Michael King: An Inward Sun: The world of Janet Frame

By MARGIE THOMSON

Michael King calls this a "companion volume" to his acclaimed biography of Janet Frame, Wrestling With the Angel, and you may think that's just a trick to make you buy both books.

But he's absolutely right: An Inward Sun gives us a sense of Frame that Wrestling With the Angel, for all its many hundreds of pages, was unable to do. And yet, this second, pictorial biography naturally lacks the depth of the first.

It's a beautiful book filled with photos documenting Frame's family and life, from her grandparents and parents (the one of her mother Lottie, child in her arms, in the company of the house cow, perfectly evokes this larger-than-life woman, and the ragged poverty of the Frames' existence), her sibling-filled childhood, the agonisingly uncomfortable school days, her years overseas, and the time since, growing older in New Zealand, but with frequent trips abroad.

We see hopefulness, beauty and plainness, her solitude but also (and this was the surprise of the first biography) with many friends, relaxed and happy, laugh lines framing her face.

We know she has endured incredible hardship (crippling shyness and social awkwardness, years undergoing electric shock treatment in mental institutions) but what An Inward Sun adds up to is a celebration of life, and nothing spells this out with greater verve than the final photo, of a now-elderly Frame, face beaming as she tap dances on the board floor of Frank Sargeson's former home in Takapuna.

This, comments King, "is the Janet Frame most beloved of her friends and family: vibrant, wickedly funny, full of mischief, an enjoyer and enhancer of life".

Many of the photos come from Frame's own albums, and others are from family and friends, in particular her sister June Gordon and niece Pamela Gordon.

Around the photos runs King's bare-bones version of Frame's life, a recapping of events dealt with far more exhaustively in Wrestling with the Angel, but still, with judicious use of quotes, enough to give us a sense of her thought processes and development as a person and writer.

Who would have believed that a 600-page biography of a writer of intense, truth-seeking fiction could be the (relatively) major hit that Wrestling With the Angel has been? It has sold around 15,000 copies since its release two years ago, and not only carried off the Montana Medal for Non-Fiction but the readers' and booksellers' choice awards as well. If you couple that success with the popularity of Frame's own three-part autobiography, and the film version, An Angel at my Table, it's clear that Frame - with her peculiar, heart-breaking psychological vulnerability, her many flaws and mistakes, and her strong, sensitive intelligence and extraordinary talent - has captured our imaginations.

She has become like a fictional character whose story has been told so often we have internalised the themes, the ebb and flow of her life's events, the tragedies, the redemptive peaks - and with such familiarity comes an inevitable sense of ownership, something the paradoxically private Frame would probably be appalled by.

The Inward Sun has been used twice before as a title for books about Frame (by Patrick Evans in 1971 and Elizabeth Alley in 1994). King, who nevertheless obviously found it simply irresistible, explains that the phrase is "Frame's own chosen metaphor for the power of the imagination. She believes it plays a redemptive role in life, giving meaning to chaos and reasons to continue living in the face of chaos."

All biography has the effect of imposing order and structure over the unruliness of an individual's life. But for all the words, the subject can remain somehow, essentially, elusive - like Ibsen's famous onion, the layers are peeled away, but there is no heart.

An Inward Sun manages to overcome this problem by allowing the images to speak, and speak they do, in a language we can all understand. This is a treat of a book.

Penguin

$39.95