SOURCE: A review of The Edge of the Alphabet, in Landfall, Vol. 17, No. 1, March, 1963, pp. 192-95.

Crawford is a Scottish educator, writer, and critic. In the mixed review below, he praises Frame's The Edge of the Alphabet for its rhetoric and cadence, stating that Frame writes in a language "so eloquent that few of her contemporaries can equal it."

It is hard for the novelist of the lost childhood, the madhouse or the concentration camp to write about the so-called 'real' contemporary world. Janet Frame tries to do it in [The Edge of the Alphabet]; the result is part failure, part success.

Her failure is the inevitable consequence of pretending that the book is a manuscript 'found among the papers of Thora Pattern after her death, and submitted to the publishers by Peter Heron, Hire-Purchase Salesman.' It is a nineteenth century, even an eighteenth century device. None...