments which blossom so tall and suddenly like fairy trees, and before I can blink my eyes once or twice there’s a forest – birds, animals, people, houses, all sprouted from the carelessly dropped moment, it is quick and slow motion. (165)
Another creative response, briefly referred to earlier in this essay, are the figures of ‘imposter narrators’ that occur regularly in Frame’s novels. Frame’s narrative often ‘leads the reader on’ with what appears to be an omniscient narrator that is only to be revealed later as another character, such as Vera Glace in Scented Gardens for the Blind or Mattina Brecon’s son John the narrator/writer featuring in the late novel The Carpathians (1988). In this novel selections from the work of another novelist – Dinny Wheatstone – are also encountered, thickening the layers of imposter narrators:
I, Dinny Wheatstone, author of this imposter record, divine the activities of Kowhai Street, the street of the Gravity Star among the ordinary extraordinary people, while I study the primer of possible impossibility, the meaning of the meaningless… (57)

Towards the end of many of Frame’s novels one comes across denouements that seem to suggest a throwing in the hand of the writer - surrendering the narrative to a precipitous conclusion. Sometimes this takes the form of deux et machina – found at the end of The Adaptable Man when the Baldry’s chandelier crashes down and kills-off three of the principle characters. Frame had been cajoled by her editor into writing a, light, murder mystery but the final novel became anything but, the whodunnit sub-plot of the murderer of the Italian migrant worker being superficial, at most. Similarly, in The Carpathians, there features the murder of Madge McCurtle but that, again, is incidental. And, after the mysterious disappearance of the residents of Kowhai Street three-quarters of the way in, the voice of the ‘real’ author John Brecon (after the two, other, ‘imposter authors’, of Dinny Wheatstone and Mattina Brecon fade away) becomes dominant. But just soon as John’s authorial voice dominates it coincides, also, with the novel losing momentum and petering out. Frame’s concern with the paradoxes of time and death symbolized in this novel by the images of the Gravity Star and Memory Flower are simply abandoned, supplanted by pedestrian passages relating the biographical background to Mattina’s life prior to her appearing in small-town Puamahara.

At other places Frame’s novels sometimes exhibit elements of modernist absurdity. In Scented Gardens for the Blind we find the following example:
When people moved about me I found that they left their shape in the air, as if they had been wearing the air as clothing which stayed molded even after they struggled out of it, for make no mistake, one struggles out of air because always it fits too tightly, ever since the first tight squeeze of it zipped into the lungs at the first breath… (16-17)
The characters Turnlung and Edelman in Daughter Buffalo are inherently absurd, their conversations have affinities to those of Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Similarly, the following passage from In the Memorial Room has the darker tone of Kafka’s absurd (one is, also, reminded that Kafka lost his voice at the end of his life):
He passed the paper over to me. I read – As I said before, Mr Gill, you are at the point of bisection of circumstances, opportunity, characters, time; everything is favorable for your obliteration. You have been stifled, muffled, silenced. You cannot cry out because you cannot hear the cries of others. On an isolated line he had written: Interesting. As if it were in place of: To be recommended. Or: a good worker. Or: Conscientious. I wrote, - But what can I do? (171)
When this tone arises it can transform Frame’s lyricism into something hallucinatory and ominous:
It was the colour that seen in the sky has the power to fill the heart with foreboding; it was an ‘earthquake of colour’, the colour of an ancient battlefield in the time of huge cannons operated by men diminished in comparison, and it was the colour of a hydrogen bomb, an atom operated by men so tall in comparison that their shadow could take a twilight walk from horizon to horizon across the earth. (178-9)

