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lee_foust's review against another edition
3.0
This is an only marginally compelling novel by a really great writer--one of my favorite novelists. While it's the weakest of the five Janet Frame novels that I've so-far read, it still has some passages of extraordinary beauty and intelligence. It just failed, in the long run, to completely come together to wow me as her first three novels have. It's also slightly more ambitious than her earlier novels (I'm sort of reading in chronological order), with a kind of panorama of characters and a theme of a community in flux trying to pull the characters and events all together into an aesthetic whole--which is where, for me anyway, the novel just barely fell short of greatness. The theme was obvious and the characters and events--although interesting in and of themselves--didn't quite come together as a single aesthetic experience for me.
As I just said, the theme of the novel is community, change, and the coming of twentieth-century modernity--as represented by the modern ideal, the "adaptable man" of the novel's title. Written in the mid 1960s, the novel is set in a rural village in Sussex on the cusp of losing its old country ways to electricity, a WWII refugee, and, finally, spillover from London's growing overcrowding. Some characters resist, others try to deal with it, and some collaborate. Then there are the disasters...but I'll leave the events of the narrative to your own reading. Not the place to start with Frame, but still well worth reading I should think.
As I just said, the theme of the novel is community, change, and the coming of twentieth-century modernity--as represented by the modern ideal, the "adaptable man" of the novel's title. Written in the mid 1960s, the novel is set in a rural village in Sussex on the cusp of losing its old country ways to electricity, a WWII refugee, and, finally, spillover from London's growing overcrowding. Some characters resist, others try to deal with it, and some collaborate. Then there are the disasters...but I'll leave the events of the narrative to your own reading. Not the place to start with Frame, but still well worth reading I should think.
nbarton82's review against another edition
2.0
I love Frame's work - usually - but this joins a collection of half a dozen books I've been frustrated with enough to throw at the wall. FFS.