Palimpsestic Leaps: A State of Siege

Originally published in 1966, Janet Frame’s A State of Siege will be reissued by Fitzcarraldo Editions on 6 November 2025 (256 pp.)

It was during her initial stretch as a psychiatric patient, an on-off period of eight years, that Janet Frame began writing. From hospital she published her debut short story collection The Lagoon, while receiving ‘treatments’ for her apparent schizophrenia, such as insulin injections and electro convulsive therapy. It was only news of the collection being awarded a prestigious literary prize that prevented a scheduled lobotomy.

During Frame’s long and vaunted career, and since her death in 2004, much has been made of her work’s ambivalence towards character, and place, and in particular A State of Siege—first published in 1966, now reissued by Fitzcarraldo—has been called postmodernist, postcolonial, a colonial outpost, apocalyptic—and much of this potentiality of method has been attributed to her lifelong afflictions. But there is surprisingly little discussion of the book’s representations of time. I say surprising because time and its elasticities are fundamental to the modernist lineage of which the novel is clearly a descendent. Virginia Woolf, one of many available modernist comparisons (Katherine Mansfield, for whom Frame’s mother was a housemaid, is another), views a woman’s life in a day in Mrs Dalloway; a family’s history in palimpsestic leaps forward in To The Lighthouse. The section titles of Frame’s novel and To The Lighthouse are strikingly similar, too: A State of Siege’s three parts are called ‘The Knocking’, ‘Darkness’, and ‘The Stone’; in To the Lighthouse they are ‘The Window’, ‘Time Passes’, and ‘The Lighthouse’. These subtitles are similar in reference—something sensed, an abstraction, then an object—and also clearly temporal in theme. So why has such an obvious connection been long ignored?

Perhaps for some readers time is less prominent within A State of Siege because it seems buried by so much else: the almost gothically peripheral presence of the indigenous Maoris on whom Malfred Signal and her fellow settlers encroach; Malfred’s shattered state of mind as she uproots herself and travels south to north. Many reviews and analyses of the novel also find it difficult to disentangle it from Frame’s own biography, and see it as a form of life-writing. This fact makes it all the stranger that time-distortion as a theme should be so ignored, given a general reading of mental illness as affecting one’s sense of time passing.

In any case, the temporal is central to the novel and our experience of it. It is first used to frustrate: Frame tantalises the reader by promising a tale of escape and adventure, spread out over the weeks and months of Malfred’s autumn years in island retirement. But after a sprawling voyage out, and after less than a week gathering her bearings on the North Island, Malfred is trapped in her new home by a prowler just outside. We expect the black night to pass, for the story to resume and the mystery of the prowler’s identity to be solved; yet for the rest of the novel we remain, with Malfred, under siege. Far from being a peripatein she spends the rest of the narrative frozen in place, and we sit with her as time drips by while the prowler hammers on the windows and doors, and repeatedly trips her house’s electricity supply, plunging her into terrible, oppressive darkness. Then, when she can take the threat of intrusion no more, neither can the narrative, and we are transported with Malfred to all the events of her life in a moment. And the passing of time is not only lengthened or quickened, but suspended, and we are held fast in it. The night, though dark, seems out of time, a hollowed-out object or cell in which Malfred is free to move, but not leave. Malfred imagines the various people she could call for help on her phone with no number—‘there’s a waiting list’, the operator tersely tells her—and begs whoever is outside to please leave her be. As she becomes more panicked, her imagination growing wilder in its unrest, we begin to wonder if Malfred isn’t imagining this prowler. We haven’t seen them yet, and neither has she; and their ‘footsteps’ and ‘knocking’, and the power outages, are taking place in a storm. Couldn’t this be the ‘element’ of the island against which she was warned? Then a stone smashes through a window. It’s wrapped in newspaper, which Malfred unfurls and reads; on the other side of the paper a message reads ‘Help Help’. Then, like Woolf’s darkness in To The Lighthouse, there is a startling excision of events, and when we next meet Malfred she is still alone, still holding the stone, and the storm and the intruder are gone.

As well as this reissue allowing readers to reassess certain overlooked aspects of Frame’s writing, another wonderful thing about A State of Siege’s republication is that it allows us to more easily see certain elements of the contemporary as being part of a modernist continuum. As Frame is redolent of Woolf’s temporalities, so Frame imparts her timeshifting ability to influential novelists working today. Despite recent claims by Rachel Cusk that her early novels were in obeisance to ‘canonical forms’, many of these are similarly tricky, and experimental: 2005’s In The Fold, for example, messes with when we are, pulling the reader up short by startlingly jolting us forward and back at will. And, while Frame is an assured literary great of New Zealand and indeed internationally, the re-emergence of this surprising novel, with its beauty and brutality, and its shocking final act, is an opportunity for her to be taken up by another new generation.

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Joseph Coward lives in London. He is the editor of Death-Kit, and his debut novel, Run-Out Groove, is available from The 87 Press.