Frame always seems to hanker, however, for producing a sense of modernist simultaneity, but more often than not this is stated rather than creatively evoked. For example, in Scented Gardens for the Blind Edward is described by Vera as:
A dark-haired man wearing dark-rimmed spectacles. Edward is a balding man wearing mirror-like spectacles. Both are true if one removes the adulteration of time. (39)
And her novel In the Memorial Room concludes with the aging novelist ruminating that he sees through language and metaphor (94) and that ‘tricky words range in two hemispheres of meaning’ (204). It is as if Frame’s vision, her mind, is overburdened by ambiguity about being-in-time: simultaneity may offer a way of eliding troubling doubles or the illogicity of chiasmus arising in language beyond the alphabet. So, for Vera in Scented Gardens for the Blind, Edward can be bald and hairy and she can experience simultaneously blindness and light. These contradictory experiences are rendered to be true and false within the space of a short passage, or even within a sentence as in this from the short story collection Between My Father and the King:
No doubt Fernando will marry a rich woman; no he will not marry her. (‘My Tailor is not Rich’)
In this way Frame embraces non-sequiturs as a way to startle the reader, creating a hiatus in the eye’s progress through her prose. In her very early, breakthrough, novel Owls Do Cry at one point (revealingly, towards the end of the novel) Frame consciously refuses to insert a full stop:
He went to the bedroom and plugged in his electric shaver. The sound of it, the itching whirr-whirr carried to the kitchen where Bob Withers sat, mourning now, over his handful of threepenny bits, and wishing and wishing
The Art Union? There was a theory that if you bought a ticket up north where the population was thickest you were sure to win a prize. (78-9)

In as far as they go such aspects of Frame’s prose indicate a modernist novelist’s consciousness, although modernism itself offers her little by way of a solution let alone resolution to the problems she saw of the limitations of language. Instead she found herself tirelessly restating the issues facing her as a creative writer - that the novel ultimately fails to convey human experience of Death, time, trauma:
Novelists are on the side of life; they understand the need to assume that all people are interesting; otherwise they agree on the death-sentence of the individual; part of their vast hostel of memory is filled with their private furniture and tenants; most of it is let to the history of life – beast, bird, man; they know but do not tell us of the many rooms let to those whose lives contained so little of interest to others that their death passed unnoticed, brought no protest or mourning. (The Adaptable Man: 205)
Bipolar Toby in The Edge of the Alphabet voices Frame’s view that ‘writ...(continued at www.cantab.net/users/john.myles

[Robert Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is different from what I have read of Janet Frame so far. There is not mental illness here. Instead it focuses on the changing of the times and how characters in a small English countryside either adapt, struggle to adapt, or plain refuse to adapt. There are plot twists and turns that only Janet can bring in these ways. The writing is still poetic. That is still why this got 5 stars considering it is the weakest of the stories I have read by her so far.

[Zachary Ngow · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of this book is constantly on your mind as you read. Who is The Adaptable Man? Probably not Botti, who immediately dies, thus failing to adapt.

There is a sort of 'Crime and Punishment' (a book I haven't yet read) aspect to Alwyn, the most obviously 'Adaptable Man' of the characters. Also Oedipus.

Aisley Maude is constantly looking back in time to the Anglo-Saxon era and to St Cuthbert. I know little of St Cuthbert but the book does mention his hermitage upon his late stage of life, similar to Aisley. He seems rather non-adaptable, fixed in the past.

"How he dreamed of Northumbria, the home of St. Cuthbert! He thought he should be there rather than in East Suffolk, yet with geographical economy he 'made do' with the East Suffolk countryside to conjure dreams of his Saint. Day after day he walked and walked. He did not really care if hogweed were hogweed or balm were balm or if the hare and the dawn had the same origin - yet he drew his breath in suspense at the idea that hares do not need eyes in the back of their heads for their sight to encompass wheat sky briar toad man gun road pigeon clod home blood god in one swift glance. 'Happy the hare at morning who cannot read the hunters waking thought,' Aisley quoted to himself."

Similarly does Russell Maude seem fixed in time. People might adapt but bones remain. He is fixated upon teeth and stamp collecting.

Vic Baldry doesn't seem to be particularly adaptable either, fixed in place to Australia. He is the migratory bird (an image JF seems to love, from a Charles Brasch poem; she later writes more of this in her book Towards Another Summer).

The women in this book surely aren't Adaptable Man? However, Greta does adapt to her marriage by burying herself in her gardening. Jenny is insecure, with some sort of inferior role in her relationship with Alwyn. Muriel also has a lesser role in her marriage with Vic and becomes obsessed with memories of a conversation with a poet and her chandelier. Ruby Unwin is definitely not adaptable, an old lady who cannot keep up with the new world. Dot and Lex are a codependent couple, not particularly adaptable. Neither is Bert.

