John Summers on Owls Do Cry
Launched in 2014 by the New Zealand Book Council and Auckland Writers Festival, the Great Kiwi Classic initiative is an annual opportunity for readers of all ages and interests to celebrate our most treasured books and writers.
Nominated by readers around the country in a month-long search, Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame is the Great Kiwi Classic of 2015, and was examined in a book-club-style discussion in a special event at the Auckland Writers Festival in May.
Over the next few months, we’ll be featuring a series of blog posts by Kiwi writers and readers on their thoughts and feelings about Owls Do Cry.
First up is author John Summers:
On the weekend I was in Oamaru – ‘the kingdom by the sea’, Waimaru. My friend Henry lives there now and he and I visited 56 Eden Street, the childhood home of Janet Frame. I peered respectfully at that dim, humble two bedroom house looking for traces of her, before realising they weren’t there. Very few of the objects were hers. It was a working class home of the era I was looking at as much as it was hers. Association had transformed those everyday things, the coal bin and some worn linoleum, just as Frame’s writing had dissolved the surfaces of dull old New Zealand life, sharing the magic (the treasure in the rubbish dump), the longing and eventual disappointment beneath. The lady who showed us around, a librarian on her day off, told us that even now, ‘some of the town’s old dowagers still don’t know why all this fuss has been made over that grubby Frame girl.’ It sounded apocryphal, but if true, what a terrific own goal by these ‘dowagers’, what proof of why Owls Do Cry is a necessary book.
I first read it as a teenager, after finding it on a list of New Zealand classics. I read that way then. The Press once printed the Modern Library’s list of the best novels of the 20th Century, and I clipped it out and duly worked my way through them, crossing each off as I went. I found Owls Do Cry grim and haunting, but also difficult. It was unlike the others on my lists – the shifting views, the songs from the dead room, and the tragedy of stifled imagination. I skimmed parts in my hurry to carry on to another, and it’s only more recently that I’ve gone back to revisit the strange sadness that I still associated with this novel. A classic maybe, but then I thought of these as things you admired, the themes carefully noted but rarely felt, like Chicks with her Alan Paton, ‘which describes the negro question in South Africa,’ and her Beethoven. Let’s just say it is a New Zealand novel.
ABOUT JOHN SUMMERS
John Summers’ creative non-fiction has appeared in Hue & Cry Journal, Turbine, and JAAM, and is forthcoming in Sport. He has also contributed travel writing to the NZ Listener, NZ Herald and The Press, and is a co-founder of Up Country, an online journal for creative non-fiction about the outdoors.
His first book, The Mermaid Boy, a collection of creative nonfiction was published by Hue & Cry Press in May.