How to be lonely at two opposite ends of the British empire

When you’re as old as I, it’s not often that you find yourself astounded by a piece of fiction. You’ve read a bit by this point, and few things will surprise you. When you do stumble upon something that shakes you to the core, you wonder if you’ve become a creature of habit without noticing, and what else have you been missing. This piece of fiction, this newly found author, is almost always from the past, almost never a contemporary. The past is a foreign country again: the fiction is not produced homogenized there.

Already in the first few pages of Janet Frame’s A State of Siege (1966, reissued as a handsome blue Fitzcarraldo in 2025 with a foreword by Christ Kraus) a memory of the experience of encountering Virginia Woolf for the first time came to me. It was a physical experience as well as one of the mind. Siege was like that. The brain, like an LLM machine on a predictive text binge, keeps listing comparisons and rejecting them, this prose is maybe like this, or like this, or this other thing that we processed, but none fit. This was a new experience.

So what happens in Siege is… not much, but also everything. The 53-year-old art teacher leaves her small town in southern New Zealand for the sunnier north of the country and a sparsely populated island an hour away from Auckland. Malfred Signal (for that is her name) spent her life teaching conventional painting techniques at a girls’ school and taking care of her sickly mother. The mother is, as the novel begins, dead; their house sold; an island cabin far away purchased sight unseen; married siblings and their families taken aback by Malfred’s determination to finally become the painter that she always wanted to be. She will find a new way of seeing. She will finally make art, unencumbered. It’s finally me-time for Mally.

At the level of the sentence, however, there is much contradictory feeling and much anguish. The past assails her: the fiancé lost to war, the father and the mother, the childhood and youth, the girls at the school. The many, many paintings that she phoned in, the pleasingly pretty non-art. The lost time. She goes to bed, the storm descends and keeps her awake, and then the knocking starts. Out front first, but then it moves to the back door, and all the windows. The swish of movement in long grass in between the knocking, a creature on the move. She will call the policeman (there is one policeman on the island, would the intruder know that, she wonders). She will wake up the priest, she will ring the doctor. She will have long loud conversations with each on a pretend call, so the intruder can hear that she has called for help and leave her alone.

The lights go off in the house.

You’re not even halfway through when you turn the page to the section called Darkness. How much worse can it get, I wondered. But this is not a thriller, and there is no gradual escalation towards some act of violence by an intruder.

Across the world, far away in Canada, that same year Margaret Laurence published A Jest of God (originally McClelland & Stewart, reissued most recently in 2018 by Penguin Modern Classics).