The entire village setting of Little Burgelstatham is a burial place. It is being buried by Progress, in the form of suburban sprawl. It is also a ground where several people are buried.

The Adaptable Man seems to be an agent of destruction, destroying the past, destroying others, destroying nature itself in a march forward of progress.

There is a strong image of mirrors. This is first mentioned with the two versions of the bible supplied to Aisley: "for now we see through a glass darkly" and "now we only see puzzling reflections in a mirror". Then later, with the large mirror at the end and with the mirrors Russell uses for dentistry.

There are also allusions to Macbeth with the witches at the start and later with Maplestone's Chart. I saw someone mention that JF likes intertextuality. It seems true. I think looking into some of these allusions would help my understanding of this book.

I saw an interview clip where JF says that she was inspired to write this book upon seeing a London dentist with outdated equipment who used the word 'whence'. This characterisation seems to have doubled into the two brothers Russell and Aisley.

I love the way the book was split into a Prelude and four acts. The titles of each were delightful, especially the first.

Another quote I liked: "But what was the use of this argument? You did reap out of season now, and you sowed out of season. Why, even the hens had the lights in their houses burning day and night, like chandeliers, to deceive them into thinking they lived in perpetual daylight; and in the end it was no deceit at all, for it was perpetual daylight; so why shouldn't men work and play and smile and weep out of their season and time?

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not much changes in the English village of Little Burgelstatham, in East Suffolk. The place and the people have remained much the same since the end of the Second World War. But it’s the 1960s and change is creeping in whether the villagers like it or not. In The Adaptable Man, her fifth novel, Janet Frame explores the tension between progress and stagnation, between adapting to changing times and attitudes and clinging to old, outmoded ways. Her cast of characters are unremarkable people whose lives have been disrupted by unwelcome shifts in fortune or are on the cusp of planned change. The Reverend Aisley Maude, who has recently lost his wife and is questioning his faith, has come to Little Burgelstatham after an illness to convalesce at Clematis Cottage, the home of his brother Russell and Russell’s wife Greta. Aisley, who reads Anglo Saxon poetry, is obsessed with St. Cuthbert, a 7th-century monk, and aspires to mimic the saint, who lived as a hermit in quiet contemplation. Russell and Greta have their own obsessions. Russell, a dentist who has resisted updating the equipment in his surgery, is obsessed with teeth and his stamp collection. Greta spends her time gardening and trying to exterminate the pests that are giving her trouble. Living with the Maudes as guests are their 20-year-old son Alwyn and his fiancé Jenny. Alwyn, who seems to float above the fray, fancies himself an amoral creature, a man of his times who welcomes change, untethered to the past, free to do as he pleases. The village in general is suspicious of strangers and resistant to change, especially technology (television, electricity) and the recent influx of holiday visitors from London, who are buying up property as they look to the English countryside as a refuge from the urban rat-race. With patience and remarkable specificity, Frame depicts the goings-on over several months in an assortment of households in a rural community that on its surface appears tranquil, but which a little digging reveals to be a seething hotbed of envy, resentment and fear. To make matters worse, the encroachment of the external world on Little Burgelstatham has taken unexpected and disturbingly tangible form in the body of a young Italian man, a seasonal farm worker, found dead (murdered?) at the edge of a pond on the village outskirts. The novel has a satirical tone and does not shy away from absurdity, and Frame’s lyrical, stream-of-consciousness approach to the narrative poses challenges but offers a huge aesthetic payoff to the persistent reader. Janet Frame delights in exposing the weaknesses, delusions and foibles of her characters—never in mockery, but affectionately, drawing the reader to them in sympathy. The third-person omniscient narrative meanders somewhat but always returns to the notion that change is an inevitable feature of the human condition, and when we resist it, we risk making ourselves look ridiculous. Janet Frame’s work draws inspiration from the author’s fascination with human behaviour, in all its manifestations, and The Adaptable Man is no exception. But this is the first of her novels to not dwell overtly, either exclusively or in part, on the many ways that mental illness can destabilize a person’s life (though a droll critic could argue that all of the characters in this novel are to some extent insane). The catastrophic and tragic event that closes the novel is perhaps a comment on the futility of humanity’s endeavours to assert control over its destiny. But as always with Janet Frame’s fiction, the reader is ultimately left to make of it what she will.

