Owls Do Cry: A Novel

By Janet Frame

First published in New Zealand in 1957, Owls Do Cry, was Janet Frame’s second book and the first of her thirteen novels. Now approaching its 60th anniversary, it is securely a landmark in Frame’s catalog and indeed a landmark of modernist literature. The novel spans twenty years in the Withers family, tracing Daphne’s coming of age into a post-war New Zealand too narrow to know what to make of her. She is deemed mad, institutionalized, and made to undergo a risky lobotomy. Margaret Drabble calls Owls Do Cry a song of survival”it is Daphne’s song of survival but also the author’s: Frame was herself misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and scheduled for brain surgery. She was famously saved only when she won New Zealand’s premier fiction prize.

Frame was among the first major writers of the twentieth century to confront life in mental institutions and Owls Do Cry is important for this perspective. But it is equally valuable for its poetry, its incisive satire, and its acute social observations. A sensitively rendered portrait of childhood and adolescence and a testament to the power of imagination, this early novel is a first-rate example of Frame’s powerful, lyric, and original prose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Release date: Nov 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781619028692

Reviews for Owls Do Cry

[anna_battista_6 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I loved this semi-autobiographical tale of Janet Frame's childhood in New Zealand, for the clear, flowing and sensitive style as well as for the description of life on the other side of the world and the characters. Reading this story of four brothers and sisters growing up, it is impossible not to be touched by Daphne, the character closest to Frame herself, and the ordeal she goes through in a psychiatric hospital. Frame, understandably, offers an alternative, more sympathetic vision of mental patients, and subtly pleads for more acceptance and understanding from mainstream society in favour of people who don't quite fit in. Frame's observations on family life and siblings relationships (both in childhood and adulthood) also ring very true. All in all, a rich, original novel, by no means an easy read but a rewarding one.

[9cee9 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Oh, the futility of life...where the "sane" partake of what appears to be the nectar of life and the "insane" are sadly dispossessed - but perhaps nearer to the truth. This book follows a poverty stricken family in New Zealand but could have been anywhere on earth. All family members lead individually distinct emotional lives and Janet Frame takes the reader on an exploration of the intimate musings of each. As crowded together physically and economically as they are, there is a vast distance separating them.It occurred to me that perhaps you have to be a bit crazy to understand this book... I just might be... I really liked this one! Very sad but insightful.

[icolford · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An unsettling and utterly original work of genius, Owls Do Cry heralded the arrival of Janet Frame on the international literary scene and kicked off a period of staggering creativity in which she would publish nine novels in fifteen years. Owls Do Cry chronicles the lives of the Withers siblings, Daphne, Chicks (Teresa), Toby and Francie. Growing up in coastal Waimaru (based on Frame’s home town of Oamaru), the children are raised by their well-meaning, unsophisticated parents in a home with few luxuries and in a time and place where Toby’s epileptic seizures are considered shameful and frightening and a sign of weakness. The first part of the novel tells of their fascination with the local rubbish dump, where they often go to search for treasure, and ends with a tragic accident. Subsequent sections take place “twenty years after” and follow the three remaining Withers siblings as they suffer setbacks and struggle to remain connected and yet establish independent identities and lives of their own. Most powerful is the section on Daphne, who has been committed to a mental institution and regards her surroundings through a drugged and fragmented haze. The reality of these scenes is fluid and hard to nail down—hospital staff are monsters, a wall is a mountain—but it is in this section that Frame’s prose and narrative imagery achieve the vivid and poetic heights for which she was to become famous. One cannot help reading Daphne’s scenes through the prism of what we know of the author’s life: her own institutionalization and narrow escape from brain surgery as psychiatric therapy. Though there are flashes of humour, the prevailing tone of the novel is tragic, and yet one reaches the end with a sense that hope is not entirely lost. In 1957, Owls Do Cry appeared without literary antecedents, leaving critics of the time with virtually no points of comparison. Sixty years later it remains a deeply affecting work of startling originality. The courage of its author, one of the most daring stylists of twentieth-century English prose, is undeniable.