Back to Nightmare

INTENSIVE CARE by Janef Frame. 342 pages. Braziller. $6.95.

To New Zealand's Janet Frame, history is a hereditary malignancy that engulfs the present and dooms the future to madness, loneliness and death. Intensive Care, her eighth novel, continues her preoccupation with the subject. At one point, she even spells history "hiss-tree," linking it uncomfortably with Eden's serpent. "All dreams," she writes, "lead back to the nightmare garden."

This is the theme that runs through the novel, a combination of poetry and narrative that culminates in a vision of a utopia in which ideals have metastasized like cancer cells. The place is Waipori City, New Zealand; the time, post-World War III--or maybe IV. In the world's blighted aftermath, conditions require such measures as the Human Delineation Act, which computerizes the population into those who are allowed to live and those who are unnecessary and must die. The latter are officially known as "animals."

Splendor of Numbers. There are tranquilizers in the water supply and Sleep Days to smudge the memory of a disorderly but more vital past. Blasted trees and frazzled grass have been replaced by plastic imitations. Numbers have replaced words as the most artful means of expression. Says Mr. Colin Monk, an H.D.A. administrator: "How I admire the immunity of numbers, their untouchability, their inaccessibility: every moment they shine, newly bathed, concealing, never acknowledging the dark work they do."

Despite the safety and power of his position, Monk is slightly disturbed. He introduces into his description of the Waipori millennium the exercise books of a retarded girl named Milly Galbraith. Hers is the traditional tale told by the classic simpleton that unwittingly speaks the truth. As Milly wonders about her fate under the H.D.A., her naive narration and bad spelling redeem words from the neutrality of numbers.

Eventually Milly is carted off with the other "animals." But as time goes on, the government is unable to completely eliminate the animal roots in man. They reassert themselves as a powerful nostalgia for the "animals." Enforcement of the H.D.A. slackens, and the deformed, the insane and the defective become the new elite. Madness and destruction ensue. "All dreams lead back to the nightmare garden."

Personal Obsessions. Despite such familiar dystopian details, Intensive Care has little in common with the average science-fiction novel, far more with social-commentary-as-critique such as Orwell's 1984 and Butler's Erewhon. It is rich in cultural context, metaphor and literary allusions. Like old European nursery rhymes, Miss Frame's dialogue disguises underlying horror with a lilting surface. Characters compulsively chase their dreams back to the nightmare garden where Miss Frame magically transforms personal obsessions into her climactic vision of general apocalypse.

Madness and violence are seen as the tragic lengths individuals and societies will resort to in order to prevent the obliteration of their identities or collective memories. The great fear is that of being stranded in a void, of being so alone that one's very existence is in doubt. As Miss Frame expresses it in the poetry that threads the novel: "It is the company of weather I crave in this weatherless room/the thermometer reads me only." In the Waipori of the future, the problem of establishing existence would be even more terrifying. If a plastic tree topples into the vinyl grass, does it make a sound if the forest is not electronically bugged?

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