[Troy Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Copies of The Adaptable Man must be fairly rare, because I had quite the job tracking a copy down for a reasonable price. However, I felt something of an obligation to do so as it was the last Janet Frame novel that I had left to read. Because it had been many years since I’d read one of her books, I found it took me a while to get into her style again and initially I was scared I wasn't going to enjoy it. At about the one-third mark I began to appreciate, once again, her absolute mastery of language and I was happily swept away.

The Adaptable Man is, I think, one of her more strange and dark novels – and that’s saying something! As it says here on Goodreads, “beneath the seemingly tranquil surface of an old English village lie murder, incest, and mystery.” It is an unsettling read but, in my opinion, brilliant. Nobody does metaphor quite like Janet Frame.

Having grown up in New Zealand, Frame holds a special place in my heart. I'm so much looking forward to re-reading her works later in life, particularly Owls Do Cry, Faces in the Water, and Living in the Maniototo - my personal favourites.

[Naomi · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Frame's work - usually - but this joins a collection of half a dozen books I've been frustrated with enough to throw at the wall. FFS.

[Kat Dixon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes, this is precisely the type of novel I like to read.

2-Minute Tuesday Reads: The Adaptable Man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RcNV...

[Pam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found the subject of the ability of humankind to adapt to the modern world intriguing (as it is something I wonder upon quite often myself), and I enjoy Janet Frame's unique & oblique viewpoint and style of writing, for the most part. However, I sort of felt, in this book, that she wore a rut about the size of the Grand Canyon, literarily speaking, around her subject, as she beat around the bush for so long that, in the end, her point had somehow escaped her reach. If there had been a single truly interesting character to sympathize/relate to, maybe I would have enjoyed it more, but these characters were all so unrelievedly mundane and unaware of their own motivations and perceptions, that I felt I could have learned just as much from any typical day making superficial observations of people at the office or stalking the aisles of a Walmart.

I realize that was intentional on the author's part. She chose what seemed to her a cross-section of a particular society with a line-up of the usual suspects at the center: a convalescing clergyman, a stamp-collecting dentist, his frustrated wife directing all her energies into gardening, his happy-go-lucky murderer son, & the son's adoring fiance, among others. Frame obviously tried to include a divergent cast of characters, allowing us peeks into each of their psyches to see how well they were "adapting" to the impending changes to their way of life, as electricity and the dreaded "overspill" of urban-dwellers were introduced to the staunchly backward, backwater village of Little Burgelstatham. It was an occasionally amusing treatise on conventionality vs modernity (technophobia), written in the 1960's, long before the word "technophobe" had been coined. By now, Little Burgelstatham would no doubt be fully swallowed up by the encroaching threat of suburbia and strip malls, and its denizens all logged in on Facebook.

However, I feel that her point would have been clearer, her story more accessible, and her character portraits more genuinely indicative of the human condition, if the book had been subjected to some major editing. It could have made a great short story, I think. But, as it was, I felt beat around the head with a point that became muddy through constant wallowing in the shallows and with the kind of characters I try to escape all day long in real life.

[Glen U · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having read a number of Janet Frame's books, I was expecting another good, if not great, effort. Her evocative and lyrical style brings the reader into a world of literary satisfaction as Frame chronicles human folly with her prose poetry. Sadly, I did not enjoy this book as well as her previous efforts. For me, in "The Adaptable Man", her metaphorical forays tended to ramble and detract from the story instead of adding a another layer to the novel, as in her previous efforts. Never a quick read, I always look forward to savoring her spontaneous and direct diversions that lead back and forth between the story line. Sometimes, in "The Adaptable Man", the pathways she took led away but never came back. This book also differed a bit, as it seemed as Frame could not make up her mind if this was to be a character driven tale, as her previous books, or it was to be a more conventional narrative, like most fiction. Her writing is still beautiful, brilliant and extraordinary but I just could not empathize and experience the lives of her characters as I did in reading her previous books. Still supremely talented, I thought that Frame lost sight of where she was going in "The Adaptable Man". Or maybe the problem was that she was trying to go in a definite direction in this book when her most wonderful writing seems to be the stream of consciousness style that uses her figurative language to evoke the feelings of her characters in the reader and allows the reader to experience the human condition within themselves.