The Edge of the Alphabet by Janet Frame review – strikingly imagined voyage into delusion

Janet Frame’s third novel, published in 1962, after she had spent several years away from her native New Zealand (and now republished by Fitzcarraldo to celebrate the centenary of her birth this year), features a trio of characters similarly seduced and bewildered by the possibilities of escape and relocation. Chief among them is Toby Withers, a man in his mid-30s who first appeared in Frame’s debut novel, Owls Do Cry . Toby nurses literary ambitions, and thinks that “overseas” will allow him to break free of his widowed father, the young woman who has rejected him, and the epilepsy that has marked him out in his small community. It takes very little time for the reader to realise that his magnum opus, a novel about a “lost tribe”, will never appear and probably never even be started.

Toby’s fellow travellers on the boat to England are also snared by delusion, in different ways. Worldly Irishman Pat feels that confidence will somehow put him in good stead with “the authorities”; former schoolteacher Zoe, terrified by receiving the first kiss of her life on board, struggles with a splintering and fragile consciousness, constantly searching for an elusive security.

Frame’s portrait of mental disarray is mirrored by the linguistic friability of her prose: speech stutters into life and gutters out of it

This relatively straightforward plot conveys little of the lability and disjointedness of Frame’s strikingly imaginative prose. The “edge of the alphabet” is not primarily geographical but psychic, and her characters experience the world as a series of vivid mysteries, filled with half-apprehended connotations and meanings. From the narrative’s shadows, a querulous storyteller, Thora Pattern, emerges periodically to demonstrate how they are being manipulated and how little they are able to force their lives to cohere.

Against this backdrop of confusion, concrete period details – of rooming houses and cinema foyers – paint a picture of postwar and postcolonial transience and displacement. From his shared single basement bedroom, Toby marshals his natural grandiosity in wrenching outbursts of bravado: “What is he doing in London,” he thinks, “except, as landlord, to survey a corner of his estate, to complain bitterly against the way his tenants are treating him, to issue eviction orders if necessary?”

Related: From poverty, psychiatric hospital and writing in a shed to literary stardom: Janet Frame at 100

Frame’s portrait of mental disarray is mirrored by the linguistic friability of her prose: speech stutters into life and gutters out of it; impressions rapidly succeed one another; memories bubble up from their suppressed depths. The business of coming into one’s own, Pat reflects, is more difficult than might be supposed, “rather like entering the parlour of oneself while the spider is waiting”. It’s an unnerving, uncanny image that is suitably emblematic of Frame’s forays into the interior.

• The Edge of the Alphabet by Janet Frame is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply