JANET FRAME IS perhaps best known as the author of the autobiographical trilogy To The Is-Land, An Angel At My Table, and The Envoy From Mirror City. These books told the story of Frame's childhood in a poor, shambolic and disaster-prone New Zealand family of the 1930s and 40s, where her quickening literary talent came hand in hand with an acute and troubling emotional sensitivity. Later, her social and mental difficulties were mistaken for schizophrenia, and she spent years in mental hospitals before escaping when the sheer brilliance of her writing was recognised, eventually to establish herself as a remarkable and innovative novelist. Interest in Frame was further boosted with Jane Campion's 1990 award-winning film An Angel At My Table, based on the trilogy. Now, Michael King has produced this substantial biography of Frame, tracking and reassessing the course of her life down to her 75th year. King's biography retells the famous years of the autobiography, correcting factual errors and providing perceptive analysis and comments from those few who were close to Frame at the time. He continues to describe her gradual establishment as an acclaimed, though controversial, novelist in the 60s and 70s, her increasing importance as a figurehead for New Zealand writing on the international stage, the explosive years of the 80s when Frame's reputation took off and, eventually, with that melancholy drift of so many biographies, the apparent drying-up of her creative springs. Frank Sargeson, Frame's first literary mentor, described her as 'a walking example of what happens when there are no gods to bear the burdens which human beings can't bear . . . the rest of us are blind if we don't see the limitations of love, harmony, order, meaning and all the rest of it which she gets on paper'. This catches the haunting, alien quality of Frame's writing perfectly, and it also suggests one of a number of ironies that underlie King's impressive and compassionate biography. The irony is that King has laid out Frame's life, chronologised it, documented it. The sometimes bewildering metaphors of Frame's writing are not the focus of attention; instead we are shown something much more stable, comprehensible, rational. These kinds of details are without doubt the province of biography, but when put aside the personalised intensity of the autobiography, Frame's life seems mysteriously stripped of something. King does not comment, but sometimes the biography inadvertently raises questions about the information that King has or has not made public. For example, information or speculation about Frame's personal relationships with men are largely lacking. Is this an oversight or an omission? Throughout the book, there is occasionally a sense that we are not seeing as much of Janet Frame as we might. Still, this book shows much more of Frame than we have ever seen before, and the sights we get of this astonishing, brilliant and tragic life are memorable. Wrestling With The Angel: A Life Of Janet Frame by Michael King Pan Macmillan $192