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.
