Gorse is Not People by Janet Frame — Launch Speech

 Posted on August 15, 2012 by ejneale

This is a slightly fuller version of the launch speech I gave on 15 August 2012 at the University Bookshop, Dunedin. The additional elements here are a marginally fuller commentary on the title story, and some thoughts on ‘The Big Money’.

Launching a book written by an author of Frame’s stature is the kind of honour that can lead to writer’s block. I did find myself heading into all kinds of displacement activities before I sat down to think about what to say tonight: you can all guess why. It’s impossible to place one’s own words alongside Frame’s gifted, unflinching analysis of society, the mind, the self, without finding one’s own style blanche and wither.
At one point I came to from a kind of fretful trance, to find myself vaccuming the car (of all the idiotic wastes of writing time) — and then, like a sharp nudge in the ribs, came the memory of Frame’s novel Living in the Maniototo, her extended, sly, funny yet also unsettling meditation on — among other things — avoidance activities: our tendency to look away from the blazing sun of knowledge. I felt haunted, but in a warm sense: momentarily visited by a wise and also slightly mischievous ghost.
Years ago, Frame’s work transformed the way I read the world. There are still people I meet, street scenes encountered, lines overheard, which instantly seem Frameian. It’s as if flickering leaves of her vision have peeled away from one of her manuscripts and been blown past. Often I’ve wished I could somehow relay moments or characters to her, knowing she was the only writer who could crystallise the tragicomedy, the dark, plangent beauty, of so many of our social games, self-deceptions, our habits and rituals.

Gorse is Not People shows an astonishing range. Yet I shouldn’t be astonished: as I’ve recently read her non-fiction collection too — so I should have anticipated the bittersweet multiplicity of her voice. From story to story Frame moves between satire, lyricism, melancholy and wit; she changes from a New Zealand child’s perspective, as in ‘The Plum Tree and the Hammock’, to that of, say, an impoverished Italian migrant, as in the story ‘My Tailor is Not Rich’; she shifts from dense, metaphysical contemplations, to stark social realism, or children’s fantasy — and all without any sense of her moving out of her natural register.

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