
This month’s ‘out of the archives’ review is of Janet Frame’s 1966 novel The Reservoir and Other Stories, by Rhodes scholar and journalist James Bertram.
This is the first collection of short stories by Janet Frame to become generally available in this country since The Lagoon in 1951: in the light of her remarkable achievement as a novelist of steadily increasing power and range, it is a literary event of some importance. Thirty prose pieces have been chosen (with the help of Dr Margaret Dalziel) from two volumes published three years ago in New York; the stories are not dated, but it seems clear from the chronological sketch outlined by the writer in ‘Beginnings’ (Landfall, March 1965) that most of them belong to the London years which saw the completion of that ‘transitional’ novel The Edge of the Alphabet, and preceded the more disciplined, structured, and completely professional accomplishment of Scented Gardens for the Blind and The Adaptable Man. It is not surprising, then, that this collection should produce a somewhat uneven effect, as if these were the by-products of a talent fiercely concentrated on larger designs.